Ruines de l'ancienne grange cistercienne de Fontcalvy

English translation

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History

In 1093, the installation of religious in the forest of Fontfroide. Constrained by the rule to reinvest their revenues, the religious launched themselves, from the 1140s onwards, into very substantial purchases of land. According to the Cistercian rule, the monks must cultivate their lands themselves. Being unable to do so from Perpignan to Béziers, the abbey would set up the system of granges, at the centre of a group of holdings, cultivated by the lay brothers. The grange is the very type of Cistercian holding organised as a small monastery, under the authority of a "magister grangial" directing the agricultural work of the lay brother friars. At the end of the 13th century, the existence of at least 24 granges is attested for Fontfroide abbey, including that of Fontcalvy. The building is of square plan, with one storey above the ground floor. The latter was originally constituted of a single vast hall, later divided into smaller rooms by partition walls one of which still subsists. This hall is covered by four rib vaults on pointed arches separated from each other by doubleaux arches. Doubleaux and diagonal arches are supported at the centre on an imposing fasciculated pillar whose profile is generated by the meeting of the various arches. The entrance is placed to the east, at the base of a tower of square section, deliberately off-axis with respect to the façade on account of the springing of a doubleaux arch and two diagonal arches in the median axis. The entrance constitutes a kind of airlock between two round-arched doors, above which a pierced floor could serve as a machicolation. A floor divided, from the outset, the vast ground-floor hall into two levels. Access to the upper floor is ensured by an external ramp set against the east façade. This arrangement, which takes no account of the defensive system, is not original. A trapdoor fitted with steps and made in the vault on the rear of the east façade, appears to have been the primitive access, probably ensured by a light ladder. There is every reason to think that a second system with mobile ladders must have existed in the east tower. The building was covered with a roof of two slopes whose upper ridge was borne by two broken diaphragm arches. On the exterior, the median buttress of the south façade is hollowed out from a certain height up to the upper storey, thus forming a kind of sheath whose use is still poorly defined. Before the east façade and in its upper part, two arches laid in voussoirs are supported on the corner buttresses and on the central tower. It is probable that these arches originally supported a curtain which encircled the building as the corbels in relief seem to indicate. Forming part of the defensive system, the four corner buttresses were arranged as look-outs. Their upper part corresponds to a small lodge, protected by a guard-rail, and to which one gains access from the upper floor by a narrow passage.