Cirque de Troumouse
— the meadow the mountains lean over.
Not only on a wall.
“The widest of the three great cirques above Gavarnie. The grass floor sits near 2,200 metres; the wall climbs another nine hundred to Pic de la Munia. A toll road runs from Héas up to the Auberge du Maillet and from there the path goes on by foot. A small white Virgin stands on a rock near the high point of the hike, placed there in 1889 and somehow still there after the 1915 avalanche that took the chapel down at Héas. In summer the marmots have run of the place and the meadow goes to lily. By October the snow has it back.
Cirque de Troumouse, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Cirque de Troumouse sits in the Hautes-Pyrénées department of southern France's Occitanie region, the central of three glacial cirques that mark the French side of the Mont Perdu massif. The floor opens at roughly 2,200 metres above sea level and runs about four kilometres rim to rim, the widest of the three; Cirque de Gavarnie and Cirque d'Estaubé are its neighbours to the west. The rim is held by Pic de la Munia at 3,133 metres and a chain of three-thousand-metre summits that form the Franco-Spanish border. The site lies inside the Parc national des Pyrénées and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage property Pyrénées – Mont Perdu, inscribed in 1997 and extended in 1999.
On a rocky outcrop near the high point of the hike, at about 2,115 metres, stands a small white statue of the Virgin, placed there in 1889. An avalanche in 1915 destroyed the chapel down at Héas; the statue, by local account, was recovered from the snow intact. The bowl itself was scooped by ice during the Quaternary glaciations, and the bedrock that holds it together is the same Cretaceous limestone that carries Mont Perdu's three sister summits across the border. Three small tarns known as the Lacs des Aires lie on the floor; in dry late-summer years they almost vanish into the grass.
The mountain road from Héas up to the Auberge du Maillet opens in late spring; from the auberge the cirque can be reached on foot in about an hour, or in season by a small tractor-drawn train that runs across the plateau. The summer floor belongs to grazing herds and to marmots, with Pyrenean lilies coming through the grass in July. By October the meadows yellow and the first snow returns to the upper rim. The road closes for the winter and the cirque is left to ski-tourers and isards. June through early September is the typical window for a weekday visit.