In October 2020, I left Paris’s Gare de Lyon on the 6.37am train, picked up my rental car at the Avignon TGV station and was on the road by 10am, heading northwest to Les Vans, where the Monts d’Ardèche butt into the Cévennes at the north-eastern edge of the national park.
It is a living relic of a nearly extinct agro-pastoral tradition – now a preserved UNESCO Cultural Landscape and Biosphere Reserve – where shepherds still drive their flocks into the mountains each spring, tend them through the summer months and know each animal by name. A drive through the craggy windswept landscape, alternating between steep gorges and endless valleys, reveals a criss-cross of picturesque villages and crumbling stone fences hewn from the grey, tawny or pink-hued local granite and limestone so as to be barely discernible from the landscape’s natural rubble. But to call it wilderness may be somewhat misleading. Its remoteness is exactly what drew me to the Cévennes, which lies about 90 minutes northwest by car from Avignon and an hour from Nîmes. The Cévennes is one of the wildest parts of France
Home to dozens of protected plant, animal and bird species, including endangered eagles and vultures, the park may well be the closest thing to wilderness in France. The park covers 361 square miles of France’s least populated countryside, a land inhospitable to highways, whose ancient expanse of ragged gorges, steep forested ridges, river-etched valleys and high-altitude plateaus still shelter a rugged way of life that has persisted for millennia. So much so that in 2018 it was named an International Dark Sky Reserve, or “ Réserve de ciel étoilé”, as the French more poetically call it. On the way, he climbed rugged windswept peaks, beheld boulder-strewn waterfalls that tumbled into crystalline pools “of the most enchanting sea-green”, and slept out of doors under a darkness so profound he called it “night within night”.Ī century and a half later, the Cévennes national park remains much as Stevenson described it in his book Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes, and is still one of the darkest places on earth. Over 12 days in the autumn of 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson and his capricious donkey Modestine walked 120 miles through the Cévennes, a remote French territory due north of Montpellier, where he met impoverished peasants, silent monks, and lonely shepherds while reflecting on the region’s history of outlaw Protestants and a child-devouring beast.
Jennifer Ladonne winds her way through the craggy wilderness of the Cévennes national park, crossing paths with Robert Louis Stevenson
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