Melissa Davies
Scrub and whirls of dust as far as the eye can see. At least 20 vultures hover overhead and the scorched tarmac is paperflat for miles. We’re on the plateau of Causse Méjean in the Cévennes National Park, famous for its history of protestant partisans but there’s nowhere obvious to swim here. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote on arriving in the Cévennes in 1879, ‘It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating to the traveller.’ Our initial feeling was the same, hostile limestone plateaus plunge vertically into gorges choked with chestnut and oak. Yet, over the next 10 days we’d come to learn how right Stevenson was as the mountains revealed their hidden swimming holes. Our cycling trip was about to become an accidental swimming holiday.
The Cévennes National Park in south east France has been on my radar for a while; however, the area is often overlooked by British tourists heading straight to the south coast or east into the Alps. Still one of the poorest areas of France, the Cévennes became an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011 yet it’s the vicious persecution of 17th Century protestants that the area is remembered for. The name Camisard still rings through the gorges and religious tension could be felt as recently as the turn of the 20th century.