The Aubrac lies to the south of St-Flour, east of the valley of the River Truyère and north of the valley of the Lot. It's a region of bleak, windswept uplands with long views and huge skies, dotted with glacial lakes and granite villages hunkered down out of the weather. The highest points are between 1200m and 1400m, and there are more cows up here than people; you see them grazing the boggy, peaty pastures, divided by dry-stone walls and turf-brown streams. There are few trees: a scatter of willow and ash and the occasional stand of hardy beeches on the tops, and only abandoned shepherds' huts testify to more populous times. It's an area which in bad weather is invisible, but which, in good conditions, has a bleak beauty, little disturbed by tourism or modernization.Once this was sheep country, where shepherds from the dry summer lowlands of Quercy and Languedoc brought their flocks for the season. They were displaced in the nineteenth century by cows, raised for their more commercially exploitable production of milk and cheese, destined for the growing towns. And these in turn, as available labour shrank with the depopulation of the villages, ceded the pastures to beef cattle, as in the Cantal further north.
Pages in section ‘Aubrac’: Aumont-Aubrac and Aubrac, St-Urcize and Nasbinals, Laguiole, Marvejols.
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