It is our last day in Sarlat la Caneda….Rosie and The Operator are making one last trip out and about….a journey to Rouffignac, forty mins down the road, to have a look at some ancient Stone Age Cave drawings….deep in the bowels of a cave.
This is one of the largest caves in the region, Rouffignac is a development of about eight kilometres of galleries which is unusually huge in this area. The whole limestone cave network was hollowed out by rivers, which have now been dry for over 3 million years.
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We boarded an electric train which runs on a track through the caves, this controls the amount of visitors and stops them from touching the walls by limiting movement, hence protecting the antiquities. A commentary is given (in French only), Rosie hired an ipad which gave an English explanation of the sites for the foreigners. It was cold in the caves, it smelt musty and all light was gone in a matter of seconds as we trundled into the gloom, a light from the train lit our way making it very ghostly and eerie. Sometimes we were in a narrow passageway, sometimes the light just disappeared into nothingness so you knew you were in a huge cavern. The train would stop at different pictures and drawings , they would shine the light on the relevant engravings or drawings, Rosie would check her ipad explanation, the guide would gabble in French, it worked well.
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Cave bears were probably the first to use these caverns. You can see claw marks on the walls and ceilings and bear dens in the clay ground of some of the galleries. The cave bears were long gone before humans found this site however.
Mammoth pictures are the main theme in Rouffignac, which is very unusual, as most of the the other caves in the area mainly depict horses and bison…of the 350 caves in Europe which have drawings in them, Rouffignac has about a third of all mammoth pictures…hence its moniker ‘Cave of a Hundred Mammoths’. Even more odd is that mammoths were rarely seen in this area of France…….
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This is an engraving of the ‘patriarch’, one of the most spectacular among the numerous mammoth representations in the cave. It shows an elderly animal (can tell age by the tusks length) and is a good example of Rouffignac art, you can see how the artist has used a nodule in the wall for an eye. There also looks to be claw marks through the picture….these are human finger trailings…..making gouges in the limestone.
Besides engraving, black line drawing is the second technique used by the artists of Rouffignac. Using carbon from fires, the artists inscribed these lines onto the walls. Unfortunately so did modern man….ancient graffiti from anywhere from the 15th – 18th century is on the ceilings of the caves too. Intrepid explorers back in the day came into the caves with their candles and wrote their names in smoke soot from the candle flames on the ceilings….another form of cave art.
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We got off the train in the final cavern of the tour, one kilometre inside the caves, all of these blackened line drawings were on the ceiling, back in the day 14,000 years ago this cave was only one metre deep, the painters lay on their backs and did their drawings on the ceiling. It has been made deeper today so we can stand and look at the ceiling. Rosie touched the wall in the dark…she couldn’t believe how cold and damp it was…and how soft it was…she got a little bit of ancient wall under her fingernails…it would be pretty easy to make those finger marks on the wall.
Trundling back to the cave entrance, the guide said that Stone Age man did not live deep in the caves, they were seasonally itinerant and only lived in the entrance of the caves. It makes you wonder why they would venture so deep into the pitch black caves with nothing but a burning torch for abit of light and draw pictures…
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It was very chilly in the caves and it was nice to be outdoors in the sun again. We drove back to Sarlat for some lunch then ventured to the Bar Tabac to buy and read the only English paper on offer…Rosie does not know what is going on in the world….and the Daily Mail is not really a newspaper, just abit of tabloid rubbish really, but it was nice to sit and look at something.
We repacked our bags all ready to leave Sarlat bright and early in the morning, we had a five and a half hour journey ahead of us to Paris. Our final destination for two nights before we start heading for home….plus, we also had a dinner date to look forward to in Paris….
