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The former province of Béarn (capital: Pau) corresponds approximately to the eastern two-thirds of the
département of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, while the western third is occupied by the French Basque country. The adjoining département to the
East – the Hautes-Pyrénées (capital: Tarbes) – more or less covers the territory of the former province of Bigorre.
Between the Pyrenean mountain range to the South and Gascony to the North, Béarn and Bigorre offer a succession of hills and valleys endowed with rich agricultural lands on which cereal farming and cattle raising have prospered. While in the plains villages are the norm, on the plateaux dispersed settlement dominates.
In the lower Béarn and Bigorre, the centre of the rural estate was the farmstead with enclosed courtyard, comprising a farmhouse (oustaü), built
of stone rubble or pebbles, of rectangular plan and of one or two storeys. Its long-wall façade is sheltered under a steep-pitched ridge roof with two hips (roof pitch: 55°). Facing South, South-East or East as the case may be, the façade is placed perpendicularly to the street and looks onto an enclosed courtyard (parquié). The agricultural dependencies (barn, byre, wine-cellar, hen-house, pigstie) are arranged round the second and third sides of the yard, whereas the fourth side is occupied by a wall in which opens an imposing cart entrance (pourtaü).  | |
Environs de Salies-de-Béarn (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) : façade d'une métairie dans la première décennie du 20e siècle (une autre édition lui donne un nom : la ferme du Camou).
Les bâtiments sont vraisembablement de la 2e moitié du 18e siècle si l'on en juge d'après l'arc segmentaire coiffant les baies du rez-de-chaussée et la lucarne.
Le corps de logis, à la façade en gouttereau sous un toit à forte pente en tuiles plates à crochet, est de plan bipartite. Il comporte à droite une cuisine au rez-de-chaussée et une chambre à l'étage, à gauche une grange-étable avec sa porte charretière en anse de panier sous une lucarne d'accès au grenier à fourrage.
Contre le pignon, est adossé un appentis couvert en tuiles canal, abritant la fournière (souche de cheminée) et la loge à porcs, cette dernière surmontée d'un poulailler à claire-voie (échelle d'accès).
L'entrée de la pièce d'habitation est surhaussée par un perron de trois marches et accotée d'une fenêtre à petits carreaux avec volet extérieur en bois plein.
Cette façade est remarquable par la présence de trois pieds de vigne grimpante se répandant sur un treillage en forme d'échelle horizontale.
Un char à bœufs chargé de fourrage est en attente. La fermière conduit les bêtes à la pâture.
Le corps de logis semble être surmonté d'un toit à 2 croupes (seule celle de gauche étant visible). | The dwellings in the wealthiest farmsteads follow the bourgeois or urban model of the 18th and 19th centuries: two-storeyed façade with symmetrically-placed openings, central-corridor plan, monumental-looking roof with dormer windows and covering of nibbed flat tiles or slates. This type of house is linked to the growth of the rural economy (notably the spread of maize growing) and the ensuing wealth of the upper strata of the peasant class.
At a lower social level, we find a dwelling house which has only a single storey under a granary and follows a different plan, stringing together a common room and a bedroom. This was the dwelling of the smallholder, the sharecropper, the craftsman. Many examples can still be seen in the Tarbes plain and the Baronnies region (Hautes-Pyrénées). The single entrance, set into one of the long walls, opens directly into a common living room or kitchen (cousine), which itself leads into a smaller bedroom (crambe) simply partitioned off by a wooden cross wall. Out of a desire to imitate the bourgeois house, the original plan of some of these “longères” was subsequently altered to a central-entry plan with an axially-placed corridor.
The bottom of the social scale was occupied by the single-room house (maysou) of the labourer tied to a large estate.
The house-type originating from the urban bourgeoisie and inspired by classic architecture actually superseded, from the 18th century onwards, a former type, also of urban origin but dating from medieval times: the “longère” with gable-wall façade, consisting of a kitchen and bedroom laid out in a row at ground-floor level, a granary at upper-floor level behind a half-timbered jettied front, and a steep-pitched ridge roof covered in thatch or wood shingles. A few specimens survive in Béarn, in the Vic Bilh region and at Oloron-Sainte-Marie.
Around Orthez and Salies-de-Béarn, the landowning bourgeois families of these cities in the 18th and 19th centuries built for their agricultural tenants farmhouses formed by adding, along both sides of a barn with gable-wall entry, two lean-to aisles, the one to accomodate the sharecropper, the other to accomodate the cows. The outcome is a building with nave and aisles reminiscent of the "métairies" with tripartite plan of neighbouring Aquitaine. The picturesque charm of these edifices is enhanced by the contrast between the high-pitched central roof covered in flat tiles over a granary and the shallow-pitched lateral roofs covered in half-round tiles. In some “métairies” only a single aisle was added to the barn, as a stable was not required. |
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Salies-de-Béarn (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) : maison au plan tripartite d'un type rencontré vers Orthez et Salies-de-Béarn (carte postale des années 1950-1960, du temps ou les Pyrénées-Atlantiques étaient encore les Basses-Pyrénées).
De part et d'autre d'une grange-remise à entrée en pignon (cf l'arc en plein cintre) et à toiture en tuiles plates, sont venus s'adjoindre, contre les murs goutterots, deux appentis à couverture de tuiles creuses, celui de gauche à usage d'habitation (cf la cheminée), celui de droite à usage d'étable. Cette morphologie particulière a valu – récemment – à ce type de métairie le qualificatif de clouque, c'est-à-dire « poule couveuse » en béarnais francisé, analogie dont la littérature touristique s'est avidement emparée.
Il n'y a pas lieu ici de parler d'influence méditerranéene pour les tuiles creuses : c'était le seul matériau qui convenait à la pente des appentis.
Il n'y a pas lieu non plus de parler d'influence basque pour le plan tripartite : il est la seule possibilité d'extension d'une grange en forme de nef et à façade en pignon. | In the high Pyrenean valleys, where cattle raising on collectively-owned summer pastures was a dominant activity and pastoral activities were run by the valley communities or besiaux, the courtyarded farm tends to disappear while the house-types of lower Béarn and Bigorre have to compete with mountain houses of elongated plan combining under the same roof both living quarters and agricultural quarters. Built of stone, these houses have their openings in one of the long walls, under a steep-pitched ridge roof originally covered in thatch, later to be replaced by slates.
On the other hand, buildings with a dual function as byre (for either cows or sheep) and hay-loft - the bordes – are strung out at some distance from the villages, in meadows reserved for mowing. These bordes were intended to provide shelter and fodder in winter to herds brought down from the summer pastures.
In the mountain valleys of the Aspe, Ossau and Ouzon (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), the mountain house is of the upper-floor hall type: a ground-floor byre is topped by an upper-floor dwelling (estadge) while a hayloft occupies the roof space. Access to the upper floor is reached by an internal staircase opening into the long-wall façade, while the byre has its own separate entrance. A lean-to breadbaking oven, built against one of the gable walls, has its opening set in the fireplace of the common room. The oldest among these houses date back to the 17th century: they have a gable-wall façade and a single doorway at ground-floor level for people, animals and implements alike. The house with upper-floor accommodation is also to be met with in the valleys of Arrens and Estaing and in the Batsuriguère region (south-western Hautes-Pyrénées), mainly in areas of severe climatic conditions. There thatch survived as a roofing material well into the 20th century, along
with raised gable ends with stepped coping (pènaus).
Relics of thatch coverings and stepped copings can also be seen in the valley of Campan, over temporary barn-cum-byres which, in the 19th century, were made into permanent farmhouses by farmers' younger sons, either by adding a single living room (caouhadé, i.e. heated room) against one of the end walls, or by arranging a dwelling room within the barn-and-byre itself, with only a wooden partition isolating humans from animals. Entry for people was by a door in a gable wall, entry for cows was by a door in a long wall.
In the summer pastures of the high mountain valleys of the two provinces, shepherds once erected dry-stone huts (capane) of rectangular plan and with low-pitched two-sided roofs of schist flags or turfs of grass piled on top of purlins and rafters. Set in the middle of dry-stone pens (coueila, cuyala) where sheep were gathered to spend the night, these huts stand today in ruins.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BUISAN, Georges, 1989, 'Un type de maison élémentaire en vallée de Campan', in Revue de Comminges,
tome 102 (Saint-Gaudens : Société des Etudes du Comminges)
CAZAURANG, Jean-Jacques, LOUBERGÉ, Jean, 1978, Maisons béarnaises (I) (Pau: Musée Béarnais)
CAZAURANG, Jean-Jacques, 1979, Maisons béarnaises (II) (Pau: Musée Béarnais)
LASSURE, Christian, 1981, 'Y a-t-il des "maisons-halle" en Béarn ?', in L'Architecture Vernaculaire, tome 5, p. 65 (Paris: CERAV)
LOUBERGÉ, Jean, 1982, Les anciennes maisons rurales des pays de l'Adour (Pau: Imprimerie Moderne)
MAGOT, Jean, et al., 1970, 'Les maisons paysannes de Bigorre', in Maisons Paysannes de France, No 5 (Paris: MPF)
PÉRÉ, André, 1979, 'Les cabanes en pierres sèches des hautes vallées des Nestes (Aure et Louron) (Pyrénées centrales)', in L'Architecture Rurale, tome 3, pp. 62-67 (Paris: CERAR) |