In early June this year I went on holidays with a friend to St Cyprien in the South of France. We spent a gloriously relaxing, sun-filled 10 days scouting around the locality on bicycles, buses, trains and boats and enjoying daily encounters with delicious French foods and wines.

On the Saturday prior to our Monday morning return flight from Toulouse we caught the 6.45am train from Perpignan to connect at Villefranche with the 9.05 Petit Train Jaune. This ‘little yellow train’ climbs through the Pyrenees along 63km of track, which once transported iron and marble produced in the region.

Stopping at hillside villages, tooting its whistle, it progresses through spectacular mountain scenery before arriving some three hours later at the village of Latour-de-Carol. After a sleepy two-hour wait we took the next train north to Foix.

There were no taxis to be had so we began to trudge uphill towards the town. A local, sensing our plight, stopped and gave us a lift to the centre of the town where we began room-hunting. This brought us on a journey of discovery. Discovery of a town steeped in atmosphere, a town still grounded in its own strong sense of identity, a feature one may or may not like.

This is a place of little squares surrounded by medieval houses, tiny narrow cobbled stone streets, and a people who did not fear to regard the tourist as an oddity.

We found rooms with the right mix of cleanliness, spaciousness and centrality offered at a reasonable price with a view from the shuttered windows of the wonderfully preserved medieval Chateau towering over the town.

Our decision to head to Foix had been influenced by our desire to visit the Grotte de Niaux. These caves, situated some 25k south of Foix in the foothills of the Pyrenees portray on their walls paintings from as far back as 13000 years before the Christian period.

On Sunday morning, knowing that prior booking is obligatory, we phoned the Grotte and were lucky to get reservations for that day’s guided tour in English.

A thirty-minute taxi drive brought us to the turn-off for the caves. Climbing steeply we came to the entrance, a nondescript appendage built into the side of the mountain. We paid the fee of €7 and were given a torch to share by our young female guide.

We proceeded through the 800 metres of tunnel and caves, all left deliberately undeveloped and unlit but for the torches we carried. The arrival, some 400 years ago, of the first modern day ‘tourists’ was evidenced by the graffiti on the walls, and the missing sections of the stalactites and stalagmites which had been hacked off for sale as garden or house decorations. Otherwise the place felt as if I was the first human ever to have entered since prehistoric times.

Some distance into the tunnel is the first simple depiction, a few dots, lines and claviforms typical of many cave paintings in Europe and which it is thought may have had some meaning.
Much further on, one enters the Salon Noir, the main epicentre of the Niaux cave paintings. In this cavern, where the high dome-shaped ceiling echoes back any sounds sent up into its emptiness, horses, ibex, deer and bison, stand or gallop across the cave walls.

With the light from her torch, the guide introduced us to each painting, engulfing us in the mystery of the who, how and why of the artists and the people of those faraway times.

She then requested that all the lamps be extinguished and for some moments we felt the totality of darkness and silence which reigns deep inside the earth.

As we returned through the chambers, I found myself seeing shapes of paintings waiting to emerge from stones and walls. Outside the exit the high, sharp air sent blinding squalls of mist-filled light from the nearby mountaintops.

With great reluctance, I sat into the waiting taxi to descend once more into my 21st century reality.