Jeannine & Roger's French Cheese Odyssey

Castres - 25th May

The joys of shopping at 1.00pm right in the middle of everybody’s 2 hour lunch break - you get the whole car park to yourself, the supermarket aisles are empty of trolley mania and there is no queuing at the checkout.

Mazamet is a nice town down in a valley at the foot of the Montagne Noire (Black Mountains). We drove over the mountains via a national park, grabbed our ham and cheese from the local supermarket and went in search of a lunch place. Unfortunately the other side of Mazamet isn’t as scenic as the mountains were; finding a picnic spot was not looking great until we stumbled upon a cemetery just out of town.

Photos below show:

• The available space if you are in the market for a plot
• The lovely adornments on family plots, they never seem to get vandalised
• The fireman who is pushing up dandelions not daisies
• That one school crew who rows into the starting blocks bow first - actually, we think by his headstone he wanted to face Mecca; not sure why he didn’t buy one on the next row over

Cheese Experience No.34 - Fol Epi, bought especially because it was pre-sliced. Fol Epi translates to ‘ear of wheat’; a whole round of the pressed cheese is decorated with wheat ear impressions. The rounds are matured in a cellar where they develop a tender texture and fruity taste. The cheese has to be made with local cow’s milk collected less than 30km from the cheese factory.
Their slogan “French and fine to the slices”? Totally agree!

Castres, from the latin castrum, means fortified city.
It has seen its fair share of history including: a roman village, a stopover for pilgrims walking to Spain’s Santiago de Compostela, it surrendered itself to the Catholics during the Crusades, and suffered badly from the black plague and the Black Prince.
After many kings laid claim to the city it somehow became a protestant stronghold; even after all the Religious Wars - Castres managed to retain an even number of protestants and Catholics.
The buildings didn’t fare as well because the orders kept coming from King Louis and the Church to dismantle anything protestant related.

Today Castres greatest tourist attraction is the Goya Museum – basically, a Spanish Art Gallery.
We visited the town on foot via geocaches and saw:

• The Bishops gardens by the Goya Museum

• St Benoit church

• The houses on the Agout

• The Pilgrim of Autan

• The Garden of Mail

This last photo is a lake in the Black Mountains. Unfortunately the rain started, that’s life in France - one minute you are in a T-shirt looking for a cool drink, then next hour you have your raincoat on wishing you had kept the drink container because then you could have attempted the cache that involves floating the cache to the top of a pipe. {Ed: What a great place for a Masters Regatta...]