64 - How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm (after they've seen brebis)? - Sarbres

Sunday, May 05 

After doing my DuoLingo lessons with my hotel breakfast, I spent the majority of the morning with the patio door open and doing travel research.  I think I've got a decent plan for the coming week and the weather looks cooperative with my afternoon plan, which is to stay within les Landes.  

I drove to the Écomusée de Marqueze (located by the town of Sarbres) while eating the dried bananas I'd bought as groceries back in Soustons.  Turns out dried bananas are quite sticky and it's about 600 kcal for a 250g box; still, a tasty lunch to follow a late breakfast.  Yesterday's forecast had showed thunderstorms (les ourages) in the afternoon but conditions driving up this afternoon were super nice!

The ticket office is an old train stop.  I arrived about 30 minutes before the next train would leave, so I had some time to spend in the museum exhibit across the tracks.  

This museum was quite informative; I feel like it had all the info I was looking for about the region condensed in one place.  I'd heard bits and bobs of it all from coworkers and friends but it was good to get it straight.  Les Landes only started to look like it does today starting in the 19th century; this area is one large experiment in using managed forests for changing an environment.  

I hadn't known about le gascon; someone needs to put together a chart showing all the different languages or something.  Aquitainique, vascon, gascon, Basque, occitanie, the list goes on and on.

I had to rush through the exhibit because the train was about to leave.  The train ride wasn't anything particularly scenic to write home about, just pine forest but it's still an interesting way to start a museum visit.  And at the station in the ecomusée, I joined onto a guided tour about the majority of the museum (the agro-pastoral communities that scratched out a living here).  I caught ~85% of what she was saying but if I wasn't focusing or other sounds were happening I would lose the thread.  My brain still glosses over spoken numbers in French.

Entry to the ecomusée is by train.  It's kinda neat that they were able to make use of the old rail line built to connect cities that ran straight through the property.  

An example of a sharecropper's house.  The museum is set up to replicate a hamlet / plantation; there's an owner's house, a sharecropper's house, and then a crappy house for the contracted laborers.  The roofs were heavily slanted in the westward direction, I guess to account for storms coming from the bay.  Meals were mostly soup with bread; the kitchen hearth was for the soup but bread ovens were located outside the house to minimize risk of fire.  

Crosses woven from wild carrot flowers served to protect households.  The cob walls featured the space between the wood frame filled with a plaster using straw from the fields.  

Overall it was a good tour of the ancient lifestyle of les Landes.  Les Landes were a region of sandy moors/marshes.  The soil was very poor so only sparse grass grew in most of the area, some maritime pines grew in corridors around streams but the rest of the area was flat and kinda crappy.  Since the soil was so poor, the communities that lived here were dependent on an old method for soil improvement: poo.  

Yup, sheep were the key engine to creating productive fields back in the day.  100 hectares of marshland could sustain 100 sheep in a year, those 100 sheep (rounded up at night) would produce enough manure to fertilize 4 hectares of fields that produce 4 tons of rye in a year, which is enough grain to feed 10 people per year.  To expand on this: the sheep were so valued for their poo that the resulting Landaise breed of sheep had a low quality wool and their diet didn't leave excess meat or milk; but they were really good at surviving (and pooping) in this environment.  The emblem of this era was the Shepard on stilts: the stilts kept the shepard's feet a bit drier and let them see further over the flat moors.

Another of the guides was specialized in the animals of the museum.  He spent a good amount of time in the afternoon directing these cows around, moving containers of feed and what not with the cart around the museum.  

Various fowl were part of the village life.  I think geese, ducks, and turkey had little coops but I believe the chickens had elevated huts that they could hop up tiny ladders to roost in at night.  The sign mentions a specific Gascon breed of chicken with all black feathers.

The museum not only replicated old buildings, but the whole layout replicated a hamlet.  This flock of sheep were allowed to graze the central lawn as they pleased.  The lawn, called an airial, also features a few trees (shade, nut, or fruit producing).  Fun fact: the central room that my desk is in at the office is called the Airial room.

The lamb got a little aggressive and looked like it was headbutting the mom's groin for milk.

Individual sheep were wary of me, but the flock as a whole seemed to have no issue getting close and personal with me.  

If this lizard hadn't moved, I probably wouldn't have seen it

Behind the sharecropper's house, the museum had a pig pen.  Like many other cultures, these communities used pigs as the way to deal with scraps and waste.  It was a big fête when the pig was slaughtered in December.

Napoleon III pushed to cultivate the area as a maritime pine forest (which was formally made into law in 1857) and the forestation completely changed the region.  As managed forests grew, the sparse marshy moors disappeared and the entire economy of the region had to change.  Sheperds traded flocks of sheep for axes and pails, but they could still keep the stilts (les échassiers).

The forests of les Landes and the Basque country were fertile hunting grounds for the palombe pigeon, who would migrate through the region.  It's weird to think that wildlife could have once been so plentiful that people could catch huge numbers of birds by putting nets between trees.

Walking stooped over through this hide was interesting; I'm not sure if there were pigeons around but I felt fairly hidden.

The hide from the outside.  

A device that didn't quite catch on.  It's a mix between a telescope and tin cans with string: point the ecoutrephone in a direction and listen for inbound enemy planes.

Beehives made from straw.  I guess like the Basque, the Landais also included the bees in their funerary rituals, including putting a black cloth over the hive for the mourning period.

There was a small section of the area discussed the ecology surrounding the rivers, the lifestyle of the miller, and the work of the gemmeurs (pine resin harvesters).  

The maritime pine is native to the region but wasn't present in such huge numbers until man-made forests were pushed. 

One of the perks of the maritime pine forests are that you can tap the trees for resin and later harvest them for wood.  The resin is a complex mix of chemicals; people in the region developed expertise in refining and processing the resin into useful products.  One of these expertise powerhouses became the company DRT (Dérivés Résiniques et Terpéniques)

Told you les échassiers des bergers would come in handy pour les gemmeurs.

This goose near the water mill was 100% ready to fight me.  "Those are brave words for someone within goosing range" - the goose, probably

A horizontal wheel for the mill; like the other Basque mill I'd seen a while back.  This one's sign said it was because of the low relief; these mills were built on diverted canals to protect against sudden fluctuations in river level.  Adding in context I learned while in Soustons, I'm guess that over time sand would also build up in these channels and reduce the available relief too.  

Please don't touch the flour; I like the little chute for the flour.

I caught the last train out of the ecomusée of the day.  Turns out the storms of the forecast did eventually come through, but I was already back in Dax by that time.  The Ecomusée de Marquez gets two big thumbs up from me; what a great and informative afternoon.  I didn't read everything but I feel like I have a much better appreciation for this Lande now.  

Dinner was in Dax at the Grand Cafe de Bordeaux.  I ordered the salad cause I wanted a lighter, leafier option... Guess I'll just have to eat all this duck, ham, and potatoes.  Oh woe is me.