Avon le Roches and the wild boars

In Avon-les-Roches, time moves, but more slowly. I mark it by the abandoned barns whose roofs sag in, in, until they vanish, as trees begin to rise in their place.

The little dim-lit, dusty boulangerie from which my cousins and I bought croissants and pains au chocolat in broken French is long gone too, its glorious fresh-bread smell with it. The village used to resound daily with the primeval braying of donkeys; only one such animal remains now.

But people still tend their vegetable patches. The night still chirrups with crickets. The honeyed stone that gives the village its name still gleams in the sun. The church, the oldest part of it 900 years old, remembers the tread of countless worshippers in the smooth worn steps that lead to its door. 

I have been roaming Avon-les-Roches for as long as I’ve been able to walk. My extended family, half English, half French, would gather there annually. Only when I was older did I realise how lucky we children were to have a free-range existence there. If I had a child now, I would allow them the same. We were trusted to use our sense when crossing quiet roads. We plucked long grass to offer to donkeys in their mud-churned pens in the sprawling farm next door, hunted for frogs and wasp spiders in the canalised brook, lifted every piece of corrugated iron we could find in the hope of surprising snakes, even tried fishing in a pond now dried up and shimmering with willows. 

One creature we never encountered was sanglier, wild boar. I knew them only as heads mounted on the walls of dark-panelled restaurants, be-tusked mouths frozen into snarls. Little could I have imagined that, thanks to them, one day I would become an author published by Bloomsbury. My book Groundbreakers: The Return of Britain’s Wild Boar charts the rewilding of boar in the UK and the impacts on people and nature, both positive and less so. I spoke to many people who had understandable practical reasons for wanting the boar gone, or at least heavily hunted. 

But I also met people whose fear edged into hysteria. Who genuinely believed a wild boar might try to eat them alive. 

We never saw hide nor hair of wild boar in Avon, and nor were our parents afraid for us. Their numbers have increased over the past few decades, to be sure. In places like Toulouse, which I visit in one of the chapters of my book, local hunters who grew up without ever seeing boar now find themselves unable to shoot enough of them during the open season (September to April). Yet even with my most recent visit to Avon – in September 2025 – I still haven’t glimpsed a French one. You may see the turned-over earth that is their calling card, or eyes in the dark, but you need not be afraid. They do whatever they can not to meet us. Even so, carefully at night, and heed the signs on the borders of woodland that warn of la chasse – the hunt. Eat wild boar with relish when it appears on local restaurant menus (a purely seasonal offering). With too few wolves in France, we are the boar’s only predator, and you won’t find a more sustainable meat.

Coming back to the village these days, I always feel a thrill that I didn’t as a child; the awareness of wild things that have endured all that has changed. Other life has become apparent too. A pair of kestrels nests each year in the old pigeon-hole that my uncle Bruno has preserved in the barn now converted to a stylish apartment. And nearer to the village heart, the brook has been re-wiggled, allowing it to flow more naturally and generating new profusions of plants and insects. 

Sometimes I even hear turtledoves. Their purring call is aromatherapy for the soul, a sound now achingly absent from most of Britain. Villages like Avon-les-Roches can be far more welcoming to nature than those of equivalent size in my country, their margins full of scrub whose very scruffiness holds the key to much wildlife. Long may this last. 

Long may wild boar, and kestrels, and people find respite here.