THE MOURJOU CHESTNUT FESTIVAL

They roasted the chestnuts on iron grills two metres or more in length and perhaps a metre in width. Two of these monsters sat in the field with what looked like old wooden fencing posts burning beneath. After a time the chestnuts were raked off and tipped into giant bins, the sort that you might use for cattle feed, and then manhandled up the slope to the festival.

Eager hands then scooped the steaming mass into those little plastic trays that you find in take-away restaurants. An incongruous, if useful, blending of ancient and modern ways. We paid our two euros or whatever and tucked in: the chestnuts, hot, sweet and woody, the essence of autumn. In the background bagpipers wailed.

To wash down your chestnuts, the festival offered a choice. Apple juice or cider - sold in one or two litre bottles. Both looked identical, the thick smudgy, amber colour of freshly pressed apple. We chose the juice. The stock of bottles flew off the shelves as fast as the chestnuts. More bottles arrived. From where, we wondered.

At the back of the stall stood a large rectangular trailer. From the back extended two pipes, each with a tap. And from these ran the supply of juice and cider. A man sat on the towbar, filling the bottles. How practical! But enough, surely, to give apoplexy to those whose heart’s desire is to keep the population secure behind racks of regulations.



As we ate, the wailing bagpipers materialised and performed a little dance. Their pipes were medieval, the sort you see in early paintings of people enjoying themselves, by people like Brueghel.

The pipers were not trying to be medieval. It was just, I suppose, that in these Auverne recesses things have not changed much in 600 years. Apart from the plastic trays the chestnuts were then as they are now. The only thing that might have changed was the language.

Then the people in these parts spoke Occitan and by the attempts made to write things (the labels on the cider bottles for instance) in Occitan, it appears that it is due for a comeback. We even picked up a freesheet in English telling us how to pronounce Occitan words.

On a casual acquaintance the language seems to bear the same relation to French as Catalan does to Spanish, that is a sort of half-way house between the two, but leaning a little more to the one than the other. Once this language was spoken pretty much everywhere south of Bordeaux and Montlucon, except for the area round Perpignan, where presumably they spoke Catalan. Anyway it is an enormous area.

And in this little part, down at the bottom of the Auverne in the Departement of the Cantal (otherwise only famous for being the spot from which hailed Georges Pompidou, the French President who grandly let Britain join ‘Europe’ in 1972) they grow chestnuts. That is, you might say, their ‘raison d’etre.’ Or was.

Did you know that in 1920, La Chataignerie (The Chestnutery) produced half a million tons of chestnuts, which were consumed up and down the land? No doubt, after the First World War had eliminated much of the young farming workforce, there wasn’t much else to eat but half a million tons is a lot of chestnuts.

Eighty years later this has fallen to a mere 10,000 tons, a fifty- old decline. Most of the chestnuts today are simply left to rot or be eaten by wild boar.



Still, at Morjou the object is to make you consume chestnuts. I noted that the organising committee limited their stall holders to a maximum purchase of two tons. This seemed a triumph of optimism. However delicious they may be, there is a limit to the number of roast chestnuts one can eat.

I estimate it would take 16,000 people to eat their way through two tons. Mind you, you would be amazed at to just how many uses the chestnut can be put. Ground into flour it finds its way into all sorts of breads, cakes, pastries, pancakes. You find chestnut honey and chestnut jam and chestnut preserves of every kind. There are decorations made of chestnuts, candles, ornaments....there are cosmetics.

And after eating you can visit the chestnut museum and demonstrations of the superb qualities of chestnut wood (it is straight-grained and so splits evenly, comes with is own preservative to resist attack by wood boring insects and spiders; if you look at a chestnut roof you will find no cobwebs.)

Earlier we bumped into Nigel, an Englishman married to Susy Atkins an American potter who runs the superb Don pottery, now in a brand new exhibition centre high on a hill, just over the Cantal border. Until a couple of years ago the pottery inhabited an achingly beautiful eighteenth century mansion, all windows and turrets and covered with lovely scalloped blue grey slates, in a deep Auverngnat cleft. The house remained unsold, he said ruefully, though the price had come down.

I suggested he sought out a lingerie manufacturer.

“A lingerie manufacturer - why?”

“Thongs of the Auverne.”