Saturday 14th September

It’s the weekend, the forecast is fine (if breezy), so we think the Luberon is going to be busy, so we are up and off early to head for a little lake on the outskirts of Apt, Lesley has heard about. It is a good place to walk the dogs and get some breakfast.

The dogs enjoyed the walk but there was nowhere to get any breakfast. They appeared to be setting up for a concert and the café was closed.  So it was on to Roussillon.

Roussillon is amazing! It is a red town in a red landscape that could be on a different planet. The towns very existence is due to the rock it is built on and out of – Ochre. Ochre is a sandstone that is rich in iron oxide and for thousands of years it has been used in the manufacture of paints and dyes. Prehistoric man used ochre for his handprint paintings to brighten up his caves. Ochre is usually found deep underground, what makes Roussillon exceptional is that here the mineral bearing layers are on the surface and centuries of quarrying has left the landscape around the town looking like something from Mars.

Rousillon is quite a classy place, full of shops selling artists’ supplies, Cézanne used to park his motorhome here and walk the dog before making his ochre purchases. It is another of the delightful Provence villages that we are almost becoming immune too. At last we found a café in the sun overlooking a derelict quarry for a much delayed breakfast. Shock! Horror! They weren’t serving le petit déjeuner only coffee. Wendy was beside herself with hunger by this time, so while we waited the arrival of quarter café crème’s she nipped next door to the patisserie for four croissants. They were great croissants, especially the almond ones and the coffees turned out to be the most expensive so far.

Reinvigorated, we dived into the old quarries to follow the ochre trail, which took us through the woodland that has sprung up, to see the strange shapes left behind by the extraction and the range of different shades of red that Roussillon ochre was famous for. By the time we had finished the village was filling up and we just managed to get the last table in the square for moules frites. unfortunately, we were behind a coach party of American tourists, so the service was slow verging on the glacial.

As a good Provençal village, Roussillon has an old castle and a hilltop view point, so we worked off our lunch with a climb to the top, from where we could see yesterday’s port of call, Saignon, and had an even better view of Mont Ventoux.

Two miles down the hill from Roussillon is Camping Arc en Ciel, a sprawling campsite overlooking an old ochre quarry. Surprisingly, it is not too busy and we have a couple of pitches on the edge of the campsite. Bryn hadn’t had a good off-lead walk for a couple of days so I took him off through the scrub that had formed at the bottom of the quarry to see what we could see. After 20 minutes we had scrabbled our way up some rocks that I realised I didn’t want to go down; we would have to find another way back. Ever onward we eventually came to a gravel path that looked as if it was on our campsite. It wasn’t! One way led to a big house and the other led to some very imposing eight-foot gates with no room to queue between them and the deer fencing either side. I followed the fencing away from the big house, hoping to find a hole. There wasn’t! Instead, there was a slightly smaller but equally grand house with equally secure gates. There was nothing for it but to plunge back into the bushes and try and retrace my steps. This proved impossible, but after much slithering and sliding and controlled falling I finally arrived back at the van just in time for the Luberon round of the world Möllky Championships.

It was a very tight contest between four evenly matched contestants. Over ambitious play saw the departure of two players, ensuring that this year’s winner was going to be male. After some nip and tuck, which saw the skittles being knocked far and wide, your correspondent managed a sneaky nine to clinch the trophy and the widespread indifference from the rest!