David

Some of the martins having a final feed before getting ready for the long flight south. They dropped from the cliff face, heading wherever the insects where: over the rooftops, round the jib of a tall crane, or swooping over the river. We arrived in the area on a sunny day in mid-September, when it seemed that most or all of the martins were still there. The next day, the weather started to go downhill at the start of the bout of autumn storms which affected a swathe of western Europe. Now only a few martins were around. I thought they might be ones which had started their journey further north, and had taken the chance of a break and a last good meal.

Les Eyzies bills itself, with some hyperbole, as the “World Capital of Prehistory”. The area is rich in wildlife now, but was far more so during the Ice Ages. As the glaciers advanced and retreated during the cold spells and the warm ones, the local climate alternated between tundra and temperate. As these phases gave way to one another, the area supported herds of many kinds of large mammals, mostly of species now extinct. There were mammoths, bison, reindeer and other deer, goats and horses. In the rivers, there were salmon coming upstream to spawn.

All of these herds survived by making annual migrations in search of the right feeding grounds for each season.  The broad river valleys, and especially that of the Vézère and its side streams with their high cliffs to the left and right, funnelled these migrations into narrow channels. The topography was almost as if designed for yet another largish mammal to set traps to hunt for big game.

The first evidence that anatomically modern humans had been alive at the same time as the extinct mammals of the ice age came from les Eyzies. In the 1850s the area got a railway station. Workers building the access road to the station dug up three skeletons in a small overhang in the cliff face. When these were investigated further, they were found to be in the same layers as the bones of ice age creatures. The overhang was called the Abri [shelter in the local dialect] Cro-Magnon. The human skeletons were dubbed Cro-Magnons, the (then earliest known Homo sapiens in western Europe.

Investigations much nearer our own time has shown that there had been Homo sapiens in Africa for many thousands of years prior to the Cro-Magnons. But in the middle nineteenth century palaeontology research  was pretty much limited to investigations by western European leisured amateurs in western Europe, with interpretations heavily distorted by the racism of the time. Quite a lot of the effort looks with hindsight like a competition between British and French enthusiasts, each trying to show that their own country had the best survivals of the earliest humans. When the competition had these limited rules, the French won hands down.

Since the uncovering of those skeletons, there have been extensive investigations in the area, which has proved to be incredibly rich in remains from this part of the past. The slew of sites showing human occupation are a record of the presence of what were most likely also migrant bands, not only of Cro-Magnons but also, during the same long ages, of Neandertals.

Crag martins sunning themselves before starting their long migration flight to escape the European autumn and head for an African spring. They are clinging to the face of a limestone cliff, below an overhang, in les Eyzies.

Les Eyzies is a village in the French region which the locals call the Périgord, and those Brits who have a second home there tend to call the Dordogne. It’s in the valley of the Vézère, which is indeed a tributary of the Dordogne river.

The surrounding countryside is attractive. The river is winding, with high limestone cliffs on either side. The cliffs are so steep, there’s a lot of overhangs. Caves can be spotted, some quite high up. So can hollows in the cliff faces where people made dwellings for themselves. Some date back to prehistory. Some were occupied as recently as the 1960s.

The cliffs on either side of the river are hundreds of yards apart. Between them is the flood plane, with the ground mostly rising fairly slowly. That’s where the towns and villages are, with the roads that connect them, and the farmland.

There’s tourism based on open-air activities. Walking on the network of footpaths; cycling on the narrow, winding and sometimes quiet roads; canoeing on the river. Some of the chateaus are massive medieval castles, dating from the time when the kings of England and France both laid claim to the territory.

But none of these is what les Eyzies pushes as its main tourist attractions. More on this, and on the crag martins, in tomorrow’s post.

A tiny frog near the pond in Wightwick Manor garden, trying to look inconspicuous in the short grass by a fallen leaf.

Closing in on a strawberry dogwood in the garden of Wightwick Manor to see the ripening fruit which give it its name.

This green shield bug could have landed more or less anywhere in the garden at Wightwick Manor and been more or less camouflaged against its background. Instead, it was placed for contrast on this fallen leaf.

Autumn leaves so vivid in colour, and so early in the autumn, are the clue that this tree originates elsewhere in the world. It’s a sweet gum, aka liquidambar.

Three large white butterflies were around the same buddleia bush as the red admirals, with several other large whites fluttering elsewhere in the Wightwick Manor gardens. The three spent a little time interacting in flight. It wasn’t clear (at least to me) whether they were jousting for control of territory, or sizing each other up as potential partners.

Perhaps neither. They suddenly broke off, all landing on the buddleia and starting to busily eat from the flowers. Two were even on the same flower head.

A pair of sweet chestnuts – the edible kind – ripening on one of the trees in the garden at Wightwick Manor.

Red admirals were one of two species which were attracted to the last few buddleia flowers in the garden at Wightwick Manor. There were three around, but this was the ony one cooperative enough for me to get pictures of it.

Heritage open days in September give a chance to see National Trust properties without the usual entrance charges. The garden at Wightwick Manor is usually (given good weather) beginning to turn attractively autumnal, as the leaves on this tree reflected in the still water of one of the ponds.