Another time, another place. For a time I lived in the Vienne in central France. The landscape and architecture of that area is quite uninspiring to the casual eye. But the longer you are there the more you see and come to appreciate. If you are travelling south this is where you start to see stone ‘longeres’, the long farmhouses built from the stone hewn from the ground. The hole left behind often became the cellar beneath the house. The hills on which these houses sit gently undulate towards the horizon, like the folds on a bedspread, until they meet the huge sky that typifies that region.