A New Adventure in France

The campsite we’re staying at looks out onto the Tarn river and, just a very short distance to our west, is the confluence of the Tarn and Garonne rivers. The Canal de Garonne also runs through the town. This canal, previously ‘le Canal Latéral de la Garonne, was built in the mid-19th century to bypass a section of the Garonne which was difficult for navigation. The canal is 174km long and joins up with the Canal du Midi at Toulouse and the Garonne river at Castets-en-Dorthe. The two canals are known together as le Canal d’Entre Deux-Mers as they created a navigable waterway between the Atlantic Ocean at Bordeaux and the Mediterranean at Sète. The canals were eventually overtaken by railways and nowadays they are purely for pleasure boat traffic and well known to us in the UK from the Rick Stein series.

• 

• 

Just a little way upriver from us we have the unusual sight of the canal crossing the Tarn via a brick arched aqueduct. The canal then continues along a tranquil and mostly tree-lined and shady route towards Toulouse. Alongside the canal runs a ‘Voie Verte’, the original canal towpath which is now exclusively for walkers and cyclists.

There are inevitably a number of locks along the canal and we noted that, unlike locks seen in the Lot where the boat users have to operate them, these locks are automatic so we were interested to see how they worked. As part of trying to expand our french language skills and vocabulary and to not just speak to each other, we try and engage every day with someone French. Our unsuspecting target on this day was an agent of the ‘Voies Navigables de France’ who was doing some work at one of the locks. He explained that as a boat approaches a lock there is a wire suspended over the river with a pole hanging down. The captain or his premier matelot turns the pole and, assuming there isn’t already a boat in the lock or on its way in, the lights by the lock turn green and the lock gates open. Once in the lock with gates both ends secured, there is a button to push to start the process of letting water in or out. Very obligingly, just after one of the locks we saw a boat initiating the process with the pole, although at the second attempt as he missed the pole first time and had to reverse his boat to grab hold of it.

As the locks are automatic there is no need now for lock-keepers but their houses, all in the same style, still exist and seem to be occupied. What a nice place to live on a sunny day.