Across Corsica — in the footsteps of Dorothy Carrington

Dorothy Carrington came to Corsica by way of the London Underground. Her lover, Sir Francis Rose, possibly misjudging the romantic backdrop, proposed on the tube. It was the depths of the second world war. The two were impoverished members of bohemian London, Francis a surrealist painter, Dorothy a writer and curator; later they claimed they lived chiefly on dandelion leaves that flourished amid the wreckage of the Blitz.

Francis pushed the boat out to celebrate their engagement, and took Dorothy to a sailors’ café down on the docks. The waiter serving the prenuptial fry-up was one Jean Cesari, a Corsican. He spent most of the evening regaling the two with tales of his homeland, of dream prophecies, of mysterious standing stones, of mountain villages, of nomadic shepherds, of an island remote from the modern world.

In the footsteps of . . . 

This is the latest in a series in which writers are guided by notable earlier travellers. For more, see ft.com/footsteps

Dorothy was smitten, though perhaps more with Corsica than with Francis. Three years later, with the war at an end, she set off for the island with her husband in tow carrying two suitcases full of sugar and coffee, both in short supply after the war. “Corsica came into view with the dawn,” she wrote breathlessly of her first glimpse of the island at the rail of their boat. “It swam in the early morning mist . . . taking substance between sea and sky.” 

Visitors have a habit of falling for Corsica. Everyone from James Boswell and Edward Lear to Beyoncé has been captivated. Dorothy’s marriage to Francis eventually foundered. It probably didn’t help that he was gay, and perhaps ambivalent about standing stones. Back in England, he spent his later years in a village in Surrey, where he attended church — ever the surrealist — wearing a Mexican sombrero and leading a cat on a gold chain.

But for Dorothy, Corsica lasted a lifetime. She became an expatriate fixture of the island, travelling its length and breadth in old buses, and living for years in a renovated pigeon loft in Ajaccio. She wrote numerous books about Corsica, including Granite Island, which won the Heinemann Award in 1971 and is still in print as a Penguin Classic. She died in Ajaccio at the age of 91 in 2002, in the embrace of the island she loved.  

Dorothy would agree on the two principles for visitors to Corsica. Never come in July and August, when the heat and the crowds are ridiculous; and don’t get stuck on the coast. Saint-Florent, L’île Rousse, Calvi, Ajaccio and Porto-Vecchio are typical French Mediterranean resorts with palm-lined corniches, pavement cafés and summer hotels and apartments piled up above yacht-filled marinas. But in these woozy, sun-drenched, beach-lounger towns, you could, frankly, be anywhere in the Mediterranean.

Corsicans thought little of their coast in the past. It was a dangerous place, the sea an easy highway for North African pirates, Genoese galleys and boisterous Vandals. In those days, a junior member of the family got the posting down on the shore to grow a few tomatoes, dry some fish and play dead when the invaders arrived. Women traditionally inherited the worthless coastal lands, while men owned the highlands. If the female line is now rolling in cash from tourist developments, and the male line trailing after sheep, it is probably only fair dues.

The islanders have always preferred their mountain villages, and to engage with Corsica, to get a feeling for the island, you need to follow them up those wonderful winding roads, into the forests of holm oak and chestnut trees, where empty upland valleys are enclosed by rock peaks and gorgeous stone villages are set like balconies over mountain panoramas. This is the Corsica that Dorothy loved, and would still recognise. This is where Corsican identity is rooted. 

Dorothy wrote of Corsica “heaving into the sky”. The island is often called a mountain in the sea. It has 120 peaks over 2,000 metres, the highest being Monte Cinto, at 2,706 metres, sometimes armoured with snow until well into summer. One of the toughest and most compelling long-distance mountain treks in Europe — the famous GR20 — runs down the island’s spine. The record for its end-to-end completion is 30 hours and 25 minutes, though less hardcore hikers might want to give it a week.  

Early one morning I drove up to the Bavella pass above Zonza. The road felt like a backdrop for a John Ford Western — dramatic cliffs, strange rock formations, some ominous sense of what might lie around the next bend. Far below, the River Solanzara tumbled over white boulders into turquoise pools. Between the trunks of laricia pine, I glimpsed the serrated “Aiguilles” — needles — of the Bavella massif, immortalised in Edward Lear’s melodramatic etchings. This morning, Bavella was rising out of the lap of clouds.

At the height of the pass, I found a shepherd lighting a candle at the shrine of Notre-Dame de la Neige, Our Lady of the Snows. A white plaster statue, Our Lady looked like a shop mannequin teetering on top of a dangerous pile of rocks. The shepherd looked like Clark Gable, to whom wardrobe had given the wrong hat.   

A man in his sixties, he spoke in a hoarse whisper, as if imparting secrets. I asked about the transhumance, the nomadic movement of livestock, still prevalent in Corsica, from the rich summer valleys high in the mountains to the lower winter pastures.  

The shepherd laid his hand on my arm, leaning forward. “The pigs seem to be in charge of things,” he whispered. “The animals know where they are going. We just trail along behind to check if any are missing. Once the pigs get going, the sheep and the goats follow. The cattle are more stubborn, the unkind would say stupid, but they hate being left behind.”  

I asked which season he preferred. Summer in the high mountains, he replied. “The animals are happier here, good grass, less people. No one likes the coast,” he murmured, “except the French, who seem to enjoy toasting themselves.” No Corsican would describe himself as French. The independence movement has a long history here and there is much antipathy to French rule.

I set off walking with a guide, Julie Michel Chaffurin, climbing through the woods. Watery sunlight trickled over thick carpets of ferns. The air was heavy with the scent of pine. Straight as columns, the trunks of the trees are used for masts, while their gum waterproofs the hulls of Corsican boats. A bird was singing — a sittelle corse, an endemic nuthatch. At a high viewpoint, we seemed to be at eye level with the Bavella massif, its perpendicular flanks rising in sheer metallic precipices like a gigantic piece of sculpture.

Julie was talking about the mazzeri, the dream hunters of Corsica. Dorothy was obsessed with the mazzeri and wrote a book about their dark arts. Julie explained that they are said to leave their beds at night to go hunting, and kill the first animal they encounter. In the face of the animal — though some say in the entrails — they see the face of a fellow villager. Within the year, that person will die. It is not a curse but a prophecy; the mazzeri are predicting a death, not causing it. Some people insist that they never actually leave their beds but merely dream their hunts. Others claim to have seen them creeping about at night on their deadly missions. Still others believe they are capable of bilocation — of being in two places at once.

It is said that the mazzeri were improperly baptised, that some words of the service were omitted by the priest, or incorrectly repeated by the godparents. They were active in Dorothy’s time and, depending on who you listen to, are still active in the mountains today. The Church disapproves, and modern generations are less likely to believe such fancies, but in mountain villages people still burn immortelle, a Corsican herb, in front of their houses on July 31, a day traditionally associated with the mazzeri, to ward off malevolent influences.   

It was Julie who recommended the megaliths at Cauria. Like Dorothy, she is passionate about Corsica’s prehistoric monuments. Corsica could be a setting for the Asterix stories. The island is littered with mysterious menhirs and dolmens. You keep expecting Obelix to appear from behind a tree in his striped pantaloons and pigtails.

Cauria lies in the deep south, in the Sartenais region. Pirates made off with much of the district’s population in the 15th and 17th centuries and it remains an empty, haunting landscape. Like a lot of Corsica, it is cloaked in maquis, that thick low-lying aromatic Mediterranean scrub — myrtle, yellow-flowering broom, pungent lentisk with its crimson berries, cyclamen and hellebore, rosemary and lavender. I followed a dirt track that cut down between the slopes of maquis. Don’t tell Avis, but the deep ruts and chasms of the track were not strictly appropriate for a compact category of hire car.

After half a mile or so, I left the car in a hedge and proceeded on foot, emerging eventually on the valley floor, where 11 menhirs, the Alignment of Stantari, stood in military file in the hot sun. Dating from about 2000BC, they ranged from barely a metre to well over two metres in height. Most were worn smooth of any features, though some bore the ghost of a face and a diagonal sword. A couple had a phallic outline. Like many prehistoric monuments, much about them was unknown and probably unknowable.

Following a faint path, I found a second group tilting at various angles in a dappled copse of trees. I was alone here. There was no gate, no ticket office, and no one else about, just the quivering heat and the hum of cicadas.      

Archaeologists have numerous theories — that standing stones had a ritual purpose, that their alignments might be astrological. But standing stones are mute and there is no certainty about what they were, what they meant. Dorothy believed they were symbols of dead people; she wrote of the sense of “a crowd of ghosts or half-created men”. And on this still afternoon in the shade of the trees, the stones felt like memorials of the distant dead. The atmosphere was that of a forgotten country churchyard. I thought of Gray’s “Elegy”. “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid/ Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire . . . Here lies his head upon the lap of Earth.” 

My last night in Corsica found me in Bonifacio. The town clings to a cliff at the southern tip of the island, the rock beneath its feet eroded dramatically by wind and sea. Several houses have already lost their grip and fallen into the waves below. The maze of narrow streets is lined with tall Genoese tenements and brooding churches built by an assortment of invaders. Above the town battlements, I gazed across the dark straits to the lights on the northern coast of Sardinia.

In the nave of Église Saint-Dominique, a church probably built by the Templars in the 13th century, I took my seat for a concert of traditional Corsican singing known as Polyphonies Corses. Plaster angels and saints peered down at us. A trio of men stood by the altar. They looked like farmers or tradesmen, broad-chested and big-shouldered. They sang unaccompanied, their harmonies soaring into the vaults of the church.

They were singing paghjella, an emotional secular style of Corsican song that deals with love and loss, with grief and lament. The three male voices weaved around one another. One carried the melody. Another anchored the harmonies with deep bass notes, while a third embellished them with a counterpoint of fluctuating notes. Without instruments, in the acoustics of the church, the effect was startling and powerful. The songs seem to reverberate in your marrow.    

Like the menhirs, the roots of this unique musical form are much discussed. Musicologists hear the influence of Genoese madrigals, Gregorian plainchant, the call of the Arab muezzin, even Roman liturgy. But everyone agrees about its antiquity. There is the persistent idea that paghjella is music from some distant pre-Christian past, that these harmonies may be those of Dorothy’s crowd of ghosts. “It was like hearing a voice from the depths of the earth. . .” she wrote, “from a beginning that one never dares believe is accessible.”

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning