A Taller, circuit à la découverte de "Lo Camin de Hé"

What is there in common between a festival hall, a municipal foyer, a meeting room or a people's house? The variety of terms used to describe these places of sociability has perhaps contributed to hiding a particular architectural richness. Albert Pomade, an architect from the beginning of the 20th century, worked all his life to build the Landes heritage. We owe him the famous Dax bullring, but also many other buildings of the most diverse kinds, such as the Basque-Landes villas on the Boulevard Carnot, still in Dax, or more than twenty projects for meeting rooms. The village hall in Taller remains a witness to the influence of the Belle Epoque on an architecture with conventional forms but brightened up by cheerful female figures.

Abbot Victor Doussy (1878-1953), a little-known poet, spent 32 years working in the commune of Taller and did a great deal of work on the conservation of the church. A friend of Francis Jammes and Emmanuel Delbousquet, his taste for the arts in general was not always viewed favourably by the ecclesiastical hierarchy, which rejected his literary inclinations. If his friends, anxious to keep him drinking past midnight, sometimes delayed the clocks, he always managed to celebrate his morning mass. Here and there he was reproached for his "atheistic" frequentations. But these so-called digressions are not enough to hide the greatness of the soul of a man who wrote in one of his poems, Solitude: "If I possessed everything one could wish for to be happy, I would lack the essential: the happiness of others".

The presence of this fountain was attested to in 1863 by the parish priest Légé. People used to come here to ask Saint-Eutrope to cure rheumatism. Until 1920, on 30 April or the following Sunday, a procession was organised from the church to this spring. In the 19th century, Taller had three healing springs: the fountain of Saint Eutrope, the fountain of Saint John and the fountain of Houn de le Leit (the milk fountain). The latter was intended for women who had difficulty breastfeeding.

On 27 July 1944, Henri Ferrand, a young Resistance fighter aged 24, consulted the departure sign: "Ammunition train for Rennes, departure at 9pm". He went to the tracks and put down his two plastic blocks. A few minutes later, a huge explosion shook the Laluque station. This supply train, of capital importance to the Germans, had been slowly supplied via the ammunition depot at Taller, the second most important on French territory. Today there is nothing left of this depot, except for some ammunition found from time to time in the forest. The route of the old railway line is still visible, however, hidden in the vegetation.