One of the great appeals of travelling in France is its antique towns and villages. Anyone looking up places to visit in France online can easily end up wandering among a plethora of pictures of castles and timber-framed houses that look straight out of a fairytale. I saw these places myself, in Foix and, to a lesser extent, the Pyrenean mountain villages. It begs the question, though: why does France have so many of these charmingly old-fashioned places and Wales, if not the UK, has so few? Wales has more than its fair share of medieval castles, but, in all my years, I’ve never seen anything like Groubit or the streets of Foix.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this means that France has generally older buildings than the UK, but, perhaps surprisingly, no – according to a European Union survey in 2011, 18% of France’s homes were built before 1919, compared to 21% in the UK. In Wales, the proportion was even higher, at 30%. In Gwynedd, where I’m from, the majority of homes were built before 1919. However, speaking as a local and a cynic, I would make an educated guess that most of those were built in the 19th century and early 20th century, when the slate quarries were operating. That was pretty much the last time there was any kind of large-scale investment in the region. Plus, due to the popularity of pebbledash to cover walls in the 20th century, as well as extensions and renovations over the years, many houses look newer than they actually are.
So that’s one reason why I am personally unfamiliar with the antiquated aesthetics of French towns and villages. Another is that while buildings in Wales are generally older, France has proportionally more medieval buildings. Coflein, which is the database for the National Monuments Record of Wales, lists a mere 1621 buildings of medieval origin in Wales, while Mérimée, which performs a similar function for the French Ministry of Culture, records around 38,000 medieval buildings in France. This is a disparity that is far too high to be simply the result of France’s greater size. Not to mention the fact that in the UK, all buildings dating from before 1700 are listed, while France has no such specific rule, so it’s likely that not all of the very old buildings of France appear on the Mérimée List.
Then there’s how these old buildings are distributed around the country. Les Plus Beaux Villages de France (The Most Beautiful Villages of France), an association dedicated to promoting tourism to the most exceptional examples of rustic quaintness, has a particularly dense concentration in the south-west of the country, near where I was. According to the 2011 EU census, the proportion of pre-1919 homes in these regions were higher than the national average, with 26% in Tarn-et-Garonne, and 31% in Lot. In Ariége, where Foix is, it was 29%. Essentially, wherever you get a cluster of old architecture, you get a pretty postcard picture.
Figures from a survey that was carried out fourteen years ago are bound to have changed by now, of course, but ultimately, it seems that what I thought was a perfectly preserved architectural landscape was an impression bordering on an illusion. French buildings are not generally older than what I’m used to, but what antique structures they do have tend to be older, and clustered together in specific regions. That, and the fact that they frequently don’t hide the stone walls and timber framing behind pebbledash and renovations, result in these strikingly pretty little patches of human presence in the midst of barely-tamed mountains or beautifully serene countryside.
Sources: CensusHub, Coflein, Mérimée, Cadw, Historic England, Les Plus Beaux Villages de France
Wandering/Wondering 