Category: Notes
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While We Were Away…
After a month wandering around France, visiting gardens, markets, wineries and eating far too much excellent food, I arrived home expecting to find the vegetable garden quietly waiting for me. The rabbits had other ideas. It appears that during our absence the local rabbit population decided that Rough Cut Garden was operating as a free…
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Eat Fresh. Eat Simply.
One of the things that struck me most during our time in France was not the sophistication of the food, but its simplicity. Before travelling, it is easy to imagine that French dining is all white tablecloths, elaborate sauces and chefs performing culinary magic behind kitchen doors. Certainly, those places exist, but what we found…
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A Quiet Farewell in Paris
After a month travelling through France, our final stop was Paris. Ordinarily that sentence would be the start of a whirlwind account of museums, monuments, galleries and long days spent walking the city. Instead, it became something rather different. By the time we arrived, we were simply ready to slow down. The previous month had…
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Learning to Slow Down in Saint-Étienne-de-Lescattes
After a week aboard the Canal du Midi, we traded our floating home for a stone farmhouse near the tiny hamlet of Saint-Étienne-de-Lescattes in the hills of Occitanie. If you’ve never heard of Saint-Étienne-de-Lescattes, don’t worry. Neither had I. It’s one of those places that barely registers on a map, surrounded by vineyards, rolling countryside…
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Canal du Midi: Expectations, Reality and a Lesson in Slowing Down
When we booked a week on the Canal du Midi, I had a fairly clear picture in my head of what it would be like. The brochures showed boats gliding through tunnels of shady trees, with dappled sunlight on the water and picturesque villages appearing every few kilometres. In many ways, that’s exactly what we…
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A Quick Update from France
If you’ve been wondering why things have gone a little quiet lately, there’s a good reason. The plan had been to spend some time travelling through southern France while still keeping up with writing and posting. As it turned out, the weather had other ideas. During our week on the Canal du Midi the heat…
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Road food
One of the great Australian traditions is road food. Long highway. Servo lights. Hot box glowing in the corner. Pies. Sausage rolls. Fried chicken. Battered savs. Twisties. A Coke that somehow tastes better somewhere west of nowhere. It’s not elegant, but it is deeply satisfying. So naturally, in France, I went looking for the equivalent.…
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The Geology Around Sète – Sea, Limestone and Lagoons
Sète sits on one of the most distinctive stretches of the French Mediterranean coast – a place where hard limestone hills meet shifting sand barriers, salt lagoons and the open sea. For somebody with a geology background, it is a fascinating landscape because almost every part of it tells a different story about changing sea…
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Limestone, Light and landscape around Nice
One of the things that becomes impossible to ignore travelling through southern France is that the landscape itself feels sculpted. The cliffs, terraces, folded hillsides and pale stone villages all seem tied together. The reason is geology. Around Nice and much of Provence, the dominant rocks are ancient limestones formed in warm tropical seas roughly 70 to…
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Lunch and Art at Château La Coste
Today at Château La Coste in Provence felt like one of those places where food, landscape and art all become part of the same experience. Before lunch we spent time walking through the grounds looking at the outdoor artworks integrated into the vineyards and hillsides. The standout for me was the Oak Room by Andy…
Rough Cut Kitchen 