France Guide
The Massif Central
Cirque de Navacelles
Heading south from Millau the autoroute skirts the barren and windswept Causse du Larzac. Turn off at Le Caylar for the stunning road to ST-MAURICE-NAVACELLES. Wild box grows along the lanes, often meticulously clipped into hedges. Here and there among the scrubby oak and thorn, or driving along the road at milking time, you pass flocks of sheep. Occasional farmhouses materialize, like Les Besses – one of the few still in use – huge, self-contained and fortress-like, with the living quarters upstairs and the sheep stalls down below. St-Maurice-Navacelles, on the GR7 and GR74, is a small and sleepy hamlet with a fine World War I memorial by Paul Dardé at its centre. Its services include a summer-only shop and a gîte ( 
04.76.44.62.55) which also does meals. There's no official campsite, but if you ask they'll direct you to a grassy place by the cemetery, where a traditional glacière – a stone-lined pit for storing snow for use as ice before the days of refrigerators – has been restored. Its chief advantage is as a base for visiting the Cirque de Navacelles, 10km north on the D25 past the beautiful ruined seventeenth-century sheep farm of La Prunarède. The cirque is a widening in the 150-metre deep trench of the Vis gorges, formed by a now dry loop in the river that has left a neat pyramid of rock sticking up in the middle like a wheel hub. An ancient and scarcely inhabited hamlet survives in the bottom – a bizarre phenomenon in an extraordinary location, and you get literally a bird's-eye view of it from the edge of the cliff above. Both road and GR7 go through. Continuing to Le Vigan via Montdardier, you pass a prehistoric stone circle on the left of the road, a silent and evocative place, especially in a close causse mist.