Parcourir les sentiers de Chagnon - La Cave du Curé

Description

Hurry up or the group will set off on the walk without you. And that, frankly, would be a pity. It's a pleasant, fairly easy walk and one where you learn as you walk. A health body in a sound mind (mens sana in corpore sano).

We're definitely motivated - Rucksack OK - water bottle OK - Compass OK.
Latin dictionary OK.
No, there isn't an odd one out in my list, because today we're off walking among the Romans. Well nearly. Anyway, we're going equipped in case anything along the way is unclear (Latin lessons, with their rosas - rosae etc. are long way off, in the hazy past).
The aim is to discover Chagnon, a small picturesque and indomitable village (no, not Asterix's village), which is full of water, history, fruit and pithy anecdotes. Plenty to keep us going throughout the entire walk.
The itinerary includes a Roman bridge (La Durèze bridge) and some vestiges of the Aqueduct that supplied Lyon with drinking water (as you can see, the greens believed in fair play even then, they were already sharing our water with our arch rivals in Lyon). There'll be a short stop at the Cave du Curé, a 80 m long tunnel hewn out of the rock (at the time the Romans preferred to dig through obstacles rather than go round them to deliver their sacrosanct elixir). Legend has it that it was used as a refuge for a priest during the Revolution.
What is certain is that those Romans really wanted to get their aqueduct built and their precious water moved (you can see they were cleverer than us about it) if we are to believe the steles that have been found in different places.
Apart from the trip back in time, the paths and trails around Chagnon also mean apples, pears, cherries. Fruit that's really popular in the valley and that people snap up at the farmers' markets.
You will see "nail stones", a piercing souvenir of the workers who used to come from the farms in the valley to make steel into nails (so they didn't have to sit and watch the grass grow).