23 February 2020

The Sequoia, the Hamlet, and the Vineyard

I've been sitting here for the last 90 minutes looking at Google Maps and Google Earth. On the site with a list of the thousands of giant sequoia trees in France, one is listed as being in Saint-Aignan and another in our village, which borders on Saint-Aignan. I think that the same tree has been listed twice — there's just one, and I can see it on Google Maps street view. It seems to be mostly hidden by trees all around it, but it is taller than those other trees. I'll try to go take a photo on the next clear day we have.

In this image, north is on the left and south is on the right.

Meanwhile, while looking at Maps and Earth, I captured these images of our hamlet and the vineyard that we live in. There are nine houses in the hamlet — you can count them. You can clearly see our back yard, our hedge along the road, and our vegetable garden in, basically, the center of the image. The paved road ends at the western edge of our hamlet and the gravel road continues out through the vines.


And here's a map that shows the vineyard, with our hamlet on the right side of the image and on the left side the end of the gravel road that runs through the vines. The distance from the hamlet to the end of the road is just over a kilometer — about four thousand feet. There are two other hamlets in the image, one to the north and one to the south, both on paved roads that meet the end of the gravel vineyard road. Enlarge the maps by clicking or tapping on them for a more detailed view.

5 comments:

  1. These images are so interesting...There seem to be more trees between your house and the vineyard than I had realized.

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  2. There's a long, narrow strip of wooded land between our property and the vineyard property north of us.

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  3. I guess those swathes of trees separating the three hamlets are along small creeks, tributaries of the Cher river, the northern hamlet being part of Mareuil proper?

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    1. South of us is la rouère [rivière] de l'Aulne (Alder Creek). North of us is another creek (stream) without a name, as far as I can tell. The area downstream from the hamlet north of us is called Les Sables ("The Sands"), and maybe that is the name of the creek too. Mareuil proper (le bourg —"the burg" or [down]town) is some distance north and west of Les Sables. Locally, these hamlets are called villages, as opposed to le bourg or l'agglomération (the built-up area, which is less rural than the rest of the commune. The municipality called Mareuil covers 12 mi² of territory, and encompasses quite a few villages like ours.

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  4. I got a new laptop and logged into gmail. Looks like I can leave comments again, at least from my new computer.

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