Castellas

The lower, present-day part of Montpeyroux, the districts of La Dysse and La Meillade, suggest that the village was inhabited in very ancient times. It is a single-street village, a way-station marking the boundary between the plateaux and the plain.

The position at a communications crossroads is perfect, with the ‘castellas’ playing a strategic part in controlling and levying tolls on the pilgrim’s way and the salt roads and with the town sitting astride the drailhe or transhumance route.

The La Dysse district was the first to be settled in Montpeyroux. However, because of the need to consolidate and protect the population in the middle ages, a fortified bourg was gradually built just beneath the château, taking people away from La Dysse, the barry (the Occitan word for faubourg or outlying district). In the 12th century, the parish church of Saint-Martin was transferred to the bourg. Like Aumelas, the ‘castellas’ of Montpeyroux is an outstanding group of fortified buildings.

Unfortunately, nothing remains of the fortress mentioned in 1097. In the 13th century the ‘castellas’ appears to have been able to accommodate the population of the village of Montpeyroux (a text, dated 1212, mentions streets and houses, and notarised deeds of the 15th century speak of a town within the ‘castellas’). During the Wars of Religion, it appears that the site gave shelter to people and their flocks who came to seek refuge there. In the 19th century, the building of a convent for Benedictine nuns, which it was demolished a few years later, wiped out all traces of the core which included the castle chapel of Saint-Pierre, the keep and the baronial dwelling that are all mentioned in 1212.

Since 30 July 1943 the whole of this unusual site, unmatched in the Hérault Valley because of the extent of its walls that are still standing, has been protected as a Historic Monument. The village of Montpeyroux as a whole enables us to better understand the issues relating to human settlement and the concentration of dwelling-places in different places in the context of their topography and the period at which they were built. It is a village which presents interesting and unusual features in terms of urban development. What is quite unique about it is that the depopulation of the fortified areas has not led to their destruction. In Montpeyroux (which means ‘the Mount of Stones’) more than anywhere else, the evolution of the human dwelling-places reveals its history to us.


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