My first encounter with dry stone huts was in the seventies, when my parents bought an old donkey house near Uzès, remodelled as a vacation house by a belgian gay model turned into a carpenter. Since I was getting bored up there, I used to ride my minivélo with my little brother on the back, and we were laughing on the many small roads, visiting garbage dumps, breakers yards, pine tree forests with red soil. I could see up and there the dry stone huts, which I liked very much, but they were often filled with dirty rubbish. My obsessions about sheperds having tremendously increased the last months, here are some beautiful dry stone huts and houses. They have different names, depending on the region they are: borie, capitelle.





Here you can see the dry stone huts of the Skellig Michael island in Irlande. We were close to this place the last week. It is supposed to be a very old monastery from the early centuries, but specialists say that it's impossible these constructions without any cement remain in the blowing wind and incessant rain. Werner Herzog shot the last sequence of Herz & Glass (1976) there. Early irish monks were travellers. They founded many monasteries in Europe. Saint Arbogast, the first bishop of Strasbourg, was irish, like Saint Colomban.