Vienne

A bread basket for modern France and so many battlefields of the past.

For very many Poitiers will be a better known name than la Vienne (which itself is confused with the town of the same name in the Rhone valley). Anyone with a fleeting contact to French history will have heard of Diane de Poitiers. That contact though will tell them nothing about the city or the lands surrounding it!

Those who fly to Poitiers Airport will be more knowledgeable. Coming from the north they will have glimpsed untold acres devoted to wheat, maize (corn), oil-seed-rape and melons. If their horizons have extended south of their destination they will have seen a gentler geography with smaller fields and more undergrowth and trees.

Properties on the banks of la Vienne at Bonneuil-Matours

Hidden towns and villages

For many more la Vienne will only be a space of an hour or so as they speed southwards on the A10 motorway. After climbing from the Loire Valley the landscape seems uninteresting, fairly flat and very much France. But escape through the toll booths - or even from the complementary N10 - and you will find an agricultural landscape littered with small towns and villages. The decline of the agricultural work-force has led to a surplus of properties - particularly the older traditional houses.

Outbuildings and barns.

Few will date from the Wars of Religion (16th Century) but one speculates that that the experience of fairly constant wars and skirmishes has been a factor in the practice of locating the vast majority of properties in hamlets, villages and small towns. To have been isolated would have exposed oneself to great danger. Within the villages the 'typical' house is large and often accompanied by a great yard. Once a marshalling point for horses, carts and carriages they are now a grassed area or garden. Around them one generally finds an extensive range of barns, cow and poultry sheds and pigsties.