About the Book
Walking a long distance path, one takes a step back in time to an age when pilgrims, pedlars, and packmen took to the road with trepidation, when walking was an audacious adventure rather than a healthy hobby, when progress was more often measured in leagues and miles than moral and technological achievement, and when the hardships of travel conferred on casual roadside encounters and staging post gatherings a convivial sense of common purpose and shared experience. Nowhere, with the possible exception of the Camino de Santiago, is this more marked than on the Sentier Cathare or Cathar Way, a 250 kilometre trail crossing the Languedoc region of southern France from the foothills of the Pyrenees to the shores of the Mediterranean. The risks and rigours of venturing abroad have dwindled, but the pleasures of the path remain the same.
Threading its way through dramatic gorges carved out by tumbling mountain torrents and traversing a patchwork of oak mantled hills, Alpine pastures, dense pine forests, lush meadows, rocky plateaux, and regimented vineland, the Sentier Cathare stitches together drovers' trails, logging tracks, smugglers' paths, and winding country lanes to link some of the principal sites associated with the dissident Christian movement from which it takes its name. Above all, we visit a succession of castles, each perched more improbably than the last on craggy peaks. This is a protean path, offering something for everybody, from the lover of wild places to the aficionado of old stones, from the hearty athlete looking for a challenge to the New Age mystic seeking enlightenment, but whatever your motive for embarking on such an adventure, walking the Sentier Cathare is a hugely rewarding experience, in the course of which petty cares slip away, replaced by a headful of mountains, meetings, and vistas, and walking becomes a way of being, so that come the end there is every chance that you will want only one thing, to turn round and do it all over again.
However, not everyone will want to embark on a long distance adventure, so as well as the standard linear route, we also feature ten circular walks exploring some of the most dramatic, recondite and beautiful sites on and around the Sentier Cathare, taking in out-of-the-way ruins, dizzying eyries, dramatic rockscapes, stunning waterfalls, picturesque paths, fine woodland, an illicit saltworks, and a natural maze that will delight children of all ages. These walks, which range from virtually effortless strolls to gruelling high mountain hikes, have been worked out with a view to giving visitors travelling by car an overview of everything the Sentier Cathare has to offer, plus a bit more besides. Nonetheless, many of them could be incorporated into the linear hike, either as a supplement to individual stages, or as a basis for extra days overnighting in one of the many superb Gites d'Etapes that punctuate the route. The main itinerary runs between Foix in the mountains and Port La Nouvelle on the coast, crossing two departements, the Ariege and the Aude, in twelve stages, and going through three distinct phases, each with its own character.
The first phase, corresponding to Stages 1 to 5, is dominated by the legendary Pog or Pech de Montsegur, a craggy peak topped by a spectacular castle and site of a notorious massacre that inspired one of the foundation myths of the Cathar phenomenon. This section features some of the finest mountain walking, much of it with a distinctly Pyrenean feel to it as we traverse high pastures and walk through a splendid gorge, the intimidating grandeur of which has lead to the widely circulated but mistaken notion that its name means The Gorge of Fear. The second phase, corresponding to Stages 5 to 9 and the southern variant (see Appendix A for details of the options), is a Pech de Bugarach section in which we contour round the culminating point of the Corbieres range, visiting three of the region's most famous castles, two more gorges, and a host of lovely villages. The third phase covers the rest of the walk as we cross the limestone plateaux and vineyards that precede the coast, experiencing en route the sort of landscape that has featured in countless French films and lured generations of visitors to the South of France.
