Saint-Jean-du-Gard, France – Amarath pricked up her ears. After another tug at her halter, she resumed ambling down the path in the middle of the Cevennes in southern France. Tree branches repeatedly brushed the saddlebags on Amaranth’s back, but the she-donkey skilfully balanced her pack of some 30 kilograms and brought it safely into the valley. Hiking with a donkey has become a trademark of the Cevennes, a mountain range between the Rhone River and Massif Central. There are various donkey hirers, and guided tours are also available. A rugged hiking region, the Cevennes are characterized by high, arid plateaus and deeply carved river valleys like the Ardeche. You can often go for hours without seeing a soul. There is a network of cabins that take in hikers, though, and tours lasting several days are no problem if you are armed with a good map and tips from the locals. People hiking with a donkey need places that provide food and a pen for the animal, so it is advisable to have the donkey hirer map out the route for you. A donkey covers three to four kilometres an hour and can carry a pack weighing up to 40 kg. It needs a break every two or three hours. Its saddlebags are then removed so that the donkey can comfortably graze and drink. The pack should contain a long rope for tethering. Before a tour begins, donkey hirers, who usually have a whole herd of them, patiently show hikers how to tie a quick release knot, how to catch the donkey in the morning, where to fasten its halter and how to use a currycomb and hoof pick properly. There are a number of routes through the Cevennes, the most famous being the one that retraces the steps of Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. From Le-Puy-en-Velay to Saint-Jean-du-Gard, it is about 200 kilometres long. Among Stevenson’s less well-known works is “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes” (1879), in which he described his adventures at the side of a stubborn she-donkey named Modestine. Hikers pass abandoned mountain villages that date from a time when the Cevennes were still densely populated. The region’s inhabitants then engaged in agriculture, growing crops such as grapes, olives and peaches. At higher elevations, they harvested chestnuts and herded goats. Silkworm breeding was an important regional industry in the 17th century, but epidemics and cheap imports brought its demise. More and more people left. But back to the present and Amaranth: At one point during the hike, she and Vanille, her travel companion and fellow she-donkey, refused to go down a certain path. After much persuasion they finally began descending, and the path grew ever steeper. It differed from the other paths that the donkey hirer had marked on the map. Indeed, the hikers had taken a wrong turn – at precisely the spot where the animals baulked.

Internet: www.ardeche-tourisme.com, www.chemin-stevenson.org; donkey hire: http://anegenti.free.fr

As spring aproaches in southern France, Brian Jackman hunts for orchids in the Cevennes

By Brian Jackman

IN Florac, on the upper reaches of the Tarn, I met an Englishman who has been coming to the Cevennes for 30 years. “It’s the orchids,” he said. “They grow here like nowhere else I know. In England, if a military orchid is found, we fence it off and mount a 24-hour guard until it has finished flowering. In the Cevennes, military orchids are as common as buttercups.” So it came as no surprise that the first orchid I saw in the Cevennes turned out to be a military, a glorious spike of pinkish purple, standing to attention in a lay-by.

I had flown to Montpellier to join a seven-day tour organised by Naturetrek, the Hampshire-based eco-travel company. It may have been billed as a Cevennes safari but camping was definitely not on the programme. Instead we were based in Cocurès (population 160), in the extremely comfortable Hotel Restaurant La Lozette, one of the best small two-star hideaways in France.

Cocurès is a pretty village of tumbledown houses with wooden shutters and kitchen gardens, and an ancient hound that howls whenever the Angelus rings. Here, every morning began with a visit to the nearest supermarket, just down the road in Florac. Then, loaded down with picnic supplies (local cheeses and charcuterie, loaves, wine and luscious cherries) we would pile into our eight-seater safari vehicle and head for the hills in search of la vie sauvage.

The Cevennes, the south-eastern corner of the Massif Central, is a hard and beautiful land, but it is also filled with the dazzling light of the warm south and the sense of freedom that always accompanies vast open spaces. If there really is a heaven, then it probably looks like the flower-strewn rocks and meadows of these timeless limestone uplands.

For anyone with the remotest interest in wildlife this is a hugely rewarding region to explore, split by colossal gorges and criss-crossed by “GRs” (sentiers des grandes randonnées) – well-marked routes for long-distance walkers that follow the old drove roads and shepherds’ trails across wild and largely empty country.

This is the region made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson, who walked here as a young man in 1878 with his donkey, Modestine. The GR70, which traces the route he took through the Cevennes and over Mont Lozère on his way south to St Jean du Gard, has been named after him, the Sentier Stevenson, and you can, if you wish, even hire a donkey and follow in the great man’s footsteps up and over Mont Lozère.

We spent most of our time in the Cevennes national park, which contains about 2,000 flowering plant species including 47 different orchids, as well as spectacular birds such as eagle owls and griffon vultures, and 45 kinds of mammals.

No wonder we needed two experts to accompany us: Michael Chandler, a Yorkshire botanist with 25 years of guiding experience, and Andy Tucker, a young ornithologist from Hampshire who is as much at home among the birds of the Ecuadorean rainforest as he is in France.

Now, with Andy at the wheel, we are zig-zagging up a mountain road for our first glimpse of the Grands Causses, the great limestone table-lands that dominate so much of the Cevennes. Marooned in the skies of Southern France, the Causses are another world. Islands of silence, the French call them. But their silence is an illusion. Listen again and what you hear are larks and sheep bells and the song of the wind running over the land.

On the Causse Méjean a pair of Montagu’s harriers hunt over the hillsides, rocking and swaying on long wings, and quails are calling “wet my lips” from meadows lit with purple pasque flowers.

This is sheep country, a lean, spare land with its ribs picked clean. Among its drystone walls and grey stone barns you may catch echoes of other limestone landscapes – the Burren and the Yorkshire Pennines – but on a much grander scale. It is also one of the last places in Europe where you can still witness the Transhumance, the age-old practice in which sheep flocks, having wintered in the valleys below, are brought up to graze on the high summer pastures.

The thin turf barely covers the stony Causse, yet wild flowers thrive in unbelievable profusion: pink scatter-cushions of rock soapwort, mauve alpine asters, masses of tiny yellow rock roses and an endemic fly orchid that sends our botanists into raptures.

My fellow Naturetrekkers are a mixed bunch. Some have come to botanise, and some to look for rare birds such as stone curlews and rock thrushes. “Some clients are incredibly keen,” says Michael. “We had one chap who wouldn’t eat lunch because he reckoned an hour each day for a week would give him the equivalent of an extra day to hunt for orchids.” But most, like me, are content to take pleasure in everything, from wildlife to wine and the joy of exploring open country in this stunning corner of la France profonde.

At noon, having picnicked under a hawthorn hedge still snowed under with blossom in early June, we find a cluster of mauve and white lady orchids, each floret like a miniature flamenco dancer in a flouncy dress; and growing nearby, the more subdued man orchid, known to the French as l’homme pendu – the hanged man.

Mid-afternoon brings us to St Chély du Tarn, a viewpoint teetering on the edge of the Tarn Gorges, where the river makes a U-turn in its stony bed a thousand feet below.

The Tarn Gorges rank among nature’s grandest follies. By comparison, Cheddar Gorge is a crack in the pavement. They are France’s answer to the Grand Canyon – 30 miles of dizzying cliffs, buttresses, pillars and fingers of stained limestone with the River Tarn shining emerald clear at the bottom.

Next day we set off to botanise on the slopes and ridges of Mont Lozère (5,600ft), the sacred source of the Tarn. Our route lies up the valley of a smaller river, the Runes, half hidden in sweet chestnut woods. In former times chestnut flour was vital for the local economy – providing “poor man’s bread” in a region where cereal crops were hard to grow.

We cross the Sentier Stevenson and find ourselves in Le Pont de Montvert, a typical Cevenol village of sway-backed roofs with fish-scale tiles. It is market day, and we top up our picnic provisions with cheese and cherries from the roadside stalls. Above the village we climb through wet meadows filled with paintbox colours – pink tufts of bistort, deep-purple mountain pansies, yellow globe flowers and, most beautiful of all, drifts of narcissi-like fallen snow.

Mont Lozère is made of sterner stuff than the Causses – a whale-backed hump of solid granite. This is the domain of the short-toed eagle, known in the Cevennes as the péyriblanc (white friar) because of its pale creamy underparts. We watch one in typical pose, hovering in the teeth of the wind as it searches for snakes and lizards on the boulder-strewn mountain-sides; and higher still, at around 5,300ft, we find daffodils still in flower, and delicate wood anemones sheltering beneath stunted pines.

Later in the week we drive to the summit of Mont Aigoual (5,500ft), where wild tulips grow. They are everywhere, scattered like golden stars in the grass. Our mountain-top picnic spot is graced with tremendous panoramic views. To the north the ridges and valleys of the Massif Central roll away towards the Auvergne. To the south sprawls the Camargue, a faraway gleam of sea and salt marsh; and to the south-east, blue with distance, looms the mighty silhouette of Canigou, the beginning of the Pyrenees.

The weather, indifferent at the start of the trip, is now in full Mediterranean mode. On a day hot enough to melt the tar on the road we resist the temptations of Meyruies, a little town full of restaurants and pavement cafes set out beside a tumbling stream, and toil up to the Causse Noir. There we watch honey buzzards and find the scarce and beautiful yellow adonis – one of the region’s most precious plants – growing in the company of Pyrenean bellflowers and spider orchids among dark stands of juniper and pine.

On our way back we re-enter the Tarn Gorges and stop near the kayaking centre of Blajoux to admire a field of lizard orchids. Each flowering spike has a wriggly tail – and a scent like goat’s cheese. But while the botanists have their noses in the grass, the birders are staring into the heavens.

Above the rimrocks, on outstretched wings 10 feet wide, floats a vision of Africa, a spiralling flock of griffon vultures. Two decades or so ago these giant airborne scavengers were almost extinct in the Cevennes. Now, thanks to a successful reintroduction programme, some 75 pairs breed in the national park.

Up on the Causses, where they search for carrion, life is as hard for the wild creatures as it is for the shepherds and their flocks who have together shaped these empty landscapes. In high summer the dried heads of carline thistles, which flowered the previous year, lie like spent suns among the stones and, except in the clay-lined dewponds known as lavognes, there is no water for man or beast. In its extremes of heat and cold this is a land without pity, as cruel as the butcher bird, the red-backed shrike, which impales its victims on thornbushes. Yet when the orchids are in flower and the grass shivers in the wind like the waves of the sea, there is nowhere lovelier in the whole of France.

On our last day, by popular request, we return to the Causse Méjean with its standing stones and weathered crosses and huge, ever-changing skies. Of all places in the Cevennes this is the one I like the best. Its waving grasslands remind me of the Serengeti – an impression redoubled by what looks like a herd of zebras on the skyline.

They turn out to be Przewalski’s horses, a breed so ancient they appear to have stepped straight out of a cave painting. These limestone uplands are the closest thing in Europe to their native Mongolian steppe, where they are now extinct. But if all goes well and numbers increase, there is a plan to return them to their original home.

It is time to leave. In the golden light of late afternoon a flock of sheep comes spilling down the road towards us. Led by a shepherd and his dog, they pass in a patter of horny hooves, leaving behind a pungent, sheep-cheesy smell that hangs in the air long after they have disappeared.
Cevennes basics

Naturetrek (01962 733051, www.naturetrek.co.uk) has eight-day guided holidays in the Cevennes costing from £895, including return flight from London to Montpellier, accommodation (single-room supplement £115) and all meals.

For independent travellers, several local companies rent a donkey as a pack animal and companion. Try Gentiane and Christian Brochier (00 33 4 66 41 04 16; email: anegenti@club-internet.fr) in the village of Castagnols, between Genolhac and Le Pont de Montvert. They charge about £30 a day or £270 for seven days including half board at gîtes or chambres d’hote .

Further reading: Wild France by Douglas Botting (Sheldrake Press), available from our retail partner Amazon.co.uk at the special price of £12.50. Click here to order a copy online

France receives more visitors than any other country, yet many beautiful spots remain hidden, and few more so than the Cévennes mountains

By Lucy Wadham

France is one of those countries that we think we know. This assumption is, in part, what shields so many of her more secret places from invasion. And when I say we, I don’t mean just we British. The French, too, when they plan their long and frequent holidays, tend to stick to the well-trodden axes of pleasure: the Alps for their skiing, Brittany or Normandy for their spas, Provence for their long lunches by the pool . . .

Cevennes National Park in France.

These are all corners well-served by the French state’s magnificent infrastructure but there are other places, most of them off the beaten tracks of the TGV and the autoroutes – and where I live in the Cévennes mountains is one of them.

Part of me is still wondering why, at the age of 43, I suddenly decided to uproot from a comfortable life in central Paris and move to a part of France so wild and so remote that even my best-educated Parisian friends, who had no difficulty rattling off the obscurest capital cities, were unable to locate it on the map. They knew that the Lozère, the part of the Cévennes where I would henceforth be paying my taxes, was the most sparsely populated départment in France. And they knew that the cévenols – those taciturn, heavily defended peasants who feature in Raymond Depardon’s fashionable and rather condescending documentary on rural France, La vie moderne – are mostly Protestant. For the French, a nation of lapsed Catholic pleasure-seekers, the word Protestant evokes hard work, austerity and mirthlessness. It is therefore of little surprise to me that, two years on, none of my Parisian friends has paid a visit.

For Parisians, the Cévennes is still the place described by the great 19th-century French historian Jules Michelet: “The Cévennes offer rock, nothing but rock, razor-sharp shale. You feel the struggle of man, his stubborn and prodigious labour in the face of nature.”

And it is true that everywhere you go in the area where I live, La Vallée Française, you see evidence of this struggle. You see it written on the landscape: in the dry stone walls and the terraces carved out of the steep hillsides; in the beautiful sweet chestnut groves that still march over so many of those terraces; even in my own roof, made of shale, each lauze carefully chosen and laid like fish scales in ascending order of size, from ridge to eaves. Michelet was right: it is a place of hardship. The Protestants of the Cévennes were brutally persecuted by the French Catholic monarchy for more than 120 years.

Today it is still a place of rigorous husbandry. The nearest supermarket to where I live is half an hour away on winding roads, so every one of my neighbours has a vegetable garden hewn from their hillside; many have beehives on the furthest reaches of their land. Everyone has a log pile, beautifully stacked outside their house – the measure of their industry and their readiness for whatever nature can throw at them.

Because in this part of the world, nature can suddenly turn nasty. Most of the year the climate is Mediterranean, softened a little in summer by the altitude. Winters are relatively short and mild, with the occasional dusting of snow on the summits. So at first it all seems relatively gentle, particularly to a Brit used to the annual tussle with seasonally adjusted depression. Cypress and green oak thrive on the south-facing slopes, and you can find morels in April, chanterelles in June and cèpes in October. At first I could not understand either the Parisian reluctance or indeed my neighbours’ dogged preparedness for the worst. But in my first autumn here, I experienced an épisode cévenol: when cold air from the Atlantic meets warm air from the Mediterranean, leading to dark cloud for days on end, apocalyptic rain, flash floods, broken bridges, dead sheep, restive children, fretful fathers and unhinged mothers. When it ended, and the sun came out, I found myself once again in the most beautiful landscape I had ever seen, one peopled with individuals who gave the impression that they felt lucky to be alive, today, and in this particular part of the world.

You come to these hills – like the writer’s writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, did – to think and to walk. Looking out over the Vallée Française from the breathtaking crest road that was carved through the Cevennes by Louis XIV’s dragoons in their pitiless campaign against the Protestants, you will see little evidence of any change to the landscape since those times. Nothing but tiers of wooded hills fading to the distance with tiny villages huddled around their precious springs and linked by thousands of footpaths, still trodden by smallholders with their goats. This is not a place for people looking for distraction or amusement. It is, and always has been, a place of exile, a place to run away to.

I once asked a neighbour of mine, who was giving me a lift to the village in his van, if he still noticed the beauty of the landscape he was brought up in. Without taking his eyes off the winding road, he smiled.

“Nope,” he said. “I drive over the mountain at sunrise every day and I see the mist in the valley but I don’t look at it any more. If I ever went away, though, that’s when I’d miss it, and I wouldn’t be able to be without it.”

People here are not smug, but they know that they have something precious and they carry that knowledge like a secret worth having.

In his essay Spirit of Place, Lawrence Durrell said, “all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper: I am watching you – are you watching yourself in me?” It was without a doubt the landscape of the Cévennes that drew me. What it was that I saw there of myself I’m not entirely sure, but my father was raised by a Scottish mother near Stirling. When we went on holiday to Provence when I was a child, he would soon become bored by the luxuriant heat that so enchanted my mother, and together we would strike for the purple hills we could see in the distance. The low-lying mountains that you see if you look west from vineyards of the Rhône are a frontier. Beyond them lies another landscape, of craggy hills, mossy woodlands, vast moors, rushing streams and stone bridges. These are close to the Scottish landscapes of my father’s youth. His fantasy, you might say, and not mine and yet the Gardon river in my valley flows towards the Mediterranean, not the North Sea. Put simply, it is perhaps as close as France gets to Scotland – or as close as I can get to my roots without betraying my self.

• Places to stay: The Hotel Bourgade in Saint André de Valborgne (+33 4 66 566932), has doubles from €55. In the village of Les Plantiers, Auberge du Valgrand (+33 4 66 839011) has doubles from €65. There are no hotels in the Vallée Française but Gîtes de France has a selection of self-catering cottage in the area. Search on the website for Sainte Etienne Vallée Française, Moissac Vallée Française or Sainte Croix Vallée Française. Ryanair flies to Nîmes from Liverpool and Luton and to Montpellier from Bristol and Leeds-Bradford. Easyjet flies to Montpellier from Luton and Gatwick. London to Montpellier by rail with Rail Europe (08448 484 064) starts from £104.50 return.

Lucy Wadham is the author of The Secret Life of France (Faber). To order a copy for £10.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6847

“I was woken in my cave above the Tarnon by a man walking his dog who told me that it was Sunday. I rolled my sleeping-bag and ambled down the path towards Florac and a medley of bell-ringing, the peals for Catholic Mass begonning as those for the Protestant Eucharist were dying away.

‘We had the wars,’ shrugged the baker, as if the bitter struggle 300 years ago between the Protestant Camisards and their Catholic persecutors were yesterday.

One of the leaders of the ragged Camisards – who had used Florac as a mountain lair – was the guerrilla genius Jean Cavalier, a one-time shepherd boy who changed sides after being defeated by Louis XIV’s generals and then, by a circuitous route, rose to lieutenant-governor of Jersey under the British before being buried in 1740, now a major- general, in the parish of St Luke’s, Chelsea.

On the last day of September, 138 years later, a twenty-seven-year- old lapsed Calvinist walked into Florac intent on picking up the echoes of the Camisards. He was told in the cafe of cousins and nephews des- cended from Cavalier and of bones dug up where ancestors had fought. “

Edict of  Nantes and Cevennes

1598, decree promulgated at Nantes by King Henry IV to restore internal peace in France, which had been torn by the Wars of Religion; the edict defined the rights of the French Protestants (see Huguenots). These included full liberty of conscience and private worship; liberty of public worship wherever it had previously been granted and its extension to numerous other localities and to estates of Protestant nobles; full civil rights including the right to hold public office; royal subsidies for Protestant schools; special courts, composed of Roman Catholic and Protestant judges, to judge cases involving Protestants; retention of the organization of the Protestant church in France; and Protestant control of some 200 cities then held by the Huguenots, including such strongholds as La Rochelle (see Rochelle, La), with the king contributing to the maintenance of their garrisons and fortifications.

The last condition, originally devised for an eight-year period but subsequently renewed, was to serve as guarantee to the Huguenots that their other rights would be respected; however, it gave French Protestantism a virtual state within a state and was incompatible with the centralizing policies of cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin and of Louis XIV. The fall (1628) of La Rochelle to Richelieu’s army and the Peace of Alais (1629) marked the end of Huguenot political privileges. After 1665, Louis XIV was persuaded by his Roman Catholic advisers to embark on a policy of persecuting the Protestants. By a series of edicts that narrowly interpreted the Edict of Nantes, he reduced it to a scrap of paper. Finally, in 1685, he declared that the majority of Protestants had been converted to Catholicism and that the edict of 1598, having thus become superfluous, was revoked.

Protestant peasants of the Cevennes region of France who in 1702 rebelled against the persecutions that followed the revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes (see Nantes, Edict of). The name was probably given them because of the shirts they wore in night raids. Led by the young Jean Cavalier and Roland Laporte, the Camisards met the ravages of the royal army with guerrilla methods and withstood superior forces in several battles. In 1704, Marshal Villars, the royal commander, offered Cavalier vague concessions to the Protestants and the promise of a command in the royal army. Cavalier’s acceptance broke the revolt, although others, including Laporte, refused to submit unless the Edict of Nantes was restored; scattered fighting went on until 1710.