Well it’s happened again. The earth has been turning, and amazingly, based on some ancient laws governing how all things are, on the 21st January, as always, the sun has returned to the village. Though low in its trajectory it now strikes the roofs of all the houses for an hour or so from 11 o’clock. And what a difference it makes. The light, which has been a chilly blue for weeks, has now a touch of gold in it again. By this morning it had reached down as far as my balcony, almost inspiring me to get out there and sweep it. Birds were flitting to and from the feeding tray and the pine tree opposite, four and a half bluetit swoops away. Just a few days ago I stood with Titine, my 90 year old neighbour - and definitely my role model - as she waited for her friend to come by and take her tea-dancing. “Only two days to go”, she said. I knew what she meant. My other neighbour, Jacqueline had said the same only the day before. This is an important moment in the winter life of the village. Everyone knows that this is ‘the cold side’ of the valley where the low winter sun does not shine for a full six weeks. On that day Jacqueline and I had paused in the road to speak together and were scolded by a neighbour for standing out in the cold. “It’s not spring yet”, he said. It’s true. Living on this side of the valley imposes a different lifestyle.
A few days ago my friend and I were up on the other slope. This is the residential part, where the hotels are, and the bigger chalets with large terraces and generous balconies, still with summer furniture on them, even parasols, I noticed. Here you could certainly enjoy a morning coffee outdoors on a fine day in the winter. As we drove higher up the winding road, we had to watch out for fallen rocks and stones, loosened by the sun. No such stones will be released on the cold side for a good while yet. A buzzard, sitting on a branch, was dozing in the sunshine and forgot to fly off as we passed by. Further up, the land levels out to create a plateau and in the middle lies the village of Feissons, a farming community of large, four-storied chalets, each storey having a balcony stocked variously with wood, hanging washing, children’s toys, signboards advertising Beaufort cheese or honey, and somewhere to sit in the sun. Roofs have no snow on them and many have solar panels. Snow on this side remains only along shaded tracks or where it has been mounded up at road edges and in strips across the surrounding fields between the village and the forest which continues upwards for another 500 metres at least. It is truly a looking-glass world. But for all the sunshine there was not a sign of spring to be seen yet and temperatures are still very low.
At the top of the village the road peters out and becomes a field track. This is where the church stands, with its unusual onion-shaped tower, covered like most around the region in copper. When Montagny had theirs renewed four years ago, the tower shone like gold for a number of weeks and could be seen from a great distance before the copper darkened to brown. From the steps of Feissons church you can look back across the valley, down to my frosty village lies - at 660 metres - and up towards the ski stations of Meribel and Courchevel, rising to over 2,000 metres. Nearby, a lady was supervising her two small grandchildren on plastic sledges as they repeatedly slithered down and scrambled back up the half-snowy slope below the church. Her greeting and her laughter when I said where we had come from revealed how much these villagers consider themselves the chosen ones, both for their exposure to the sun and for living ‘at altitude’. Some decades ago, a local priest did some calculations. For several years he had recorded the hours of sunlight each day of the year on both sides of the valley. He found that, given the angle of the sun, which strikes on this side earlier in the day most of the year and the height of the mountain behind us casting its shadow, ‘our’ side has, surprisingly, more sunshine hours throughout the year than ‘the sunny side’. Some of my neighbours appear to believe this. Others are not persuaded. They do agree though that the summers being extremely hot, the sunny side dwellers suffer much more in hot weather (twisting beams, buckling balconies, peeling paint, fading curtains - significant property damage) and envy us our climate.
A sundial has been created on this face of the church. The building does not face due south, but rather more towards West-Southwest. This means that the angles drawn for the hours of sunlight vary greatly in size; a huge space separates 11 and 12, half as much lies between 12 and 1 and increasingly tiny slots mark 2 to 5 o’clock. No other hours are shown. Also the gnomon or pointer reads the hours in an anti-clockwise direction. Apparently, on a horizontal dial the shadow would move clockwise. I’m rather interested by this idea. Five minutes spent on the Internet showed me a complicated mathematical formula for setting up a ‘declining’ vertical sundial, so-called in the case of the Feissons dial since it does not point in a true cardinal direction. In case you are tempted to have a go it is [ Tan θ = cos λ tan (15° x t)] where ‘θ’, theta, is the angle between the hour line and the noon hour line which points due North, and ‘λ’, delta, is the geographical latitude and ‘t’ equals the number of hours before or after noon. Pause for thought. Fortunately, in cases such as this the Wikipedia website recommends observation as the better method of arranging the hourlines since the maths becomes complicated where the dial cannot directly face a cardinal point.
Now, using my pocket compass I see that the roadside wall of my house has the same orientation as the wall of Feissons church on the other side of the valley. If they can have a sundial, why not me? What an addition to the local amenities it would be. What a focus for walkers’ cameras and subject of endless historical invention by the young Tourist Office guides in the summertime. Let me see now. I need a board fixed to the wall, fairly high up on the wall, a spike and some chalk. Oh, and a ladder. Er, and some sunshine. There’s the sticking point just for the moment. But while I wait for the sun to come down to street level for more than one hour a day I can be assembling the materials and working on the formula. Who knows, you may decide to drop everything and come to give me a hand. I can at least promise you a very sunny summer visit.
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copyright Julia Austen 2015