The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

It must never be forgotten that when an army is advancing in great numbers it is of paramount importance for it that the host should be able to concentrate before action. But roads, especially roads over mountains, compel men to march in long strings, so that the head of the column will have arrived at a particular point hours before the tail of it; and what is more, the deployment of the column, that is the getting of it all into a front perpendicular to its line of advance, takes time in proportion to the length which the column had before it began to deploy. This accident it was, for instance, which destroyed the French and their allies at Crécy, for though they greatly outnumbered the English they had come up in columns too long to deploy in time. Now it evidently follows from this principle that armies on the march, even under the rudest conditions, will attempt to follow parallel roads. To find two roads parallel to one another and leading to the same field of action is to halve the difficulties of transport and of deployment. But it is very difficult (under primitive conditions) to find two parallel roads which are near to one another, and unless the lines by which the army advances are near to one another the advantage of the alternative routes will disappear in proportion to their distance one from the other. In mountain regions it is especially difficult to find two passages parallel to each other and yet in close neighbourhood. This is precisely the advantage afforded by the trench of the Gallego continued in the Val d’Ossau to the east, and in the trench of the Aragon continued in the Val d’Aspe to the west. Two hosts using the old mule paths could leave Sallent on the Gallego and Canfranc on the Aragon at dawn of one day, and both would meet at Oloron in the French plains before the evening of the morrow; on the southward march a host could assemble in the plains of Béarn, separate to use these two easy passes, and meet at Jaca at the end of the second day.

It is fairly certain therefore—much more certain than a thousand of the historical guesses that are put down as truths in our textbooks—that the easy pass between the Gallego Valley and the Val d’Ossau was twin throughout the Dark Ages to the great Somport pass not 8 miles westward of it. Abd-ur-Rahman must have used both and so must the Christian knights when they came so often to the relief of Aragon in the heavy and successful fighting against Islam which marked the tenth and eleventh centuries.

To appreciate how close these two parallel tracks were to each other one has but to remember that the gap between the Val d’Aspe and the next easy pass westward—right away at Roncesvalles—there is a matter of 40 miles. Between the Val d’Ossau and the next easy pass eastward there is a gap of indeterminate length according to the definition of the term “easy,” but there is at any rate no notch over which one could take any armed force until one gets to the Bonaigo, quite 60 miles away. All between is the mass of the highest and most rugged ridges of the Pyrenees, over which certain paths have always existed, indeed, and over which, in two places at least, at Gavarnie and at Macadou, the French propose to drive roads, but no gap in which was ever passable in the Dark and Middle Ages for a great number of men.

I have said that these two parallel trenches were not only twin in history for the use of armies, but were also communicable one from the other just south of the watershed. North of it, indeed, the Val d’Aspe and the Val d’Ossau, though one can be reached from the other, only communicate by very high and rocky ridges, the easiest of which is the Col des Moines. But on the south side there is one accidental easy passage. You may go all the way from the Somport to Jaca and find nothing but the most difficult mountains on your left, and all the way from the Pourtalet (which is the pass at the top of the Val d’Ossau corresponding to the Somport) down to Sandinies and find nothing but difficult mountains on the right, save just at the beginning of the descent where this accident of which I speak occurs. Its feature is a lateral valley called the Canal Roya which takes its name from the streak of intense red scoring the side of its principal peak.

This lateral valley points right away eastward from the trench of the Aragon, it is nowhere precipitous along its stream (a rare advantage in the Pyrenees) save in one spot where a quite low precipice is easily outflanked along the grassy slopes above it. And the end of that valley consists in a sort of semi-circular ridge of grassy steep banks in three places of which ridge, at least, a man or a beast can walk over without difficulty or danger. These three places are the Port de Peyréguet, the Port d’Anéou, and the col of the Canal Roya. This last is the principal one, the easiest and the lowest. Each is within half a mile of its neighbour, and on the further side one comes down quite easily by large steep slopes of meadow to the valley of the Gallego. The Port de Peyréguet and the Port d’Anéou bring one down just on the north of the flat dip of the pass, the col of the Canal Roya just on the south of it; but whether one comes down just north or south of the flat Pourtalet pass is an indifferent matter. The travelling in all three cases is little more than a walk.

These “gates” up the Canal Roya from the Val d’Aragon into the parallel valley of the Gallego knit the whole four valleys into one system, and to this day their customs and their inhabitants have very much in common, and the two valleys, which were the core and heart of Aragon and the origins of its crusade southward against the Mahommedans, count in history and in local geography with the two valleys which were the heart and origin of Béarn up to the north.

The Val d’Aspe, which is the most important of the four, is that valley in the Pyrenees where the characteristics of the range are most strongly marked. It might serve as the type of all the others. You cannot see the opening of it southward from Oloron without appreciating that you are approaching something distinctive and singular in landscape. It is so clean-cut and so obviously an invitation to the crossing of the hills. The gorges which divide into separate flat steps every Pyrenean valley, are nowhere more marked than here. The village of Asasp which stands at the first of them is singularly characteristic of such an entry; the gap through which the old lake broke is so clear, the walls through which the Gave runs are so perfect.

Somewhat further on when yet another gorge has been passed there opens out one of those circular and isolated spaces of which Andorra is the historical example, and which in greater or less perfection are characteristic of all these hills.

This plain, which still recalls in its contours the old lake which created it, and of which it is the floor, is more regular and more complete than any of the many jasses and “plans” which distinguish the other vales. It is even more striking than that of Andorra. It nourishes five villages which might easily (had not the great international road run through them for 2000 years) have federated to form an independent commonwealth as the eight villages of Andorra federated to form one. Indeed this circus, surrounded by almost impassable hills which meet at either end in narrow Thermopylæ, was very nearly independent at the close of the Middle Ages, and when it appealed against the king for the preservation of its customs, these were preserved by the authority of the king’s court.