To Corte...

When we leave in the car this morning, my body aching and stinging – no pain relief – James aching and metaphorically stinging from so much research into insurance and so many dead ends – we work our way into Ajaccio – the birthplace of Napoleon – The sides of the roads are dotted with road signs that have seen the French blotted out, crudely, with some spray paint, leaving only the Corsican name on display. Sometimes there is an extra tag that looks like it might read “French pigs!” but the Corsicans value their pork too much, I’d imagine, to use it as an insult. What we see, in the overcast morning, is a town ravaged by cheaply wrought stucco utilitarian building and we are lost, in dismay, trying to find the street that houses the one pharmacy in the whole city that is open on a Sunday.

Relief from flash ibuprofen and we’re off into the mountains – yet tense and uneasy with dark moods that are mirrored by the ominous mist clinging to the cliffs.

It’s impossible to resist the sublime – truly Shelley-esque sublime – craggy cliffs that jut up into the clouds cut roughly with snaky waterfalls – the lines of eerie light green and pink echoing the flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral. The power of them, the sheer majesty, screams the religion of a darkly wild and primeval past, before Corsica was divided up amongst greedy Europeans, before perfectly manicured lines of grape vines punctuated the hillsides like hyphens bleeding together. The peaks don’t even bother to dare the explorer to challenge them because nothing can dominate this landscape for long – it can only exist in tentative harmony, in the shadows of these daunting titans. Every so often, one sees a clearly man made conglomeration of stones which seems to have sprouted by magic on to the sheer granite, but whoever ventured to make their home in so inhospitable of an environment has long since bled into the cliffs, the gorges, their bones and flesh feeding the life of the landscape.

Driving through the occasional mountain village on the road to Corte, people gathering in the squares – Their harsh accents and bright laughter seem like overcompensation, like they’re aware that at any moment, they’ll be swallowed alive by the gorges and the rocks and the fast running mountain streams.





A path leads to the top of a grassy hill nestled uneasily in these mountains. It meanders up to a large ruined stone structure, which looks like an offering, a sacrificial site to appease, crumbling and frequented now only by the hikers, mostly Germans, who don their fluorescent and poles.