Le Haras du Pin in Normandy

One of the most interesting and memorable things we saw while we were in the Perche region of lower Normandy in August was a horse event. Actually, we almost didn't go. Marie had enthusiastically recommended it, but Evelyn, who really wanted to go too, thought it might be a little too far and too long for me and Lewis. Circumstances combined to get us there, fortunately.

« Un haras » is a horse breeding and training facility. Dating back to the early 1700s, the Haras du Pin the oldest of the 20 existing horse breeding facilities in France. It's always been owned by the French government, and Louis XIV and XV were instrumental in its creation. The haras sits on a 25,000 acre property north of Alençon and owns forty stallions of various breeds.

Before the show started, I noticed this stereotypically French face in the crowd.

I have to admit that I wasn't convinced the show was a good way to spend one of our three afternoons in the region. Getting to the village, Le Pin-au-Haras, on winding little roads took us about an hour from Bellême, where we had had lunch, and we arrived without a minute to spare for the three o'clock show. Before setting out, we had telephoned a horse farmer near Mortagne who advertised guided tours of his "ranch," but he was on vacation until early September. If he had been there, we would have done that instead.

The château at the Haras du Pin equestrian center and, on the right, the crowd gathered for the spectacle

The event at the Hara du Pin was a spectacle that's held every Thursday afternoon, at least during the summer season. A crowd gathers in the big courtyard between the haras stables and the château on the south end of the space. The spectators are very close to the horses as they prance and trot by — and there are dozens of them. The riders and trainers wear striking red jackets and black trousers.

A team of Percheron horses — you can see how close the crowd was to the action.

It was partly proximity to the horses that made the show so spectacular and exciting, as well as the backdrop of red-brick buildings. The weather enhanced the experience by conjuring up dramatically stormy skies and threatening us with rain. Rain it did, but only lightly and briefly — the fat raindrops were a little local color, reminding us that we really were in Normandy.

VIPs got window seats on an upper floor of the château from which to enjoy the show.

During the show I took hundreds of photos, and I've been going through them this morning. I plan to post some of them over the next few days. They're better than I thought they would be, given my little automatic camera, which is just barely fast enough to capture action scenes. (Remember that you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

The rest of us stood or sat under umbrellas as rain started to fall.

I took pictures of the horses and riders, but it was the faces in the crowd that made me realize how good the show and the whole experience really was. Everybody was smiling — children and adults of all ages, despite the rain showers. Our hearts were beating to the rhythm of the horses hooves. I was reminded how much I love living in France, where these kinds of magnificent places and special events are part of the experience.

Where were we?

Here are a few more photos I took at the horse and buggy show at the Haras du Pin in August 2011. Here's a link to the Haras du Pin web site, with information about the horse show (les spectacles équestres) and the different breeds of horses there. The site is in both French and English.

This map gives you an idea where we were. Our gîte for the trip was just east of the big town of Alençon near the smaller towns of Mortagne-au-Perche and Bellême. Northwest of Alençon is the Chateau de Carrouges, which we visited. And straight north of Alençon is the little town of Sées and it's gigantic cathedral. North of there is the Haras and the town of Argentan.

The Haras du Pin is in the southern part of Normandy, 160 kms (100 miles) west of Paris. It's 60 kms south of Caen and 100 kms southwest of Rouen. The Mont Saint-Michel is 125 kms west. The Haras 80 kms north of Le Mans, and 150 kms north of the city of Tours. It's a 2½-hour drive from Saint-Aignan on the autoroute.

Horses at the Haras national du Pin

Un haras is what a stud farm is called in French. The dictionary says it's an Établissement où l'on sélectionne et élève
des étalons et des juments pour la reproduction et l'amélioration de la race chevaline.
Un étalon is a stallion and une jument is a mare.

I was in the middle of planning some posts about other châteaux in the Loire Valley as a follow-on after my Valençay series, but since the subject became horses, I was reminded of another trip we took in 2011, up to southern Normandy.

It's was Marie's idea to go to the Haras du Pin while we were up there. She's the woman from Normandy who wore
the flowery pink dress that blended right in with a mass of flowers growing in the gardens at Valençay

At first I wasn't convinced I wanted to go to the haras, but I was so glad I did when we got there. Evelyn and her husband were with us too. Actually, it was Marie who introduced me to Evelyn and her husband in 2003, when we first came to live
in Saint-Aignan.

It was a hot, thundery day in August. On Thursdays back then they had a horse show at the haras on Thursdays — maybe they still do — and we happened to be looking for something to do on a Thursday afternooon.

The national stud farm at Le Pin was founded in 1665 and the château was built in the early 1700s.
A thundershower threatened to wash out the show that Thursday afternoon, but finally only a few fat raindrops fell.
It was all very summery and atmospheric.

Au Haras du Pin : couleur et mouvement

Looking at the timestamps on my photos, and at the clock in pictures of the château, I think I've figured out that the Thursday afternoon show at the Haras du Pin in lower Normandy lasted about three hours. Every minute of it was enjoyable, even when big raindrops started hitting us and the horses. I guess I don't have a lot to say about it, but I do want to share the photos. It was exciting to be so close to such big, impressive animals.

I warn you; I have a lot of pictures of horses and buggies — more than 200. Don't worry. I won't post them all. Just for the record, my camera that day was a Panasonic Lumix ZS1. I still have it but it doesn't get much use these days.

Teams

Teams of horses. They were the finale at the horse show we saw in August in Le Pin-au-Haras. That's the name of the village where the Haras du Pin is located. In French, a "team" in this sense is called un attelage [aht-lahzh]. The verb atteler [aht-lay] means "to harness, to hitch up."

Now I've about exhausted my connaissances on the subject. I'll just post the pictures.

The horses, buggies, carriages, drivers, and passengers were beautiful to watch.

Meanwhile, our weather is supposed to be warm for the next few days. That'll give us a chance to get a lot of yard work done. And tonight we're going to a party. It's a Franco-American affair, more about which later.

The day after

The day after the horses, I mean. The horse event at the Haras du Pin was thrilling, at least for me. As I said, it was a combination of the beauty of the spectacle, the drama of the weather, and the smiles on the faces of children and adults in the crowd. The word that described it for me in French was émouvant.

After such a good afternoon, you'd think the rest of the things we did in the Perche would pale in comparison. But no. On Friday 8/26 we went to see the Château de Carrouges, which is just 20 miles northwest of Alençon and about an hour's drive from Mortagne, where we were staying in a gîte rural.

I surprised Evelyn by getting her in this shot at Carrouges.
Click the picture to enlarge it.

I'd been to Carrouges before — once with CHM in 2001 and again with Walt and our friend Sue from California in 2006. Each time I've seen it, it has been a thrill. Carrouges is a big brick building surrounded by a moat, with a separate gatehouse. It's on the edge of a small town and surrounded by many acres of prairie and forest. The moat features honking geese and croaking frogs.

Marie from Normandy taking a picture
at the Château de Carrouges.

Once more, the weather was dramatic. After we had finished the guided tour of the interior of the château, which was owned and occupied by the same family for 450 years (late 1400s until 1936), we emerged to a long band of dark black clouds and loud rumbles of thunder. However, it didn't rain.

After the trip to Carrouges, we returned to Mortagne-au-Perche
for dinner. That's Lewis studying the restaurant menu
at the Hôtel du Tribunal.

In more local news, the tomatoes have come in. Walt went out and picked enough to fill two buckets yesterday afternoon. Some of them have started to split because of all the rain we've had, so it is time to cook them. They'll either get dried in a slow oven for a few hours and packed in glass jars, or cooked into sauce and frozen in plastic containers.

Part of yesterday's tomato-picking haul

The roar of tractor engines is loud this morning. A grape-harvesting machine and a tractor hauling a trailer drove up at about 7:00 a.m. The crew is busy harvesting the "black" grapes just on the north side of our property.

Horse show portraits

Here are six close-up portrait-style photos that I took during the spectacle équestre at the Haras du Pin 10 years ago.
Tomorrow I'll post one more slideshow before moving on.

A face in the crowd...

It's amazing to me how sharp and clear these images are. The camera I took them with is a Panasonic Lumix ZS1,
which was sold outside North America as the Lumix TZ6. I bought it from Amazon USA in January 2010 for just $212.
I've charged up its battery, put in an SD card, and starting using it again, especially in the kitchen.

Le cheval noir et l'homme à la veste rouge

One of the most interesting and longest segments in the spectacle équestre we saw in August 2011 at the Haras du Pin, in Normandy, featured the horse and the red-coated man you see in this slideshow. It's a demonstration of what is called dressage.

Le spectacle équestre touche à sa fin

This is the end of the series about the Haras du Pin in Normandy and its spectacle équestre.

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As winter set in last November, Walt and I found ourselves hoping for some below-freezing weather in late 2020 and early 2021. The previous two winters had been weirdly mild and wet. However, we never thought we would have some of our coldest winter weather in April. That's what has happened. For two weeks now we've had morning low temperatures at or below freezing. The cold wave started just as all the grapevines and fruit trees were putting out new growth and blossoms. Reports now are that are about a third of the fruit harvest across France has been lost to the cold. The grape growers must have known that the cold snap was going to last for a while. Here in the Saint-Aignan area (AOC/AOP Touraine-Chenonceaux) we have seen no effort to protect the vines by setting out smudgepots (bougies anti-gel) or burning bales of straw, as we've seen around the vineyards in past years.

The MC, le dressage, and hard rain

Here's another series of pictures that I took at the horse show at the Haras du Pin in Normandy. The man in the red jacket was the master of ceremonies for the whole event, and he also gave a demonstration on dressage, or training. One web site I've seen calls le dressage "teaching the horse how to learn."


I was pretty happy to get the last picture. The horse obviously didn't stay in that pose very long, but he repeated the trick several times. My camera was so slow that I had to anticipate the animal's and trainer's movements and press the shutter release in advance.

Meanwhile, here in Saint-Aignan, it rained hard for most of the day yesterday. We forgot to put the rain gauge out in the morning so we'll never know exactly how much rain we got. No mater, what we do know is that « il a plu comme vache qui pisse » — it really came pouring down.

This morning the weather report says we are getting the remnants of Hurricane Katia. I think we've also had what was left of Irene and Lee. Rain is predicted again today, but not as much.

Stormy skies over the Château de Carrouges

Soon I might have to rename this blog Spending a lifetime at Carrouges... The day we were there in August 2011, after the horse show at the Haras du Pin, the weather was threatening, but we didn't get soaked. Coincidentally, we had stormy weather and heavy rain overnight, after a very windy Sunday afternoon.

Le Château de Carrouges

Just 20 miles southwest of the Haras du Pin, where we spent an afternoon seeing that spectacular horse show I blogged about a few weeks ago, stands the 14th-century Château de Carrouges. It's a striking brick complex with a Renaissance-era entry tower (un châtelet) and a moat (des douves). I've been lucky to be able to visit Carrouges four times since 2001. It's about half an hour's drive from the big town of Alençon in lower Normandy.

This a 2006 photo of the château at Carrouges, which dates back to the 1300s but which,
like most of these old buildings, has been modified and expanded over the centuries.

An earlier castle at Carrouges was located on a nearby hilltop. That one was laid siege to by the Plantagenêts
in the 12th century and then destroyed by the English at the beginning of the 100 Years' War (1337–1453).

The château as it exists today was built in the mid-1300s by Jean IV de Carrouges on marshy land a few miles south.
The Wikipédia article about it describes it as a château de plaisance.

In the 1400s, at the end of the 100 Years' War, a whole new wing was added by a Norman official who had acquired
the château when the Carrouges family line died off because of a lack of male heirs.
Other Norman families occupied the château over the centuries.

Much later, during the Second World War, Carrouges was used as a place to store the contents of the museums of
the cities of Rouen and Beauvais, which were judged to be in danger of being destroyed or stolen.

The first time I went to Carrouges was with CHM in June 2001, on a day when we saw eight or ten other châteaux.
That's when I took the photos above (except the first one). We were driving from Rouen down to Vouvray,
where Walt and I had rented a gîte for a two-week stay. It was because we enjoyed that vacation
(and an earlier one) in Vouvray so much that we ended up relocating to the Loire Valley in 2003.

Un défilé de voitures « hippomobiles »

Hippomobile (for "horse-drawn") is a good word. It's an adjective that seems most often to modify the word voiture (car, vehicle). The dictionary I normally consult says the adjective was coined in the 1890s, and probably based on the "new" term automobile. If I remember correctly, this parade was the finale when we spent the afternoon watching the spectacle équestre at the Haras du Pin in lower Normandy.



I post all these photos and slideshows with the hope that people who are curious about France or already know they love France will find them interesting and even useful. My blog posts are viewed by between 750 and 1250 visitors every day, according to the statistics that Blogger records and shares.

Faces

I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't think I'm very good at taking photos of people. Almost always, the faces I see in portraits don't really resemble the faces I see in real life.

Thanks then to Evelyn for the pictures of people. The one above, plus my current blog banner, as well as the ones below, are photos Evelyn took in Bellême ten days ago. Walt, Lewis, and I sat on a bench along a pedestrian street as Evelyn and Marie looked around in a shop.

When Evelyn came out to take the picture, we started monkeying around. Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil. By the time we finished, as small crowd had gathered to enjoy the scene. That's how we acted as a group during our 10-day visit. The last time we had all seen each other was two years ago, when we spent a few days in Paris together.

This picture of our friend Marie from Normany, Walt, and me is one we took by putting the camera on a tripod and setting a 10-second delay so that we'd have time to pose. As usual, I have my mouth full of some good food.

Finally, here's a picture I took at Le Haras du Pin, a big horse breeding and training center in Normandy, north of Alençon. We spent an afternoon there. I needed to post this last picture because it didn't seem fair that Evelyn (on the left) was left out of the other photos.

Evelyn also took this photo of some tomatoes from our garden
that were sitting on a window sill at the gîte near Mortagne.

If it weren't for the Internet, we wouldn't be friends. I met Marie on the 'net in 2000 and in person for the first time in 2001. She knew Evelyn already, and I knew Evelyn on the 'net, but the first time Walt and I met Evelyn and Lewis face to face was in 2004, when they came and stayed with us in Saint-Aignan for a few days. Marie is back in Normandy now, and Evelyn and Lewis are getting ready to get on a plane for their flight back.