Let’s pretend that we’ve never heard of the Dordogne. We’ll chuck out the prism of “Dordogneshire”, through which the region appears as a summerhouse extension of the home counties, and come at it with an innocent eye.
What do we see? A land of forests, green hills and fields, cut by rivers and overlooked by cliffs — the whole apparently purpose-designed for mellow wellbeing. The countryside remains defined by old- fashioned farming, speckled with villages and small towns that testify to the understanding between man and landscape.
Time has, though, also given the region a tougher texture. The Hundred Years’ war and later religious unpleasantness both blasted this way: the abundance of castles was not thrown up to enhance the view. The Dordogne was for years an impoverished backwater, prey to peasant revolt and unreason. It’s barely a century since villagers at Hautefaye bunged a local noble on a bonfire, roasted and then ate him.
But isolation also ensured that the place remained untouched. And today, quite naturally, past backwardness translates into present wealth, from the tourist business. Which is why you should go soon, before the summer crowds pack in. Enough sites are open to make this a trip of tough choices. And, as you wander remote upland lanes, the only people you’ll meet will be in housecoats or wellies, not Barbour jackets.
This circuit is best for arriving at Bergerac on an afternoon flight, then hiring a car.
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DAY ONE
Not much time this afternoon, so it’s a quick trot through a slow, vine-cloaked landscape to Issigeac, a sinuous, somnolent medieval settlement whose vast gothic church looks ready to swallow it whole.
From here, the woodland, pastures and comely hills confirm that man and nature long ago sorted out their differences. It’s neither wild nor tamed, but something in-between.
So you’ll doubtless be smiling as you ascend the hill to Beaumont, a doughty little bastide town founded in 1272, when the English ran the place. The Dordogne was frontier territory between French and English interests. Both sides put up bastides — essentially, medieval new towns — first to ensure economic control of their region, then to defend it.
What is astonishing, at Beaumont as elsewhere, is that the chequerboard layout and many original buildings survive — and appear as adapted to contemporary purposes as they were to medieval ones. Country life courses through the arcaded central square.
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Don’t miss the great fortified church, within which you may spot a deliriously ornate reliquary containing a single tooth from the mouth of St Martial. Contemplating holy relics is, of course, one of the key pleasures of continental Catholic churches, and nowhere more so than up the road at Cadouin.
Nestling between wooded slopes, here is another superb and settled gold-stone village (from now on, we’ll take the loveliness of villages as read, or we’ll never get through). Its centrepiece is a 12th-century Cistercian abbey — within whose cloisters lurks one of the bigger cons in Christendom.
This is a large piece of cloth that, for centuries, was hallowed as Christ’s head-shroud. Pilgrims showed up by the thousand, assuring Cadouin’s prosperity — until 1933, when the cloth was shown to be of 11th-century Egyptian origin and dedicated to Allah. It remains laid out reverentially, as if the church can’t quite let it go.
Check into Le Prieuré (Rue St Suaire; 00 33 5 53 24 18 37, www.priorygetaway.com; doubles from £36), where Derrick and Anne Primm, an Anglo-French couple, have created a splendid chambre d’hôte in former abbey buildings slotted into the top of the village. Dine down the street at the Restaurant de l’Abbaye (Place de l’Abbaye; from £11).
DAY TWO
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First, tack along the Dordogne, here grown wide and contemplative, towards St Cyprien, diving off into the winding lanes at the sign for Les Milandes. Drive up the steep single street to the fine Renaissance chateau at the top and reflect: all this — hamlet, chateau, superb views across the river — once belonged to the black music-hall star Josephine Baker, celebrated for dancing topless in a micro-skirt fashioned from artificial bananas. Paris in the 1920s had never seen anything so exotic. It covered her with money.
Post-war, she developed Milandes as a holiday complex, and as a home for her Rainbow tribe of adopted children. In the 1960s, the enterprise went bust. Now, the chateau (£5.40) is an engrossing memorial to Baker’s extraordinary career (the banana skirt is in there; so is a picture of her walking her leopard). A photo in the kitchen shows her forced eviction in 1968. One of the 20th-century’s greatest stars is huddled on the doorstep in her nightgown.
Pop along the river to Castelnaud castle (£5), an altogether sterner, medieval item that overlooks the village like an unforgiving seigneur. English-held during the Hundred Years’ war, it stared unblinking at Beynac, a French stronghold equally dramatic on its cliff across the way. It still does, though now the rivalry is over visitor numbers.
Once in the place, however, and surrounded by startling reproductions of medieval weaponry, you can feel its latent desire to loose off a few boulders at more or less anyone. A sense of power persists.
If manicured box trees, thousands of them, are your thing, continue to the hanging gardens of Marqueyssac (£4.75), spread across a rocky spur just over the river. Then repair for lunch to La Roque-Gageac. This is the loveliest part of the valley, with looping river one side, cliffs straight up the other and the gold-stone village jammed between the two, scrambling up and over itself for space.
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Eat at La Belle Etoile (from £16), before ambling through the vertical warren of village domestic life, past and present. Then set out for Sarlat.
Everyone’s seen the photos. Sarlat is the Dordogne’s emblematic town, with the best restored centre in France. Its network of streets, passages, squares and venerable buildings articulates an idealised medieval and Renaissance past as if it were the present. It’s so well done that it feels like a production number (they’ve lost count of the number of movies filmed here).
Don’t miss the Renaissance house of Etienne de la Boétie, philosopher chum of Montaigne; the weird, suppository-shaped Lanterne des Morts, or ... well, don’t miss any of it. And consider yourself lucky that you’re here off-season, so you don’t have to swat away all the world’s other tourists.
Now, a break from history. Nip out of town south through the suburb of La Canéda, following signs to Gorodka. There, the artist Pierre Shasmoukine has made an extraordinary conceptual assault on the wooded hillside. An aircraft fuselage, totems, a dragonfly made from a real helicopter, and a great deal more, sprout among the trees. I’ve no idea what’s going on, but it’s weirdly enthralling. Easily worth £5.
Backtrack to Sarlat and then on to Les Eyzies for the night, at the Hotel Cro-Magnon (54 Ave Préhistoire; 05 53 06 97 06, www.hostellerie-cro-magnon.com; doubles from £50; menus from £15.75), which is more welcoming than it sounds. The name, in fact, refers to the cliff into which the hotel backs. It was here that the first skeletons of fully modern man were unearthed in 1868.
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More traces of our flint- chipping ancestors have been found around Les Eyzies and the Vézère valley than anywhere else. Like foie gras and recreational canoeing, prehistory is a Dordogne trademark.
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DAY THREE
But cave-digging is also a bit daunting, notably if you can’t tell your Magdalenian from your Aurignacian. So kick off at the Musée National de Préhistoire (£3.20), entirely modernised and reopened last year in a series of ochre blockhouses under the lip of the cliff in the village centre.
This is not a frivolous place of furry models. But, if you pay attention, you’ll find the flow of prehistoric human affairs, not least from Neanderthal to Homo sapiens sapiens, magnificently covered. It was, you’ll note, a pretty slow flow. We’ve gone from horseless carriages to the iPod in a century. They spent thousands of years perfecting the stone axe-head.
So much for the theory. Now the practice. First, follow the signs out of the village to the Abri Font-de-Gaume (£4.40, book ahead on 05 53 06 86 00). Since Lascaux closed in 1963, this is the only cave in France where you can see original polychrome paintings. Up the cliff from the ticket office and deep into the narrow cave, they take some getting used to.
But once the guide has pointed them out, and lit them appropriately, prepare to be humbled. Our forebears knew everything about movement, perspective and how to use the bumps and hollows of the cave wall to give volume. There are friezes of bison and horses and, most sublime of all, a depiction of a stag reindeer leaning to lick a doe’s face. A message of tenderness across 15,000 years. Lucky it’s dark, or they’ll see the tears in your eyes.
Now head up the Vézère valley in the lee of tree-clad cliffs that appear keen to burst forward, as if packed with too much geology. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the echoes of millenniums — and also, perhaps, the call to lunch. Stop at L’Auberge du Peyrol in Sergeac (05 53 50 72 91; from £12), then double back a couple of miles to the Roque St-Christophe (£4.65), my favourite historical site in the valley. A 1km-long rock face rising straight up from river and woodland, it’s slit with terraces and natural cavities that hirsute men colonised 55,000 years ago. They were still being used as a fort and township through to the early Renaissance.
Continue to the open-faced little riverside town of Montignac, where, in 1940, four boys fell down a hole and bumped into the greatest prehistoric art yet discovered. The Lascaux caves had to be shut to the public, whose mass presence was damaging the paintings. But the bison, mammoths, horses and stupendous 16ft bull have all been reproduced, using original 17,000-year-old techniques, at Lascaux II (follow signs, £5.75), a mile or so up the hill out of town. These lack the emotional impact of the Font-de-Gaume originals, but remain awesome nonetheless.
Thread your way along the hilly, wooded lanes to Fanlac and Bars, and so to Périgueux. Though county capital and one of the most beguiling middle-sized towns in France, the place lacks first-rate hotels. So check into the two-star Ibis (8 Blvd Georges Saumande; 05 53 53 64 58, www.accorhotels.com; doubles from £32 weekends, £40 weekdays). It’s functional, friendly and nicely wedged in-between the river and the Byzantine cathedral.
If you wish to dine with le tout Périgueux, head out of town to La Table du Pouyaud (Route-de-Paris, Champcevinel; 05 53 09 53 32; menus from £21), where the food amply justifies the reputation. Otherwise, eat in the town centre at the Clos St Front (Rue St-Front; menus from £11.50).
DAY FOUR
Devote the morning to Périgueux. If I didn’t live where I live (Languedoc, if you’re nosy), I’d probably live here. It’s effectively a country town with big ideas, bigger meals and an old centre where modern life and commerce vibrate through a wondrous tangle of medieval and Renaissance streets and squares.
Start off-centre, where the Roman settlement of the place is splendidly celebrated in the new Vesunna Gallo-Roman museum (Rue 26ème RI; £3.90), constructed around the remains of a big villa. Trek back to the historic heart and the cathedral, then — and here’s the real treat — dive into the pedestrian warren and simply soak it all up: the town houses and glorious facades, the markets, the sense of people and place living well with a very long past.
Don’t miss Rue Limogeanne — notably the Favié tableware shop, with its Renaissance frontage — or Place-St Louis. Stop for coffee at the Café-de-la-Place on the Place-du-Marché-au-Bois. And then leave. You have a plane to catch.
Canter down the Isle valley (direction: Bordeaux) to St- Astier, for lunch at La Palombière (from £8), on the little square by the church. Continue by bobbing off the beaten track, along the titchy lane that snakes south to Bergerac.
Getting there: Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com) flies from Stansted to Bergerac from £36; Flybe (0871 700 0123, www.flybe.com) flies there from Southampton and Bristol from £68, and starting on March 28, from Birmingham from £88.
More information: (00 33 5 53 35 50 00, www.perigord.tm.fr).