The province of Aude in the Languedoc in the South of France is beautiful, wild and rugged, with soaring mountains and dense forests, rich red soil and extensive vineyards, picturesque villagesand Cathar castles perched like eagles' nests on the tops of high mountains.
It is a remote and peaceful land, bathed in warm sunshine, and a visitor could easily feel that it has always been so. However, in the 13 th century, this lovely countryside was the scene of one of the cruellest and most shameful events in the history of the Catholic Church, and one for which it has only recently apologised - the Albigensian Crusade, in which tens of thousands of people were tortured, burned and massacred for their beliefs. They called themselves Cathars (meaning 'pure') the Church called them Arians, Albigensians and heretics. Their only crime was to refuse to submit to the orthodoxy of the Roman Church and their punishment was total annihilation. There are no Cathars today, but their memory remains vividly alive in the folklore and language of the region, a language called Occitan. They left nothing but some texts, and those amazing castles.
Take a six days' hike along a waymarked path called the Sentier des Cathares or the Way of the Cathars. It takes in a variety of scenery - forest, mountain, gorge, village, river as well as a hard climb up to two or three of the hilltop castles. Your accommodation will be in 'gîtes' or farmhouses, varying in comfort from the fairly basic to the comfortable, and providing an evening meal, breakfast and a packed lunch.
Spend the first night near the tiny hamlet of Bouriège, south of Carcassonne , and set out the next morning to walk through a limestone landscape, into the valley of the Aude River . Follow this with a steep climb up to the hilltop village of Rennes-le-Chateau, a tiny place, but one with a curious mystery.
About 100 years ago, the parish priest was renovating the church, and discovered mysterious encoded parchments inside a pillar. He took these to his superiors, who sent him to Paris , where he met with delegates from the Vatican and members of the nobility of Europe . When he returned to Rennes-le-Chateau, he had changed completely. He started spending money on a vast scale, in carrying out elaborate building projects, redecorating the Church in a most bizarre and grotesque fashion and building a library. Yet he never disclosed the source of his wealth, and when he died, he was revealed to be penniless.
The locals today have various theories - that he discovered the Treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem , or a secret so detrimental to the history of the Catholic Church that he blackmailed the Vatican with it, and was paid to keep quiet. Others say that he also secretly became a Cathar. Whatever the truth, the source of his wealth remains to this day a mystery.
From Rennes-le-Chateau the view is spectacular - in the distance the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees rise above the nearer Corbière Mountains . A few miles away, the isolated peak of Pech de Bugarach rises sheer from the plain to a height of 1,230 metres, while below you stretch miles of vineyards, their soil a rich red colour. Here and there lie small villages with their red tiled roofs and yellowish stone walls.
If youre fit, take a climb to the top of the Pech de Bugarach. In summer itll be hot, and the track steep, but on the lower slopes it zig-zags through forest, which provides some welcome shade. Higher up, the going is more difficult, and youll have to over rocky outcrops for the last few hundred metres. At last, four hours after you start, you reach the summit, and the amazing views in all directions will have been well worth the effort.
A steep two-hour descent will bring you to the hamlet of Le Linas, where youll probably need to refill your water bottles at the village pump.
Next morning, walk through the beautiful Gorges de Galamus, a steep-sided ravine cut by the river Agly through the limestone landscape typical of the region. The road winds its way through the gorge about halfway up from the river at the bottom to the cliff at the top, and in places cuts through the rock so that the ceiling overhangs you with a clearance of only about 3 metres. As you round a bend, youll see a tiny hermitage carved into the rock, below the road but above the highest level the river can reach during a flood. Later your path brings you upward through scrubland to emerge in a valley with breathtaking views of two of the most important Cathar Castles - Quéribus and Peyrepertuse, perched like fortresses on the highest ridges.
After a nights rest, take the steep, narrow path to Peyrepertuse, a castle shaped like the prow of a ship, running along the top of an 800m high crag. From below it looks almost inaccessible, and it is easy to see how it was never besieged during the Albigensian Crusade. It fell, however, to French forces in 1240, through negotiation rather than armed conflict, and was then used as a base to harass the remaining Cathars in the region.
On the sixth day, climb up to another castle - Termes - near the village of the same name. It had held out boldly against Simon de Montfort in 1210, eventually succumbing for lack of water. 140 Cathars were burned here. In Villerouge-Termenès, the next stop, the castle has been recently restored, and houses an audio-visual exhibition telling the story of Guillaume Bélibaste, the last of the Cathars to be tried by the Inquisition; he was captured and burned alive here in 1321.
It is fitting to finish your trek in a village where a period of history also ended. Youll have walked about 100 kms in the six days, through a variety of scenery, visited numerous villages and talked to some of the villagers. Youll also learn a little about a religion relatively unknown in modern times, but which in its various forms had dominated much of southern Europe in the Middle Ages. In an era of violence it preached peace and tolerance, and in this land of Occitania its memory lives on in those lofty memorials to those who died so cruelly for their beliefs.
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