MONTS D’ARRÉE
The wildlife is rich and varied. Buzzards, woodpeckers, jays and other common birds live in the forest. Salmon and otters revel in the clean waters of the rivers, and beavers have been reintroduced.

This ancient wood naturally has its own legends. Dahud, the daughter of a 6th-century Breton king called Gradlon, was in the habit of throwing her lovers off a rock near Huelgoat. King Arthur is supposed to have slept in a cave somewhere in the forest. And there is a Gallo-Roman hill-fort, which, inevitably, has come to be called Le Camp d’Artus (‘Arthur’s Camp’) – although its links with the legend are tenuous at best.


MASSIF DES ECRINS
The first and only person I saw the day I climbed the mountains of the Ecrins was a lean, grey-haired man in his fifties. Nothing unusual about this, but his outfit was odd: swimming trunks and a short-sleeved pullover, which seemed superfluous on such a hot day. He stopped and chatted amiably to me.

He was clearly a true lover of nature, for he lived in a cabin in a remote spot 8 km (5 miles) from the nearest village. At this altitude (1,600 m/5,250 ft), the snow would lie waist-high at his cabin door during winter, so he would retreat to another cabin further down the mountain until the spring. Neither of his two homes had electricity or a telephone, and gas lamps and wood fires were his only sources of light and heat. I couldn’t help feeling I’d run into the modern French equivalent of Henry David Thoreau, who, despairing of progress, retreated into the woods to find inspiration for his writing. When we parted, he wished me a ‘bonne promenade’; I wished him a ‘bonne vie’, thinking to myself somewhat enviously that he already had precisely that.