Emulating the exodus
of the first monks from Molesmes in the eleventh century, new
monasteries of the Cistercians were always sited in remote wooded
valleys alongside or built over fast flowing streams. It was
in this semi-wild environment that the daily liturgy was
maintained, and the products of scholarship and the agricultural
year bore fruit. The following word picture sets out the
Cistercian landscape of the French monastery of la Grande Trappe
that most environmentalists would immediately recognise as their
pastoral lodestone of nature conservation.
"In the daylight that followed my arrival, the
pale grey Trappe resembled not so much an abbey as a hospital, an
asylum or a reformatory. It dwindled off into farm buildings, and
came to an end in the fields where thousands of turnips led their
secret lives and reared into the air their little frostbitten
banners. Among the furrows an image mouldered on its pedestal; and,
under a sky of clouded steel, the rooks cawed and wheeled and
settled. Across the December landscape, flat and waterlogged with
its clumps of drizzling coppice and barren-looking pasture-land,
ran a rutted path which disappeared beneath an avenue of elm-trees.
Willows, blurred and colourless as the detail of an aquatint,
receded in the mist; and, here and there, the pallor of the woods
was interrupted by funereal clumps of pine. Isolated monks, all of
them hooded and clogged, at work in the fields, ploughing or
chopping wood, dotted this sodden panorama and the report of their
falling axes reached the ear long seconds after the visual impact.
Others were driving slow herds of cattle to graze. Two of them
would converse for a few seconds in their extraordinary semaphore,
and then 'Viens, la blanche!' or, 'a droite, grosse bete!' would
break the silence as a cow or a laggard cart- horse was urged
through a gap in a hedge Then the stillness fell once again, and an
occasional sequence of gestures was the only discourse between
mortals"
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1957)