La Flandonenque

“The main harvest was chestnuts. People stopped doing it because it was no longer profitable... We sold them, and with the little pieces we fattened up the lambs and also the pigs. We ate chestnuts till spring: at four in the afternoon with our bread instead of chocolate, and in the evening we had a bowl of boiled chestnuts. In August, the leaf has more flavour, we made bundles to feed the goats and sheep. We dried them, we put them up in sheaves like wheat, then we brought them in. For animal litter, we gathered chestnut leaves.”

The mill was used to grind grains during the famine that affected the inhabitants of Flandres in the Second World War. It stopped work in 1950. In 1994 and 1995, the roof, walls and mill mechanism were restored, with the support of the National Park, by a farmer who had used the mill. On the lower level, you can see the room that houses the horizontal wheel. Water that has gone through the mill flows back into the river. From the pond that served to regulate water flow, you follow the béal (channel) which brought water to the mill.

In 1944 a group of resistance fighters, made up of German and Spanish anti-fascists and a few Frenchmen refusing to be drafted into the STO (forced labour in Germany), settled at La Fare. Eight days later, on 12 February, the militia blew up the buildings using dynamite. The maquisards, who had been warned in time, had already left.Since 1990, the hamlet has been repopulated, and its new inhabitants are restoring it. Today, some 30

  "In around 1850, Vernet had 82 inhabitants. In '39, there was a little old man who lent us his house for dancing, we drank the wine he made.” “There were climbing vines and even wild vines that were left to climb into the holm oaks, clinton vines. They had very small bunches, sometimes you needed half a day to pick a bucketful. There were also iron wires stretched across rivers, you had to unhook the wire to pick while standing in the riverbed. We made wine for the family to drink.” (Patricia Grime)