Formed 500 million years ago, the shale of the Cévennes presents many different colors. It predominates in the Cévennes landscape of the one-eyed valley. The elders knew how to use shale to build their environment and to improve their living conditions, it is in the same spirit, that I use it in my turn. From the Greek schistos (which can be cracked), the shale is the rock resulting from the metamorphization of clay or marly sediments.
There are as many varieties of shale as there are clays and marls, so that their colors are very varied: blue, green, red, yellow, black. The schist debits, cleaves itself according to generally oblique planes in relation to the plan of the statification: the plans of schistasity. Slates and slate are part of this same family of rocks.