The Causse farm – massive, leaning against the terrain to protect itself from the cold winds, the same colour as its surroundings – is in perfect symbiosis with the landscape. Limestone rocks and flagstones were used for walls and roofs.
These houses were usually built without timber – wood being a material that is virtually absent from the Causse – using a system of vaults: a main vault supported by buttresses or other buildings, half-vaults supporting field barns. Under the residential floor, vaulted sheep barns carried the weight of the flagstone floor of the common room. The limestone roof also rested on a vault, its extremely heavy tilestones being laid without mortar or nails onto a bed of soil and gravel that covered the vault.
In spite of its desert-like appearance, the Causse was once upon a time the granary of the valleys: plains and dolines (rounded depressions) were cultivated, but so too were the now abandoned slopes, as can be seen by the low walls that demarcated fields. Clapas, or piles of small stones, were the result of stone-removal work carried out by agricultural labourers. Today all this is the realm of sheep: the dolines are farmed above all for fodder.