How many hermits make a crowd?

There may be a definition problem when you have four hermitages within a few hundred meters of each other. To my mind that’s simply not doing your lonely hermit-ing properly.

We did a lovely walk between hermitages after driving up a death-defying twisting road which is where, in my experience, driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road really comes into its own. The walk is only a couple of kilometres long but takes you to four hermitages, or perhaps more accurately lonely chapels. The views from each were enormous.

The village the walk starts and ends from features a witch’s house which is definitely not worth visiting. There is also a restaurant which is utterly worth visiting. Sadly we were on a time-line which meant they generously split up their standard menu to make it practical for us to eat quickly, so we didn’t really do justice the the lamb shanks and pork ribs which featured.

The agenda issue was that the more intrepid amongst us had booked to do a flying fox run down the mountain. I counted myself a designated survivor and passed on the experience, but those who enjoy hurtling down mountains at 150kph had a good time. The company doing the flying fox was particularly thrilled to have 83-year-old Jean complete the run and immediately snapped her for their social media feed.

We then drove up the mountain behind our hotel to visit an abandoned village (there are many of those around here after an abortive dam project from the sixties led to all the local villages being compulsorily acquired). It was a bit of weird combination of eerily deserted and strangely occupied that was proving entertaining until we realised the strangely occupied part had big dogs.

So now we’ve been sitting in the garden of our hotel in the still of the evening. Tomorrow we move on from the Pyrenees to the coast.

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