BY chance I came across an extraordinary series of black and white photographs entitled Voices of the Vivarais – a picture study of a way of life in the Ardeche. They were taken by Tessa Traeger, probably the finest still life photographer of her generation, in the late 1990s and beyond, but only exhibited and published in 2010.

Although 81 now, her voice has the lightness of a girl’s and her enthusiasm leaps still from her present photographs and the joie de vivre with which she shows them.

To capture the lives of the peasants – again, a term used with pride in France – she went high into the mountains to a life essentially unchanged for centuries.

For those who don’t know this area such a trek, even now, can be daunting and rather otherworldly.

Perhaps it’s odd to use such words for an area where backpackers, caravanners and outdoor sports enthusiasts bottle-neck the towns in summer and early autumn.

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They come to the gorges channelled through the mountains; climb through the caves and fling themselves into white water rafting in the fiercely rushing waters of its geography.

But perhaps I look at it through my own experience which has left me with an uneasy, unhappy feeling whenever I have driven into its embrace.

I have always ended up there on stories which have never fully concluded, always with a somehow sinister edge and always at the year’s tail end or beginning.

The last was to see the partner of an English woman, murdered in her house by her handyman lover. There are those who still doubt that, although he was jailed for the crime.

Her body has never been found in the forested, unvisited depths of the area.

The overgrown driveway to the farmhouse, on a damp, dark day was uninviting and gloomy, masking the little light available when I arrived.

Interviewing in a room where bloodstains still spoke of an horrendous attack, and no amount of commercial cleaning had scraped the wooden floors of the dragged body outline, was unnerving.

Job done and driving away I looked up at the mist shrouded hills, the tracks to God knows where and thought of the body of a once vibrant party woman wedged in cave, rock or gully. Perhaps never to be found.

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Thankfully there was nothing more to keep me in this brooding, forbidding area and I turned the car to drive swiftly away to my own, gentler, but equally mysterious in its own way, Tarn-et-Garonne.

So I turned to Ms Traeger’s images expecting them to confirm my own feelings.

Far from it. Her portraits show the men and women holding out their work with pride: The saucisson maker who sells to the great Parisian restaurants; the chestnut gatherer, the bread kneader, the herder and milker of goats.

At first, she’d concentrated on their hands holding their produce. But seeing their dismay when showing them initial Polaroids with their heads cut off, she showed more in their full glory.

But it’s the hands that have the most impact. As brown and gnarled as the earth, the fingernails often begrimed with dirt, they cradle their wares as tenderly as holding a nestling.

I know these hands. I see them in my own farming neighbours; see where the arthritis has formed knots in the joints and turned the fingers inwards; splayed fingernails widened and ridged.

I know these faces: Wrinkled too soon from hours of toil in the field: Eyes both mocking and kind, looking upon we souls who live a pastiche of French life in their unwanted, difficult farmhouses.

One of the Vouvrais pictures shows the back of an elderly woman, pinny and cardigan wrapped, walking a goat up the hill.

The photographer, seeing her love for her goats, remarked on a pretty white one.

The woman laughed and told her to enjoy her for she had no use for her and she would be eaten next week.

Traeger remarked on the mixture of love and lack of sentimentality that she witnessed in the relationship between beast and owner; at odds with our too sentimental views.

Here too I have seen a neighbour crooning to her young pig who ran to her touch and head rubbed himself around her hand in an ecstasy of love.

He would be slaughtered for the next holiday feast and neighbours would be invited to join in the cutting up of the beast into joints and sausages. I’d declined.

Tentatively, I had asked if she felt no pity, no sorrow. She eyed me, knowing I had not long come from the city where meat is carefully packaged to give no clue to its provenance.

"He has had the best of lives," she said, scratching his snout as he gazed at her adoringly.

"He has had the best of food and the best of what we’ve eaten too. Yes, his life will end but it will be kind and we will think of him with love when we eat him and give thanks."

I look again at Traeger’s images. She was usually in the pages of Vogue but these are her legacy.

Harsh, unsentimental, factual, often seemingly cruel….but the essence of La France Profonde.