Provence-Beyond (Beyond the French Riviera) ®
Where:
[ Apt | Bonnieux | Caussols | Forcalquier | Gordes | Lacoste | Luberon | Ménerbes | Murs | Seillans | Viens | Villes-sur-Auzon ]
Photos:
Larger of this one just outside Forcalquier (30 k)
The "Three Soldiers", beside Gourdes (26 k)
Two other bories, near Seillans and Caussols (28 k)
The Borie Village near Gourdes (36 k)
Below: [ Where are they? | Book ]
Ahhh, so this is what a Borie is: a dry-stone hut.
The one in this photo is a couple of km southwest of Forcalquier, beside the D950 road.
Dry-stone construction, which has been around since the dawn of time, can be seen in the hills throughout the Beyond region. Here, the remains you'll see (sometimes in ruins and sometimes still used), date as far back as the 13th century. Around the 18th and early 19th centuries, farmers and shepherds built everything from small stone huts (bories) to complete small farm complexes with this method.
Although the bories were very useful, the reason for building them was very mundane: to clear the stones from the fields. If the stones hadn't been in the way, most of the bories probably wouldn't have been built. But there were a lot of stones to clear, and rather than just make an enormous pile, something useful was created. M. Pierre Martel built a small borie in 1964 the way his grandfather had done. When he finished, he figured that he had used up to 300,000 stones, or about 180 tons. ["Bories", by the Parc Naturel Régional du Luberon; Edisud]
The land is often barren of good timber and the stone is plentiful. These are labor-intensive constructions, built in a time when schedules were more relaxed. The artistry includes very careful selection of stones of varying thickness and then assembling them into tight, compact walls with neatly straight edges. The fact that many of these bories have lasted centuries, while the cement has crumbled on more modern buildings, shows the benefit of simple ideas and good workmanship. Oh, yes. The bories can be ancient, but the name is late 19th century.
Where to Find Bories
In Beyond, the area around Forcalquier and the Lure mountains is well known for bories, and there are many in the Luberon and the area around Apt and Bonnieux. In the Alpes-Maritimes, shepherds still use them in the hills above Vence and Grasse, and they sit beside the modern telescopes of the CERGA observatory on the plateau of Calern. Some places where you can see the bories of Beyond are listed at the top of this page.
Dry-stone huts, whatever they are called, can be found all over the world. In the Borie Village at Gordes, there are photographs of "bories" from Beaujolais in France, Corsica, Crete, Death Valley in California, Italy, Mexico, Peru, the Sinai dessert, Switzerland, Turkey and what used to be Yugoslovia.
A Beyond reader, who's a student of archaeology from the University of Malta, told us the Maltese variety are called "giren".
Books
An excellent book (in French) about the Provence bories, with photos, maps and architectural drawings is:
- Bories
- Parc Natural Régional du Luberon
- Edisud (publisher)
- ISBN 2-85744-720-5
