Where a mole makes a dozen neat heaps of soil, a 'rat taupier' or rat-mole makes a hundred. Brown rodents 5½ inches long with a 2½ inch tail, small ears and eyes, they eat roots, in the garden munching their way underground along the rows of vegetables. Touch the carrot plant that looks limp and it falls over, revealing an empty hole where the carrot should have been. In the fields, soil from their hills contaminates the hay and damages machinery. Like voles and lemmings they often increase to plague proportions.

Until quite recently, farming families would move in summer to high farmsteads known as 'burons'. Their dairy cows cropped the sweet mountain pastures; milk was turned into St Nectaire or Cantal cheese. At the beginning of this century there were a thousand active burons, now there are a dozen. Will burons suffer the same fate as Britain's drove roads or the Dartmoor warreners' homes, overgrown and fallen into disrepair yet used within living memory? In spring, all over the Massif Central beef herds are still moved up to the high grazings, a tradition known as the 'estive'. In Allanche it is celebrated the last Saturday in May. On their way to the mountains, groups of Salers walk along the main street, tricolour ribbons decorating their horns, bells clanging. Stalls are set up, musicians play, there is a holiday air. First prize in the raffle is a pedigree heifer.

Further south sheep are milked to make Roquefort cheese. In the greener north, flocks contain tens rather than hundreds because of the high cost of fencing small fields. From May to September, on the Puy de Sancy 2,200 ewes, dozens of small flocks run together, are looked after by an old shepherd who lives in a hut with his two dogs for company. Nowadays few people are willing to spend months alone, with no doctor or café nearby, without even a television. Snow can dust the peaks from September, the last drifts disappearing in July. Cantal, in mid Auvergne, has grazing land higher than Ben Nevis, but in other ways, the scenery, the wild flowers, the superb walking, even the rainfall, it is like Devon, on a grander scale; the National Park, eighty miles north to south, is Europe's largest. From a farming point of view, a Devon dairy farmer is likely to be in his thirties, single handed and milking eighty cows or more. His Cantal counterpart is older, has half the number of cows and can count on family help. Half a dozen men and women with wooden rakes gleaning the last wisps of hay for the baler is a common sight. A direct result of small herds is that animal health seems better. In spite of cattle standing immobile all winter, it is unusual to see a lame cow. Reportedly the average British dairy cow is culled at six, many Cantal herds have twenty year olds.

Little artificial fertiliser is used. In the warm summer days, grass thick with flowers and herbs makes quickly into sweet, green hay. A third cut is often taken as late as the end of September. Cows graze the aftermaths dotted with purple autumn crocus before coming in to winter in traditional stone shippens. Partly to avoid keeping the family at the other end of the building awake all night, the cows' collars and bells are hung up in lines on the wall. Enough hay for winter plus a bit spare is stacked in the loft above. Five months cattle spend, tied by a chain round the neck, before hurling themselves ecstatically out again onto the freshly green spring grass.

Perhaps a cow with a bell round her neck, spending the days looking after her calf while eating gentians and wild thyme is not the most efficient of systems. But it produces food worth eating, gives employment in an area where there is little else, it is natural, sustainable and a joy to see.

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