LES VERGERS TALLEVENDE

Translates literally as “The Orchards Tallevende”.

 

“Tallevende” is from the commune or parish that the orchards are in - St. Germain de Tallevende la Lande Vaumont”. This shares with two other villages the dubious distinction of having the longest village name in France

 

For a long time I have had a fancy for French cider apples. They have so many evocative names; Egyptia, Faro, Grouin d’Ane, Tête de Brebis etc. There are far more French varieties than there are English ones and besides, in cider terms, the English are the junior partners. Many of our varieties have been liberated from France, some have had a change of name whilst others are still in their French guise such as Michelin, Dabinett and Abondance.

 

Persuading English cider aficionados to embrace French cider or cider apple varieties has been a thankless task so far. In Herefordshire anything at all from outside the county, let alone from outside the country, is suspect. The positive outcome of this has been that the more ingrown toenails I have encountered, the more determined I have become, not just to be a “National” collection but, better still, to become “International”.

 

An early idea was to plant our THIRD ORCHARD up with a French Collection. On  reflection  this  seemed  rather  impolite towards French

 

 

 

 

 

Le Patron

cousins and their cider apples. A better idea seemed to be that the principal collection of French apples should be in France.

Some of my erstwhile friends have pointed to another explanation. In a lazy  internet  moment  I  did come across the amazing fact that nobody had considered buying the car number plate C1 DRE from the Swansea repository of the DVLC. The English version, C1 DER, I had been informed,

 

 

had a value greater than £20,000 and I had found C1 DRE at an asking price of less than £1,000. As a matter of form the DVLA clerk asked me why I chose that particular plate. I asked in reply whether anybody in his organisation spoke French.

C1 DRE is every bit as good as C1 DER – people in Herefordshire just think that I am dyslexic.

 

Nevertheless the idea of a French orchard was no more than a simmer until, by chance, I came across the French eBay site on the internet. Fate slipped into a higher gear when, having typed in “cidre” no less, up came a 1930’s circular press owned from new by a family near Rouen. A series of emails in French and broken French generated such an apparent friendship that soon I had virtually signed the French family up to come to Tidnor and show us English how cider was made in Normandy. The maggot in the core turned out to be that I was too mean with my bidding and consequently lost the prize. The generated entente cordiale fizzled away as quickly as it had been fermented.

 

But the seed was sown and before long another press, this time near Compiègne in Picardy, succumbed to my parsimonious bidding.

 

Although the cost of the press itself was fairly modest the collection expenses were something not to be sneezed at. Trailers on ferries and overnight hotels soon mount up to a small fortune and, in an attempt to achieve money’s worth, I suggested to Anna, my partner (and now Company Secretary) that we detoured to spend a couple of days in Normandy.

 

British eBay showed up only one advertisement for B & B accommodation in the region and that was in a village near Vire in Calvados, Basse Normandie. The proprietor was a Londoner and, as Londoners often are, he was obliging and resourceful and wanted to know my business. I told him that I was in the market for orchard land, smugly imagining that he could put that in his pipe and smoke it. But I was to be surprised, before Anna and I rolled up with C1 DRE and trailer at the pretty village of Montechamp our host had an English speaking estate agent and six properties lined up for us to see.

 

In France, any mention of “English” in the same sentence as “property” tends to ignite imaginations and send prices doubling. Nothing we saw was suitable anyway. What could we expect at a moment’s notice as it were? Even if the prices had been reasonable I was determined not to “marry” our beautiful orchards at Tidnor with a set of ugly French sisters. I had no expectation whatsoever of finding any land on this path finding visit.

 

After a day spent looking at land we determined that our second and last day should include an excursion to Granville on the coast opposite our Channel Islands. Our resourceful Londoner suggested that we might call in to see a couple that he knew along the way. They had expressed an intention to sell some of their forty or so acres although he knew that they were looking for “top dollar”.

 

Anna and I were inclined to ignore the invitation but when we saw that the people lived almost directly on the route from Vire to Granville we agreed to make the necessary small diversion. Vaughn and Mig Bird were running a 4 x 4 adventure experience using a motley collection of old and very old Land Rovers of every description. They came up with the idea of renting me some land. I would plant my trees and they would run their Land Rovers through the orchards on well defined tracks………Non, Merci, Au Revoir.

 

Vaughn obligingly showed us the whole of his estate which was situated in sight of the magnificent recreational park of Lac Dathée, with its magnificent countryside facilities including an 18 hole golf course nearing completion. Right at the end we came to a group of small fields on a hogsback with striking views for miles and miles in three directions; 10 acres. Would I like to buy it? The rest is history, or rather, LES VERGERS TALLEVENDE.

 

On the French charts the land is made up of six separate pieces. The smallest, about half an acre or less, was a tightly bunched copse of trees. The rest of the land was arable or pasture.

 

 

Job Done  -  the copse is in the background

Vaughn gravely pointed the copse out to me and told me a story of 1944/5 and a British Mosquito fighter/bomber caught in enemy fire when strafing the German High Command H.Q. At Vire.  Plummeting earthwards the navigator

managed to escape the plane and operate his parachute whilst the pilot was trapped in his doomed machine. True to his Anglo-Saxon roots, the brave man had the presence of mind to salute his comrade in the last remaining seconds of his life. This explained the depression in the land in which the trees had been allowed to grow undisturbed because the French Government had had a protection order placed on the site.

 

Of course, that fired my imagination and on my return to the U.K. I had the opportunity to visit the R.A.F. Museum at Hendon only to find that “the researcher” was away on holiday. Eventually, through emails, the people at Hendon were genuinely apologetic at having drawn a blank. They needed more information. I tried Vaughn and Mig but they were not living the rural idyll in remotest France for nothing.

 

In the meantime I had the magnificent idea of marking the crash site with a garland or wreath of English cider apple trees as a living monument to the brave pilot. Accordingly I ordered 25 prime specimens from Bulmers for collection in February 2008.

 

We did have an experience on the way back to Blighty. Outside the toll booth off the motorway outside Boulogne had collected a grim force of Douaniers; nine unsmiling men and one woman in smart combat outfits complete with formidable guns. Seeing that I was pulling a trailer and as their raison d’être was contraband, I was motioned over to the side with a gesture that bore no arguing with. Half a dozen turned to face me and weigh up the possibilities; me, Anna, our boot and better still, the trailer behind. The leader’s eyes reached our number plate and I watched him perform a double-take. Sure that he was not seeing things he nudged his immediate companion and pointed out his find. He too looked twice. Then they both looked at me and burst out laughing. I could not believe it. Then, to cap it all, they paid me the not insignificant compliment of speaking to me in pretty good English.

 

“And what, Monsieur, do you ‘ave in the trailer?”

 

“A cider press, of course.” What else?

 

That set them off again.

 

In August 2007 Anna and I made the journey to the Notaire’s office in Vire to sign the papers and pay the money over for the land – the whole process had taken a very relaxed eight months. Before the ceremonial signings we popped along to the land and I ambled over to the crash site copse to pay my respects (or confirm my suspicions).

 

In that preceding eight months I had had sets of papers arrive from the Notaire showing the nature of the six pieces that made up the whole. The piece with the copse had a name – “Blanc Rocher” – White Rocks – and although there was no way of telling, I guessed that it might have had that name since before 1944.

 

Sure enough, as I pushed my way through the natural hedge that that grown up around the perimeter of the copse, I had to grab out to stop myself falling thirty or so feet into a pond glistening far below. Even an idiot could work out from there that it would have needed many squadrons of atom bomb carrying dive bombers to have created a crater of that size in hard quartz rock (blanc rocher). Nevertheless, an hour later, I was signing up with alacrity in front of the Notaire, Anna, Vaughn and Mig.

 

Why was Blanc Rocher a protected area? Anna and I solved that with a visit to the Mairie in the village of St. Germain de Tallevende la Lande Vaumont. After consulting many old maps and dossiers, his very obliging secretary came up with the solution. Some wandering French Government Official had been given the brief to scour the countryside for “monuments” or places of interest. Why not a copse growing out of an old road stone quarry?

 

What were we to do with the 25 trees being weaned in the Bulmer nursery? Plant them of course - at Les Vergers Tallevende in February 2008 in memory of a good story.