There was a conference, as you may have heard, and since then things have been unusually sociable in my life, so I’ve had less time to write blog for all the right reasons. That said, I am now really quite far behind with posts, so I’m going to try and squeeze things out faster for the summer. The first target obviously has to be my April trip to Catalonia, which we left on the way back from l’Esquerda with me demanding you all sing the praises of Imma Ollich. This must now continue, as you may remember that I’d met la Professora Ollich solely because of not having been able to get where I actually wanted to go. I explained this to her in the course of the next day’s conversation, and before I’d got much further it had been settled, to my grateful surprise, that she would take me, or rather get her research assistant, a quite wonderfully practical student of Iberian Celts, to drive us all out there. And so we did, early start so that as we approached the target area there was still mist over the Panta de Sau…
It looks incredible, but it’s only looked that way for a short time, which was a continual problem to me with this trip. What you have there is a reservoir that was created in 1962 by damming further down the river, and there are two or three villages that Sant Pere de Casserres owned under that water, in drowned ruins. Mind you, the need for the reservoir is demonstrated by the fact that only a few years ago things got so dry in the area that one could go on foot into one of the drowned churches… (A fantastically graphic slideshow here.) It’s just that this looks timeless but actually the landscape my subject people had to work in was rather different. Anyway. We had two distinct aims in this trip, one for me to see the monastery, and one for Professora Ollich to look at some ruins that await proper study on the way, and this means lots of pictures—there are ninety in the directory from this trip, most of which I’ll spare you—so I will put the rest of the post behind a cut, with this taster to give you an idea of the kind of thing that lies beneath…
Sant Pere de Casserres viewed from the visitor centre
A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe 