Our House in Brittany...The Simplest of Pleasures...

In the UK we have a town centre house on the Sussex coast. Life around us is what you you might expect from our position... articulated trucks make TK Maxx, Sports Direct and McDonald's deliveries at unsocial hours, revellers walking home after late licence bars fold in the early hours... We've even had inebriated folk nestling down in the corner of our garden to sleep it off. This is probably one of the aspects that makes our house in Brittany such an oasis by comparison. There you can hear a pin drop during the day in lulls between bouts of birdsong or watching the circling Buzzards, the murmurations of Starlings - I think that's October... and, of course the 2 or 3 tractors a day which seem to be far more plentiful than cars. I even saw Peregrine Falcon parents teaching their offspring how to hunt, plummeting down at 100mph and then pulling out to ascend and do it again... then their kids having a go... A magical day. All are a welcome alternative to the domestic UK entertainment of rolling 24 hour (bad) news... back to back programmes about folk trying to decide whether to move to Australia or not. Others regretting their tattoos and body piercings and others wanting to display their own embarrassing bodies - all very graphically played out. Lovely! We don't have TV of any description in Brittany... French or English. Well, actually we do take a Humax recording box and have an old telly to watch stored programmes on... So that might be watching The Commitments for the 100th time or documentaries about Squeeze... Steve Winwood, Clapton, Hendrix or Springsteen...
As the antidote to all of the annoyances of home, our house in Brittany, was a rare find indeed, at a price that meant we just couldn't walk away without going into overdrive during the last few hours of a 3 day viewing trip...The last of three. So, possibly 15 or twenty properties were viewed before happening upon this one. Even getting the opportunity to view it had taken us by surprise. We got back to our digs to return a large scale map we had borrowed and to bid farewell before making a dash for the channel port and home. It was back in the days when the French system for UK residents making expeditionary sorties to buy property there hadn't really been catered for properly by an emerging agency infrastructure... Of course, 16 years down the line, things have changed radically.

At the end of what we thought was a well planned trip that had gone ragged toward the end, we had found our house more by chance than by design. The house had been lived in 3 years earlier by a lone elderly lady, Madame LeRoy, unable to tend to the three quarter acre garden for perhaps another 7 years before moving to a nursing home, so it was massively overgrown.  A barn, just 25 metres from the house, was completely invisible, overgrown with Ivy, its roof slate covering punctured by Elder saplings. It was very much more akin to a day in the undergrowth with Davy Crockett or Jacques Cartier than viewing a property via Right Move or Zoopla.  So Rick (our B and B host) asked, when he opened his door to us for the last time... "Well? What was it like?" - "Brilliant" I said... we had both agreed as we drove back to his place... We had 'buzzed' about the prospect of maybe buying something with so much potential. "There was a window open to what we now know as the kitchen, so we climbed in and had a look round"...
"Amazing! What are you going to do then?" What we actually did was attach our video camera to Rick and Lynne's TV and watch our antics as we viewed and as we overcame the undergrowth and trotted in blind panic through the house which, to all intents and purposes, could have been occupied by someone with a shotgun and an intent to use it! We had already had a similar experience further south during an earlier trip...more later probably. It looked very much like a Marie Celeste situation where, in the dining room, there was a card table canted over on one corner where a leg had given in to woodworm - a chess board and playing pieces scattered on the floor. The camera careered up a rickety barn style staircase to the first floor - into a room sectioned into two. The communicating door creaked as `I pushed it open - camera in hand - to reveal two single mattresses on bare wooden floorboards... a hurricane lamp between them and crocheted woollen blankets cast aside by the last occupants. Who, we wondered, had been here? Squatters? Maybe, but it looked too tidy for that... although the window was open. Grandkids of the last owner enjoying an end of exams break at "Gran's old house"? More than likely, "yes", but there was none of the teenage detritus, beer cans, food packaging... no evidence of anyone skinning up. The rapid and rickety tour scuttled on through a door and up a spiral staircase to a loft where oak boards roughly laid looked anything but of weight bearing capacity... Thus the video camera zoomed shakily and speedily around the house and garden into and out of the barns suggesting quite definitely a feeling that we felt we shouldn't have been there at all. And it clunked to black and clipped to silence to leave just the rapid breath, beating chest and scuffling at our car door out in the lane. The video at an end, Rick said... "Well that's it then! You can send the Notaire a fax (ahh those were the days) and offer the asking price and... It'll be yours!"

And so it has become. And since that time, 16 years ago, we have enjoyed snatches of very special quality time at Le Roz, relaxing (well sometimes) renovating, gardening, walking, cycling, rambling, foraging for wood for the woodburners, sight-seeing... exploring, visiting agents... finding new ones...sampling restaurants, running our websites and very much enjoying life!

Chris Slade
Drone Photography: Benn Slade

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