A short break in Avebury and Rennes-le-Château
Recently returned from a couple of weeks’ holiday from the amorphous stress of freelance work. I spent most of the first week over in Avebury, where I was saddened to find out that the little campsite in Winterbourne Monkton, just north of the henge, is now gone. Seems like a prime area for a campsite… but now it’s all down to pitching in vaguely illicit locations if you want to get close to the landscape here.
Looking for carefree relaxation rather than being evicted from a pitch at eight in the morning, I called the warm & welcoming Copes, who kindly let me camp in a corner of their large garden. It rained a little, and the nights were quite nippy, but in all a pleasant time was had, ambling about the henge, and over to the amazing Fyfield Down, smoking and thinking strange thoughts. I was especially impressed by the mob of Fresian cows that silently mobbed me from behind their fence as I wandered up to the downs. They were a really curious—in both senses of the word—bunch. I’ve been having more and more dreams recently of various animals honing in on me as if I were a magnet for their spirits. On top of my several dreams from years back of Fresian cows grazing on a roof signalling an apocalypse (and this was well before seeing O Brother, Where Art Thou?), this common experience of cow-mobbing took on the uncanny air of dreams.
Back in London I attended the interesting but slightly disappointing Thelema Beyond Crowley conference at Conway Hall. Commemorating 100 years since the ‘transmission’ of Liber Al, this formed the first of a strange trinity of coincidental centenaries clustering around the trip my friend Lee and I had planned to visit Rennes-le-Château in southern France. Our trip followed hot on the heels of Elizabeth Regina, who visited Toulouse to mark 100 years of Anglo-French relations. Due to fly out on April 11th—the day after the last part of Liber Al was received—we were bound for Perpignan, the capital of Rousillon, the heart of French Catalonia. I didn’t realise until after booking the flight that this city had been graced with Salvador Dali’s florid blessings, when his cumulative experience of the railway station there led to him pronouncing the station to be a "cathedral of intuition", indeed, "the centre of the universe" (see his 1965 painting, The Station at Perpignan). Of course this year is Dali’s centenary, and Perpignan have apparently commemorated it by erecting a luminous column topped by a laser beam.
Well, I was too busy getting ripped off by a taxi from the airport to visit the centre of the universe when we arrived. It was inevitable really: my first airport taxi in a foreign country, not yet used to using the French language, not yet used to Euro-Sterling conversion, trying to allow for it being Easter Sunday, plus sleep deprivation. (I should note in passing that my headstate was nowhere near as fried as Lee’s, who had been out clubbing the previous two nights, and hadn’t slept since three nights before, and was undergoing a major relationship meltdown. Getting him quickly to the beach on arrival to chill out added to my haste in dealing with the cabbie.)
Bereft now of most of the first few days’ cash, we crashed in a daze onto the sunny but chilly, windswept Mediterranean shore of Argelès-sur-Mer. Of course by the time our hunger got the better of us, all the restaurants along the commercialised seafront were closing after lunch. We eventually found our way back to the cheap-n-cheerful snack bar called La Petite Fringale ("The Little Pang of Hunger"), whose bizarre decorations (pictured) we’d laughed at on arrival. We didn’t know then what the name of the place meant, so we called it The Hallucinating Crocodile. Something being advertised by a crocodile that’s so hungry it’s weeping and hallucinating the food in question delighted us, leading to our sleep-dep formulation of a new prehistoric era: the ‘Churrolithic’, wherein the abstract motifs of cave art showed not ‘entoptic’ patterns hard-wired into human physiology, but drifting visions of various flavoursome snacks, such as chips and doughnuts. (Churros, in the menu pictures, looked like oddly-shaped chips, and for the rest of the trip Lee was intent on getting some, doused with mayonnaise. Luckily, before he tried this, we found out from some English locals that Churros are actually a stick-like doughnut, smothered in sugar.)
Our first campsite was just south from Argelès (above), with a pebbly private beach, many many French people taking their Easter break, and lizards scurrying along the walls. (Lizards! Wow! I had a pet lizard as a kid, I can’t believe it took me 25 more years to visit a place where reptiles are common creatures.) We spent a couple of days chilling out thereabouts, wandering down to the insanely pretty town of Collioure (summer hangout of Matisse, among others), up to the 16th century Fort St Elme overlooking the bay (apparently now some lucky sod’s abode), pausing to watch ants and be bemused by the tiny yellow train-like vehicle that was hauling tiny yellow carriages of tourists around the local roads. The Côte Vermeille, as the French coast heading down towards the Spanish border is known, due to the sunsets, seems a wonderful place to spend more time, but it’s damned windy in spring. In any case, we had to push on…
We never made it to see the prehistoric art and other, natural, wonders in the Pyrenean caves, as I was excitedly anticipating. When you’re only in the region for a week, and you’re heading mainly to Rennes-le-Château, it’s not really worth planning on going further. Especially when you’re relying on camping and public transport. We waited 4 hours for the train to Perpignan, arriving late enough to miss feasible connections into the Aude valley region. If you’re ever stuck in Perpignan with a tent, head straight for the tiny Camping la Garrigole, a 15-minute walk west out of the centre.
The next day we made it. The coach to Quillan enters the lower Pyrenean foothills—well, mountains if you’re English—through some breathtaking gorges, with vast rocky overhangs and craggy cliffs muzzled with wire meshing giving you a tangible sense of mythical transition, a perilous bottleneck into a new space. Sandwiches and beer at the café opposite the station, then the Limoux bus up to Couiza, the nearest town to Rennes-le-Château. Rain was starting to spit, but we felt we had to actually arrive at Rennes-le-Château that evening, so we started along the winding road up the hill, reassured by my credit card and the Rough Guide’s assurance that there was accommodation at the old vicarage.
Clambering through some brambles at one point to try and cut across the zig-zagging roadway, a branch that Lee pushed out the way twanged back, straight in my face, a couple of thorns embedding themselves in my forehead. The amusing Christ parallels were far from lost on me, even as I cursed loudly and tried to carefully pull the thorns out without tearing my skin. I made sure there wasn’t blood running down my forehead before we entered the little village, famed as the axis of a wild legendary complex that has at its heart the idea that Jesus started a family in the region and that his bloodline survives.
Well at this stage all I can really say is: don’t trust a Rough Guide without question! They can live up to their titles. Was there a place to stay in Rennes-le-Château? No. Has there been in recent years? No. Where’s the nearest campsite? Oh, only 6km away, in Rennes-les-Bains. Fuck. Cue another taxi ride—not a rip-off, but not cheap—to this incredibly quiet little spa town, straight to the campsite… which, naturally, is closed. Well, not physically closed, so we pitch up and tuck into our pasta, anchovies and wine. We also visit Artisanna, a lovely English-run hippy café / art gallery, and chat to the owners over tea and bread pudding. The next morning we get evicted from the campsite (thankfully not at an especially ungodly hour), but our dejected trip to the local shop, stocking up for our anticipated mega-hike to Rennes-le-Château and god knows where then, ends in a serendipitous meeting with Atmo from Artisanna. He lets us know that there is a campsite nearer to Rennes-le-Château, at the English commune Laval Dieux. Kindly offering to look after our rucksacks for the day while we wander over there and make arrangements—not to mention enjoying the wonderful summery day that’s unfolding—he tells us to be back between 6 and 8pm, when he can ferry us and our stuff back to Laval Dieux.
That day made the trip. The walk up the hill, past the curious stone seat known as the Devil’s Armchair, quickly elevated our spirits as we drank deeply of the sumptuous landscape, the delicious pine-scented forest air, and the now blazing sun.
We tripped out on the red, gold and green of the gorgeous earth, radiant sun and flourishing vegetation, joking and theorising playfully, and just gasping at the beauty. The hill of Rennes-le-Château stood in the distance (in the centre of this photo).
We got a friendly reception at Laval Dieux ("the valley of God"), where the campsite was closed in letter but not, crucially for us, in spirit. Wandering to the site itself, down the hill from the cluster of communal living quarters, we glowed with awe at the tree in the field next to us. The midday sun cast a shadow directly before the tree, giving us an uncanny image of the World Tree, shadow/roots reaching down as the branches stretched up to the sun. Anyone familiar with the research of Henry Lincoln et al. (which I don’t want to get into here) won’t miss the symbolic associations of centrality: Laval Dieux is bang next to La Pique, the little rocky outcrop that near enough marks the dead centre of the famous ‘pentagram in the landscape’ around Rennes-le-Château.
Back in Rennes-les-Bains, we found we had most of the day left to wait for Atmo, so we parked ourselves outside the (you guessed it, English-run) bar in the town square and soaked up beer, coffee, and more sun. Here I finally managed to do nothing—inside and out. Ah, yes, I remember now: a holiday! Pure bliss.
The next day, though—our last day in the area, the day on which we were to walk to Rennes-le-Château and have a good look around—it rained. And rained. And rained. All day, the same steady shower. The impression of the church at Rennes-le-Château, strewn with fantastical alchemical symbolism, couldn’t be entirely dampened, of course. I remember an excellent moment when I heard a discordant whining noise rising slowly but surely amidst the pious choral music being played inside: suddenly it sounded like something from Psychic TV’s Dreams Less Sweet. Until I realised the whine was an unhealthy car outside. But, such is the background ambience of vaguely heretical esotericism that the place exudes. On a more ordinary note, I recommend not skimping on the graveyard: there are some purple beadwork decorations on some graves there whose beauty I couldn’t disrespect by taking a photo on such a grim rainy day. And back to weirdness: we found out in the graveyard that we had coincidentally arrived in France on the birthday of Rennes-le-Château’s notorious benefactor, Abbé Bérenger Saunière.
The walk back was pretty miserable and wet, but Colin, a joiner spending a bit of time at the commune in exchange for his services, was a real trooper, letting us hang our drenched tents up around his woodburner, entertaining us with hitching stories, and inviting us surfing in Newquay. Maybe!
And so we managed to make our way back to Perpignan weathered and satisfied, instead of damp and dispirited—thanks largely to the local English contingent. Someone different took our money at Camping la Garrigole, and it all seemed nicely symmetrical when he led us round the site only to point us to the exact same plot that we had chosen to pitch at last time. We never saw the town’s "luminous column topped by a laser beam" that marked the centre of Dali’s universe. But, as we lamented this over our last night’s trangier camping stove fare, we realised we’d found our own luminous column: the campsite light that marked our little plot of grass, at the centre of Camping la Garrigole.
