Grove Koger

During the time that Maggie and I stayed in Avignon in 2008, we booked a tour with a local guide that took us to the little hilltop towns of Gordes and Les Baux as well as the Pont du Gard. In architectural terms, the Pont is a bridge, but not the usual sort. More specifically, It’s an aqueduct bridge over the Gard (or Gardon) River designed to carry water from a reservoir fed by springs near the town of Uzès to the city we know today as Nîmes.

The Pont was completed in 18 BCE under the supervision of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the deputy of the emperor Augustus. According to David A. Hanser’s Architecture of France (Greenwood, 2006), it was expertly designed to withstand the strong winds that blow through the Gard Valley as well as the flood waters that can race through the river gorge itself. Its lowest tier is the most massive and its highest the lightest. It’s about 160 feet tall at its highest point, but was built without mortar. The entire aqueduct is about 30 miles long, but constructed with such skill that it drops less than two feet per mile, assuring a steady, manageable stream from Uzès.

Writing in her book In the Rhône Country (Dutton, 1910), Rose G. Kingsley described the Pont standing “majestic and aloof in the solitude of its lonely valley against the intensely blue sky.” We weren’t the only tourists visiting that day in late June, so we couldn’t enjoy the sense of solitude that Kingsley had experienced, but nothing else seemed to have changed in a century.

□□□

The image at the top of today’s post is one of Maggie’s photographs of the Pont. The second is a 1923 poster designed by E. Couronneau for the Compagnie des Chermins de fer du P.L.M, and the third is a watercolor by David Gentleman for the cover of the Faber edition of Lawrence Durrell’s Quinx (1985), the final volume of his Avignon Quintet.