Dimensions
135 x 216 x 29mm
On the day after the death of Franco, Bernard Loughlin made his first visit to Farrera, a village in the Catalan Pyrenees. There, in a chilly seventeenth-century church, he and his Belfast sweetheart, Mary, were married; and there, by candlelight and with the help of a local midwife, Mary gave birth to their first child.
Bernard and Mary spent the next two decades in Ireland, running the artists' retreat at Annaghmakerrig. When they left in 1999, under the shadow of a terrible crime committed by a neighbour against their children, their destination was Farrera. They were starting a new life.
'In The High Pyrenees' is a loving and frequently hilarious account of the smells, sensations and intrigues of a mountain village. In gorgeous, vivid prose, Bernard Loughlin tells the many stories of this out-of-the-way place, where hardy outsiders live alongside a handful of remaining Catalan highlanders who continue to lead a largely pastoral existence.