The high Cévennes do not look like the south of France that most visitors imagine. This is a land of schist and granite ridges folded one behind the other, cloaked in chestnut woods and heather, with deep valleys where the villages cling to terraces held up by dry-stone walls. The Col des Faisses, at a little over a thousand metres, is a quiet saddle in this world, a place where the road tops a ridge and the forest opens to a view of blue hills fading into distance. It is far from any large town, and that is much of its charm.
The Cévennes have a history of resistance. In the early eighteenth century, Protestant peasants known as Camisards rose against Louis XIV's persecution, and fought a guerrilla war in these hills from 1702 to 1710, hiding in caves and forest and ambushing royal troops. A hundred and sixty years later, in 1878, the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson walked through the region with a donkey called Modestine and wrote Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, which put the area on the map for English-speaking visitors. Parts of his route are now a long-distance trail, the GR70.
The riding is slow, intimate and rewarding. The roads in this part of the Cévennes are narrow, with plenty of tight bends and blind corners, and the surface is often patchy, with loose gravel on the edges and the occasional rockfall. Traffic is light, especially outside July and August, and you can ride for an hour without seeing another vehicle. Weather can change quickly. Autumn storms, called épisodes cévenols, bring heavy rain, and in winter the high roads can ice over or close. Spring and early autumn are the best times, with the chestnut leaves turning gold in October.
The sweet chestnut was once the staple food of the region, the bread tree of the poor, and the old terraces and drying sheds can still be seen. Nearby Mont Aigoual, at 1,567 metres, has a weather observatory that has been in operation since the late nineteenth century, and the whole region is protected as a national park and part of a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, the Causses and Cévennes.
Services are thin on the ground. Florac, about fourteen kilometres away, has fuel, cafés and shops, and Alès, a larger town, is about thirty kilometres further. Fill up before you head into the hills, carry water, and expect to take longer than the map suggests.