If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I have a penchant for unearthing strange, quirky or downright eccentric stories. And rural France affords a surprising number of them.

Hams in the belfry

Have you ever heard of curing hams in a church belfry? I certainly hadn’t. Nonetheless, this is what happens in the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre in the Cantal town of Saint-Flour. I read that large jambons d’Auvergne, weighing around seven kilos, are hung in one of the two belltowers for several months to finish off the curing process. The Auvergne region is noted for its charcuterie.

Journalistic antennae waving like mad, I buckled down to find out more. I assumed that this mingling of historic and gastronomic heritage must be an ancient tradition. In fact, one of the producers of charcuterie started to do this only in 2022, when they suspended 57 hams from the beams.  

Perfect conditions

Okay, but why? The dark basalt cathedral is the highest located in Europe, the cathedral square being around 900 m above sea level. The belfries are thus exposed to the dry winds blowing off the high plateaux of the Margeride and the Aubrac. Protected from heat and light, the tower provides the perfect conditions in which to cure the hams. Who knows, maybe the pealing of the bells might add a certain divine je ne sais quoi, too.

These heavenly hams are highly sought after and sell for around 150€ a throw. Selling them under the name Florus Solatium (flowers of solace), the cathedral has benefited from a share of the profits. The money has gone towards the restoration of stained-glass windows and the organ.

Short lived

This practice should have become an annual event. Sadly, la Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (Drac) has decided in its wisdom that it will not prolong its authorisation beyond the end of 2023.

La Drac is the outpost of the Ministry of Culture in every region. It has a number of roles, including protecting heritage and architecture. It’s not clear why la Drac objects to the hams, which has happened very recently, despite granting authorisation last year. Presumably, it stems from the violation of some government regulation, which are many and varied and sometimes contradictory.

So this short-lived practice bites the dust before it can become a tradition.

Walking on your head

A couple of weeks ago, we drove through a local village and noticed that someone had turned the village sign upside down. Kids larking about, we assumed. When this started to happen everywhere, it became clear that this was more than simply a prank by bored schoolchildren. So what was going on?

It turned out that this was a farmers’ protest against the plethora of conflicting agricultural regulations “qui nous font marcher sur la tête” (which make us walk on our heads, i.e. make us go crazy).

I’m no expert on agricultural policy. And I’ll admit that I don’t condone some of the farmers’ protest methods, e.g. blocking the roads with heaps of manure or burning tyres or disrupting the traffic with convoys of slow tractors. The effect of some farming practices on the environment is also a thorny subject.

However, creeping government regulation has definitely become more onerous in recent years for just about everybody. Anyone who runs a small business in France knows how hedged around with red tape it is. This includes farmers in our area who have small farms and don’t practice intensive farming. They also play an important role in keeping the land open, otherwise it would revert to unmanaged woodland. Like everyone, their costs have risen with inflation, but they are under pressure to keep their own prices down.

And finally…

Speaking of quirky things, the weather in France has been pretty awful since about mid-October. Rain, sometimes torrential, has dominated, punctuated by the occasional bright, frosty day. This has rather spoiled my grand plan to tick places off my bucket list this autumn. It’s a salutary lesson that even in the South of France, the sun doesn’t always shine.

According to our subjective method for assessing the weather each day (plus = good, minus = bad, zero = indifferent), only one November in 26 years was worse than this year’s, and one was equally dismal.

Having experienced a serious drought in the late summer and early autumn, we experienced the exact opposite in the late autumn. In October and November, we had a whopping 271 mm (10.67 in) of rain. This means that for the year, we’ve had a little more than the average. The difference is in the distribution: it doesn’t rain for months, and then it does nothing but.

We are, of course, much better off here than the poor folk in the North of France, who have suffered hurricanes, hailstorms and flooding. Fingers crossed that the weather might calm down for them over the winter.

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