France- Tourism and living history

[LongViewFarm]

I did the usual tourist things in France, and some more interesting stuff. One of my favorite things was the day we visited two living history sites in the Breton area of France. The first was a village recreated as it was around the year 1000ad. Very easy to see the few steps away from hunter gathering that they were, with simple homes showing the very early timber framing with ‘cricks’ made from bent trees and opportunistic limbs. They also brought their animals in with them into these rudimentary thatch roofed huts, and practiced a small scale, yet quite technical bit of agriculture, like crop rotation and rotational grazing. Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures here.
the second site was from Breton during the period from 1500-1900 and this had a lot of cool things to see as well as demos. I took lots of pictures, and got a short video of the horse powered chopper at work. Unfortunately they did not work the horse for more than 4 turns around the wheel. I’ve put more pictures up on Facebook, but will put a few here, and the video.
During the chopper demo, the blades were completely exposed and unguarded so tourists could see how it worked, and the hostest even had a volunteer from the crowd pushing the (thistle?) into the machine- a very different experience from here in USA. Liability insurance is less of an issue there, I am told.
Cheers.

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[LongViewFarm]

I do not know why they are upside down. Sorry!

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