Pilgrim's Progress – Long Distance Walks in Europe and the UK

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short

William Shakespeare – Othello Act 2 Sc 3

Unless you are mad enough to be walking the GR4 through the Cevennes  it is very unlikely that you will ever come to the small hilltop village of Thines.

Quite simply, it is in the middle of nowhere. But, as I discovered when I arrivef there after a six hour hike, it has a surprisingly lot going for it!

Les Vans felt like the gateway to the Cevennes. It boasted a host of restaurants as well as a hiking shop which had everything any self respecting hiker or mountain biker might want to buy except for what I was looking for – a pair of lightweight hiking gloves to protect my sunburnt hands!

I was tempted to try out one of the local restaurants but none of them seemed to offer any local specialities. It was just the usual mixture of burgers, pizzas and pasta.

The lady who owned the house where I was staying in Les Vans, belatedly arrived the previous with  the keys to my room at 5pm! She’d been out walking for the day!

In her early 60s, Estelle had something of the residual hippychick about her. There was a large map of Africa blutacked to the wall of my apartment together with quite a lot of primitive African art adorning the walls including a rather menacing portrait of a African man in his 30s in a pinstripe suit reaching inside his jacket for something – a pen, a machete, a submachine gun? Who knows. Another painting depicted the inside of an opium den with several drug addicts spaced out on couches. The aged grey cat slumbering on the patio added to the ambience of voodoo and witchcraft!

I headed off from Les Vans shortly after 8am and almost immediately entered a pine clad wooded hillside path which continued all the way to the tiny village of Malarce.

For some reason I thought Malarce was the little village where I was staying the night. I’d been given the code to the key box for the municipal gite where I was staying the night. The only problem was that there didn’t appear to be a municipal gite just the local mairie, which had a key box but one which didn’t open with the code I had! What to do? At this point a young lad appeared who confirmed that I wasn’t in Thines, which did have a communal gite. It only too 15 minutes to get there by car but he had no idea if you could reach it on foot!

I decided to take my chances and continue on the GR4. Hopefully the path would lead to Thines and it’s municipal gite.

After about two hours of walking through pine clad forests I emerged at an escarpment with views towards a small hilltop village. Hopefully this was Thines.

As I neared Thines, I wondered to myself what the chances were that the tiny hilltop hamlet would run to a bar selling cold beer on tap. The chances were negligible I thought to myself ruefully. Well I was proved dead wrong. Thines boasted not one but two bars! The Lord moves in mysterious ways I thought to myself, punching the air with glee as I downed an ice cold pint of Pelforth!

The municipal gite was located next to the charming and impressive 12th century church which boasted stunning views of the valley below.

Nobody seems to know how the church at Thines was constructed. The human effort required to mine the stones and transport them by narrow mule tracks is mind boggling. A testament to mediaeval faith in the Almighty and a reflection on the sublime views from the hilltop location.

The interior of the church was no less impressive and there was ample evidence that it was in regular use by the members of the artistic community that seemed to constitute the bulk of the village’s inhabitants.

Besides it’s impressive church, Thines boasts an equally impressive sculpture which commemorates the members of the French Resistance who were killed by the Germans during WW2.

Thines was the site of the first French Resistance action in the Ardèche in August 1943. Following an allied arms drop in the area a few weeks earlier, the village was surrounded by the Gestapo and six members of the French Resistance were assassinated together with three villagers including a 90 year old lady.

Tomorrow I head off to the Trappist Monastery of Notre Dame les Neiges where Charles de Foucauld stayed in 1890.