Some of you may think I’m milking this aqueduct I ride by occasionally pretty heavily, but I’m taking a gamble that there aren’t many of you out there that read all my entries. Here goes another one!
Today’s ride was a now-regular excursion, north of Teyran into the bliss of vineyarded hills. For a little background on what I found today, check out these posts. There you’ll find a couple pictures of an aqueduct built in the 1600s, unused and unloved today.
https://gerrypatt.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/another-roman-bridge-interlude/
https://gerrypatt.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/speaking-of-headwinds/
Here’s what I happened upon today.
I never put too too much thought into this before, but what we see of these constructions today is usually the ‘bridge’ part of the aqueduct, but presumably a large part of them were just little like drainage pipes on, or maybe even under, the ground.
This small section, on the other side of the road I was on, looked more aqueduct-ish.
The only other thing of note (other than the glorious weather) was this field filled with piles of pulled-out vines, ready to be burned. I wonder why this needs to be done. disease? Changing variety? Going ‘bio’? I’m open to suggestions.
The Vicious Cycle 
Could be the vines are part of the EU-based reduction of wine growing. There’s a huge surplus of low-quality wine produced all over Europe, with France, Spain, and Italy being the chief offenders. Now, why this isn’t turned into biofuel instead of actually growing maize for that purpose and depleting the soil thereby is a subject for your friendly Brussels bureaucrat, but wine acreage has to be reduced by a hefty percentage in the next few years.