h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Today is F for France.
10 years ago we bought an old house in France. It's in a little village on a hill near the Lot. It was a farmhouse, so it has two barns, one of which still has cow stalls in place, and a ruined prune oven. The house is built of limestone blocks, but there was a crack running down the front wall, which turned out to be subsidence, so we had to get concrete walls built in the cellar. We've also had the roof retiled and a new septic tank installed.
The back garden is mainly grass with fruit trees, which sometimes produce cherries and apricots, plums and apples. It slopes down to the west, which means we get views over the nearby valleys and sunsets over the distant hills. The garden also means that we spend a lot of time mowing the lawn, cutting back bushes, pulling out weeds. I'm sure weeds grow faster in France! The front lawn is easier to mow, so we put a table on it and eat our meals there, with occasional glasses of .
The area has a series of limestone ridges, separated by valleys with little streams. On some of the hills are bastide villages, which were founded in the Middle Ages and fortified. When the weather is good, we go for walks or cycle rides but some of the hills are too steep for us to ride up.
If all this sounds idyllic, it creates a lot of work and, when the weather is bad, there is little to do except sit in the house and read.

[Amy P]

In my part of France, MVP, we don't call them weeds, we call them salad

Deb

True. We can pick both fennel and sage.

Am totally envious! It sounds idyllic.

A ruined prune oven?

Is it the prunes that are ruined, or the oven itself?

I did wonder about that 6th thing yesterday...

What part of France is this house in?

The place is Lot-et-Garonne, so south-east of Bordeaux.

The farmers round here grow plums and dry them as prunes, so every farm used to have a prune oven. The roof of ours is broken in. (The rude French which the previous owner used might escape the filther ).