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The Guardian
29-07-2025
- The Guardian
Alpine adventures: fairytale hiking in the hidden French Alps
The baguette was fresh from the boulangerie that morning, a perfect fusion of airy lightness and crackled crust. The cheese – a nutty, golden gruyère – we'd bought from Pierre: we hadn't expected to hike past a human, let alone a fromagerie, in the teeny hillside hamlet of Rouet, and it had taken a while to rouse the cheesemaker from within his thick farmhouse walls. But thankfully we'd persevered. Because now we were resting in a valley of pine and pasture with the finest sandwich we'd ever eaten. Just two ingredients. Three, if you counted the mountain air. As lunches go, it was deliciously simple. But then, so was this trip, plainly called 'Hiking in the French Alps' on the website. The name had struck me as so unimaginative I was perversely intrigued; now it seemed that Macs Adventure – organisers of this self-guided walk in the Queyras region – were just being admirably to the point. Yes, Queyras. I hadn't heard of it either. Bordered to the north and east by Italy, barricaded by a phalanx of 3,000-metre peaks, this regional natural park might be the least-discovered – and the Frenchest – corner of the Alps. Queyras only really entered the national consciousness in 1957, after disastrous floods made it briefly headline news. Tourism filtered in. But it remains little known to outsiders, and centuries of undisturbed agriculture and isolation mean its rural character has been preserved. Even now Queyras takes some effort to reach. Either you take the narrow, hair-pinning road through the gorges of the Guil River from Guillestre. Or you drive over the 2,361-metre Col d'Izoard (from Briançon) or the 2,744-metre Col Agnel (from Italy), both of which periodically test the thighs of Tour de France riders, and both of which close over winter, all but cutting Queyras off from the rest of the world. Making the most of Macs Adventure's collaboration with the no-fly specialists Byway, my husband and I travelled as close as we could by train. We overnighted in Paris, whizzed down to south-east France, then chugged more slowly towards Montdauphin-Guillestre, where a Vauban hilltop fort surveils a strategic meeting of valleys. Finally, we boarded the end-of-day school bus, joining children inured to the spectacular views to squeeze up the valley to Ceillac, gateway to the natural park. The plan from here was to spend six days hiking a circular route that promised big, satisfying climbs but no technical terrain (and no shared dorms or privation). Covering up to 12 miles each day – and walking for an average of six hours – we'd use parts of the GR58 (the grande randonnée that circuits Queyras) as well as other trails to roam between traditional villages. We'd eat cheese, gaze over lakes and mountains, and generally revel in a region that, reputedly, has 300 days of sunshine a year and as many species of flowers as it does people (about 2,500 of both). On day one this meant walking from Ceillac to Saint-Véran, over the Col des Estronques (2,651 metres). It was a fine start, under blue September skies – we'd come at the end of the hiking season (the trip runs June to mid-September), when crocuses still fleck the meadows and houseleeks hang on higher up, but the bilberry bushes are beginning to blaze in fall-fiery colours and there's a sense of change in the air. We joined a light stream of other walkers, progressing up the valley via lonely farmsteads and meadows bouncing with crickets. Noisy choughs and a boisterous breeze welcomed us to the pass itself; 100 vertical metres more took us to the lookout of Tête de Jacquette, where we felt like monarchs of this mountain realm. These may not have been the very biggest Alps – few peaks sported any snow – but they rippled every which way, great waves of limestone, dolomite, gabbro and schist. From the col we dropped down through arolla pine and larch to Saint-Véran. At 2,042 metres, it claims to be the highest village in Europe. It's also a snapshot of Alpine life before the modern world seeped in. The oldest house, built in traditional Saint-Véran style, dates to 1641 and is now the Soum Museum; the ground floor, with its half-metre-thick stone walls, is where animals and families would sleep together for warmth. The upper floors, built from tree trunks, were used to keep hay, barley and rye; the grains were made into coarse loaves that would last all winter, baked in the communal oven. That enormous village oven is still fired up a few times a year, for festivals. But I was pleased to be fed at Hotel le Grand Tétras ('Capercaillie') instead. Here, we feasted on gratin d'oreilles d'âne (literally 'donkey's ears', actually a delicious spinach lasagne) and stayed in a simple room with a five-star view to the opposite peaks. Sign up to The Traveller Get travel inspiration, featured trips and local tips for your next break, as well as the latest deals from Guardian Holidays after newsletter promotion After this, our days settled into a familiar pattern. We'd set off after breakfast to buy picnic supplies. We'd hike up through butterfly-wafted green. We'd cross a pass, go by a lake or reach a panoramic ridge. Then we'd descend through forest or towards an icy river. By evening we'd be ensconced in a pretty village, drinking reasonably priced wine, with a multicourse meal or an indulgent fondue. The air was always fresh, the trails always joyful, the crowds largely thin. 'It's busy here mid-July to mid-September,' said Christophe Delhaise Ramond, the owner of a gîte in Abriès where we stayed one night, as he poured us mélèze (larch) liqueurs while we pored over maps. Then he reconsidered: 'But there are only around 2,000 tourist beds in the park, so it's never that bad.' It's thanks to Christophe that we made a slight detour the following day. As planned, we climbed up to 2,583-metre Lac Grand Laus, a lake so brilliantly blue-green it seemed a bit of the Mediterranean had got lost in the mountains. It was spectacular, but as crowded as we'd seen anywhere in Queyras. So, on Christophe's suggestion, we continued to climb, steeply, up to the Col du Petit Malrif, where tenacious flowers popped through the rocks and the views were immense, reaching to snow-licked peaks. From here, we looped back, via two smaller, but no less Mediterranean, tarns, where there were no other people. At the second we flopped down in the cotton grass and chewed baguettes stuffed with bleu de queyras. We stayed there long after the baguettes were gone, listening to the water burbling in the wind. Finally, we headed on, descending via a rocky cleft. Soon we emerged on a track so swirled by puffs of silken thistledown it was as if we were hiking in Fairyland. But no, we were still just hiking in the French Alps – albeit a particularly magical bit. The trip was provided by Macs Adventure and Byway,; the seven-night self-guided Hiking in the French Alps trip costs from £1,150pp half-board. Transport was provided by Byway, which can book return trains from London to Montdauphin-Guillestre, plus a night in Paris in each direction, from £734pp
Times
14-05-2025
- Times
Macron is wrong — the best baguette is a binned baguette
To France, where campaigners are calling for half-size baguettes to become the norm, on the grounds that too much goes to waste. With the slogan 'Une demie, ça suffit' (half is enough), a food waste app, Too Good to Go, has suggested that les Français ask their boulanger to bake them half a baguette, a sensible change to working practices greeted by French bakers with all the calm acquiescence we associate with French farmers and French air traffic controllers in August. However, amid the howls of Gallic outrage, we are in danger of missing the point: the best baguette is a binned baguette and six out of ten French people admit to doing just that with at least part of it. But my top tip after you've been to the boulangerie and carried your baguette home is to feed it to the birds and have a croissant instead. Or not, because croissants are overrated too, and don't get me started on brioche, or pain complet, which tastes like doormats, or pain de mie, the runt of the litter and the ideal choice for what, exactly? You're never at a loss with a poppy seed bloomer, but pain de mie? Naturally, a country that takes itself so seriously that it polices its own language, tries also to police its own bread. La vraie baguette has to be 55 to 65cm long and weigh 250 to 300g, because otherwise the sky will fall in or it might be a ficelle, not a baguette, so watch out for the language police. President Macron once said that baguettes are '250 grams of magic and perfection in our daily lives', which shows how much he knows. Unesco has added baguettes to a list of the world's 'intangible cultural heritage', alongside Syrian soap and Estonian mash, a clear disservice to Syrian soap and Estonian mash. • Is French food really the best in the world? Yet the popularity of this sorry attempt at baking is fuelled by a romantic myth that you'll break off a chunk and eat it with camembert, in the perfect picnic spot. There will be a river meandering close by and no wasps. How many of us can say that we have ever, even once, achieved that? Is it worth persevering with what should, by any reasonable measure, be a doomed form of carbs on the off-chance that we might? Baguettes are stale by the time you've left the shop. You're more likely to eat them sitting in a traffic jam on the autoroute du Soleil than a water meadow in the Dordogne, and the kids will be bored witless in both. They are an inefficient shape. They taste of cotton wool and crust, compared to, say, a poppy seed bloomer, which tastes of poppy seeds and loveliness. And lest the French feel singled out, the same applies to Italian bread. Has anyone ever truly enjoyed a grissini? Foccacia's all very well, but no one would care if they never ate it again. Anything served on ciabatta would be better off not, and that crispy poppadom thing, pane carasau? No. Nor is it just a European thing, because anything baked with yeast in America is instantly suspect. I love America. Some of my best friends are American. But you just can't trust a country that invented waffles and serves biscuits with gravy. And the darkest and most important truth about this most important of subjects isn't the length of baguettes in France, it's the ubiquity of sourdough in England. You can't buy anything that isn't sourdough any more. A baguette isn't any less pointless for making it sourdough and a muffin is not improved by it. Where have all the good, plain bloomers gone? To the barricades, citizens, and let us abolish all this fancy foreign sourdough. Unless it's too hot. Or raining. Or August. An email arrives from someone senior and apologetic at M&S, admitting that in its recent hack, 'some personal customer data has been taken … this could include contact details, date of birth and online order history'. There is, she adds, 'no evidence that it has been shared', perhaps showing a slight naivety about what hacking is for. Now, hacking and its co-defendant, scamming, are obviously very bad things, a modern curse with terrible consequences and hapless victims. But the M&S hackers will now be armed with knowledge of my bra size and that I recently bought a hair clip and returned a light fitting. Was it worth it, I asked a friend. 'Yes,' she replied. 'That's invaluable information, if you're a plastic surgeon performing breast reductions in a well-lit hair salon.' • Marks & Spencer shuts out WFH staff after cyberattack Lucy Worsley, promoting her new Lady Swindlers podcast, has said, 'We still recognise those situations where women feel they have to marry for money.' I think her point is that she feels sorry for such women, but honestly, Lucy? Would that I had. I'm halfway through doing up a house. I spend my days adding up columns of figures wrong and my nights worrying about it. I count plug sockets, not sheep, and wonder if, perhaps, electricity is overrated, because do you have any idea how much nice light switches cost? Off the top of my head, I'm fairly sure that my relationship history isn't replete with chances to marry money, but is it too late? And could he be persuaded to invest in some plugs? • Lucy Worsley interview: 'I don't mind sexist trolls — they can just get on with it'
