The Real Thing

All that I have known in the past about Troggs is that they were a British rock band of the sixties who made their name with the song “Wild Thing”- number 257 in Rolling Stones list of Greatest Rock Songs of All Times. Other than that “Troglodyte” has been occasionally been a handy word to have up your sleeve for crosswords: A person who lives in a cave, or a person whose ideas are so out of touch that they are prehistoric. In the Dordogne troglodytes are and have been the Real Thing.
On Tuesday we went for a nice 9 km walk around the town of La Roque-Gageac, on the banks of the Dordogne River, and into the hills behind. La Roque-Gageac is another of those “Most-Visited” towns of France. It is built into the limestone cliff that towers above the river. The limestone in this part of France is in huge horizontal strata that the river has cut deeply down into. Because there are slight differences in the hardness of the different layers some have eroded more than others, forming long chambers 5 to 10 meters deep and tens to hundreds of metres long.
These are known to have provided shelter for humans for at least 55,000 years. Modern houses in La Roque-Gageac, and Rocamadour as well, and many other villages are built right into these overhangs. The limestone provides the back wall and floor to the houses, and sometimes the roof. If you can imagine a sideways photograph of a row of terrace houses, then tear it roughly down the centre, it is what you have here. La Roque-Gageac is, however, a bit of a real-estate risk. Over the last hundred years there have been major collapses that have carried away houses, and killed a number of people.
A more spectacular example is the now deserted Roque St Christophe. It once had five layers of housing, with one of the overhangs a kilometre long, and is thought to have accommodated up to 1500 people in the Middle Ages. The village was easily defended, with a single fort at the end of each level able to defend the whole community. Roque St Christophe held out against the Vikings who sailed up the Dordogne, when a lot of larger towns couldn’t.
It took the English army to finally break through the defences in the Hundred Years War. This, and the later Religious Wars, finally destroyed the community, and it was eventually abandoned. The site is eerie. The whole cliff face is covered with rectangular holes where beams were inserted to hold up floors and rooves. You can see where rooms were carved back into the limestone, and steps carved into the stone linking different levels.
Wild Thing just isn’t the same any more.
Chris