by Ava Dale
Picture a ruin— what are the first images that come to your mind? It’s pretty likely that you pictured ancient, dusty settlements from civilizations long ago. Which is valid!
But for me, ruins are just so much more than that. Ruins are abandoned movie theaters or unused building in public parks, or maybe even bridges constructed long ago, that have been integrated into modern development. Ruins can be alive. They can be part of a metropolis, burgeoning with life. For me, ruins are connections to the past, they’re locations that we just can’t know everything about when we look at them. They have an innate sense of mystery by simply having existed in a location longer than we have.
When I lived in Europe, something I just couldn’t understand was how normal old buildings or ancient locations were to the average person. They were everywhere! On my commute home from my French school I would pass by empty old chapels, an abandoned bar, and even the overgrown remains of a roman wall.
How could you not be intrigued by all of these places?
I couldn’t understand it.
Here we were surrounded by interesting places to discover and yet no-one seemed interested in exploring?! I wasn’t going to let that stop me. One of the first places I sought to explore was the park, the wall in which had been constructed by the Romans during their control of the city, and then reinforced by one or more of the many rulers who came after. By using a forgotten path in the overgrowth surrounding the wall, I was able to easily make it on top, and I was rewarded with a half-collapsed tower chamber, something invisible to the rest of the park below. I marveled at my discovery, and at this point was very confused why no-one else had sought to find this treasure which I had uncovered. We were in the middle of a city, the peak of human activity, how is it that I should be able to find such a path untreaded?
However, when I went to explore the abandoned bar, I started to get it. The thing was, these magical locations were something normal for the people of Europe. To someone who lives in an old building in the middle of the city, and has as long as the building has been constructed, that building holds new mysteries- but to someone who is just moving in, it’s a ruin laden with stories that just yearn to be told, to be found, to be discovered. In a way, in order to discover mysteries we have to travel out of our home and into the unknown.
This is what is so exciting to me about travel, because in a way, you have to get away from your normal in order to really find mystery. And as an explorer, someone who lives to see what’s around the next corner, it’s necessary to truly see everything the world has to offer.
Unlike the city in which I lived, which was urban Europe, the countryside France is simply abounding with locations that transport you back in time, back to early 2-5 B.C, when the Romans conquered the region. If you’re looking to connect with spirits of the past, Provence and southern France seems like the place to go. In fact, one could potentially argue that one of the main factors why France exists today is in part due to the Romans’ conquest of it. The Romans settled and unified the land and people roughly where France is today, at the time, the Romans gave the area the name Gaul. While the territory of modern-day France and ancient Gaul don’t necessarily correspond 1:1, Gaul is pretty universally considered to be the ancestor of France as we know it today, and many of France’s major cities initially began as Roman settlements.
If you are a fan of France’s beloved character Asterix, you might know Gaul from the exploits of one little village that resisted Roman Conquest with the help of a magic potion …
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