Sunshine in an oddly artificial but strangely attractive spot

Some curious places can be surprisingly appealing.

Take the Buttes-Chaumont park in Paris. For a long time, it was a refuse and sewage dump, a place where the bodies of executed criminals were put on display and, in one part, a gypsum and limestone quarry The gypsum was used to make plaster, so it was an important substance in building, which at least makes the purpose of that part of the site constructive – in the most literal sense – and that’s more than can be said for the other bits.

Eventually, though the city of Paris decided to make a park of the place.

I don’t know whether the presence of all that gypsum played a role in how they set about it, but they used a lot of concrete in modelling the park to their design. A waterfall, outcrops of boulders, a stream running between rocky banks – they were all built, not found, laid out by man not nature.

That’s what makes the place so odd. Little or nothing about it is natural, the landscape itself is artificial.

Natural it may not be, but the lake’s an attractive spot for all that

And yet, oddly enough, it manages to be attractive. The waterfall is worth a visit, and the lake is beautiful, especially with the rocky crag in the middle of it, crowned with a belvedere from which one can just glimpse the distant Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. So it’s fun to go to.

OK, I admit, it’s a bit remote, but that is the Sacré Coeur there

Danielle and I hadn’t been to Paris for years, though we lived on the western edge of the city for three years back in the nineties. My brother and his Danielle live now, and it was good to visit them for a couple of nights. Especially as the day before he left was his birthday so we took them out for a pre-birthday celebration.

During the day, while they were both working, we popped down to the Buttes-Chaumont to enjoy the park again. Which turned out to be wonderful. It helped that the weather was glorious, even well into October. What helped the day less was that it had been cold in the morning, so we ended up having to carry coats and sweaters as soon as the clouds cleared.

We even had lunch in a little restaurant opposite one of the gates. We could have eaten outside but chose to go inside, because it was simply too warm in the sun. So it was a fine way to enjoy the last day of our nearly six weeks in Continental Europe.

Of course, by the time we got home to Luton, it was chucking it down with rain. But, hey, it wouldn’t be a welcome home, would it, if it didn’t feel like home?

The waterfall’s fake too
But I like it anyway