This is a bit embarrassing, but it shows what happens when you make assumptions about a place new to you.

One enormous blunder. One not as ridiculous. But each could have been avoided had I asked around before I hit “publish”.

Let’s start with the smaller mistake.

We spotted some odd patches on the Google map of the region, out in an area we occasionally walk past.

One of the trapezoidal patches was blue-ish, and the other was vagule purple. Well, you can have a look at the original item and see.

We thought … assumed … one of them was a reservoir and the other, the purplish one, was … well, we weren’t sure, but we were thinking it was perhaps the dumping of left-over liquid from local vineyards.

Turns out, both bodies of “water” are sewage-treatment ponds. We were up there again today, and wondered how we failed to notice the smell the first time we went past.

The second was a bigger and sillier blunder.

We climbed to the top of a nearby ridge, pushed through a thin band of trees and undergrowth … and nearly toppled 100 feet down the side of a cliff in a deep rocky hole we (OK, I) decided was the Grand Canyon of the Languedoc.

Probably tectonic activity from way back that produced some rock shoved higher and some neighboring rock that didn’t rise, creating this dramatic, puzzling place a couple of miles square, with high cliffs nearly surrounding it.

Well, actually …

The place was previously a quarry.

Well, of course.

Forget ancient tectonic activity. It was a seam of rock — marble or maybe basalt, used in buildings throughout the area or maybe just pulverized to use on road beds or even as a mineral-seeping form of fertilizer placed around area vines.

We found out about this blunder when a local resident warned the townsfolk about the chance that a closed quarry might be reopened, and said he had a petition people living in the town could sign.

Apparently, the quarry created some noise, and dust from the processing of the rock would occasionally drift over the town.

“Hmmm …” was my response to hearing this, and the wheels began to turn.

A quarry, the sort of commercial site that creates big holes in the ground, nearby the town, close enough to cause agitation …

So I asked, and, oh yeah, that was the old quarry that I had dubbed the Grand Canyon of the Languedoc.

It would have been just another patch of rolling hills and vineyards had not somebody started digging the rock out of there a century or two ago. Lots and lots of rock, over the years.

And, by the way, the town just east of the quarry had a rock processing plant which still exists. (Had wondered what that thing was doing there.)

So, face red.

I will try to do more checking when it comes to this “south of France” stuff.

This country has lots and lots of surprising geographical formations, some of them very near to us.

But some of those odd spots on the map can be explained away as every-day occurrences and do not need analysis via flights of fancy from the new resident.