History of streams

This could be the beginning of the story of the Loire. It could begin there: from these primordial waters which rise from the ground and fill the myriad peat marshes dotted around Mont Gerbier-de-Jonc. From these sources, a series of rills – tiny rivulets of water that flow among the moss, marsh marigolds and other rockfoils – water the peat marshes and pool together in the very first stream. From this unassuming stream, then the next, the Aigue Nègre, whose dark waters mix with the Loire and its history – sometimes seen as its true source, and at others as its first tributary.

But let’s return to the beginning: how many anonymous sources are there? Hiding behind the banners of the three “official” ones (the Authentic, the Geographic and the True)? Forty? Fifty? Maybe even a hundred? We will never know for sure. IGN maps, incidentally, simply indicate “sources of the Loire”, bearing no relevance to the local “war of the Loires” which seeks a single story in a place where multiple stories overlap.

The source of a myth

The myriad sources of the Loire enchant us by their mystical past just as much as their present realities disenchant us. Yesterday clear as a mountain spring, today increasingly turbid, how we perceive them is changing as we discover, among other ills, their level of microplastic contamination. And we change too, when we learn that the emerging Loire is not being spared the new order brought into play by our plastic-driven lifestyles. This is the case right along its course, at its surface and deep down in its sediments. We also change when we understand that the Loire is not what we believed. That, rather than a water resource or an inert landscape, it is something else entirely – a different Loire altogether, multifaceted, living and reactive. The stories of this river “that rises and falls among the moss” are... infinite.