The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why Le Perche is France’s answer to the Cotswolds...
... but with fewer tourists – and no Jeremy Clarkson. Anthony Peregrine celebrates an unsung region of Normandy fuelled by cider, butter and black pudding
Disappointment has been crushing in Mortagne-auPerche, across southern Normandy and, indeed, beyond. The greatest black pudding festival in Europe has just been cancelled for the third year running. It was due in mid March when, as for more than half a century, the Foire au Boudin Noir would have furnished three days of blood-sausagerelated festivities. In normal years, some 18,000 visitors show up in Mortagne (pop: 4,000) to taste black pudding, buy black pudding, eat eight tonnes of black pudding and get swept up in a whirlwind of activity – music, dance, the works – celebrating the finest flowering of global charcuterie. Conviviality is the key but also, tragically, the present issue. Organisers reckon that it’s tough to kindle conviviality when you’re also checking Covid passes.
So, for another year, the black pudding party is off in Mortagne-auPerche. You will have heard of this place. Well, you will if you come from Bury, the English equivalent of Mortagne as national black pudding HQ. Bury producers have long performed creditably among the 600 contestants in the Foire’s international boudin noir competition – and with this week’s splendid news that France has now ended Covid testing for British travellers, it is to be hoped that they will compete again next year.
After all, the little town should have a place in all our hearts and – here’s the thing – not solely for black pudding. Mortagne is one of the main centres of the Perche, an unsung region between Normandy and the Loire which also has echoes of the UK. More specifically, of the Cotswolds. Like the Cotswolds, the Perche overlays several counties with a sort of bucolic gentleness. It is distinguished by gentle hills, forest, orchards, mild valleys and hedged pastures dignified by cattle and local Percheron heavy horses. It exhales a benign serenity fuelled by cider, butter, cheese and, obviously, black pudding. It fits my mindset pretty well.
I’m not alone. Also like the Cotswolds, the Perche has become the go-to region for high-pressure urbanites seeking tranquillity. “Paris in exile” is the phrase. And the trend whisking high-earning Parisians two hours from the capital, already evident for a decade or more, has been kicked up several levels by pandemic refugees seeking their place in the country. They’re all coming – business leaders, artists in the (distant) wake of Utrillo and van Dongen, media folk – and anxious to escape corporate stress and big city mores in order to reproduce those mores in the deep, green countryside. As with the Cotswolds, these rustic parts are punctuated by antique and retro shops, design concept stores, organic bakeries and courses in yoga, pottery, botanical painting and other disciplines not noticeably favoured by a farming population.
But the Perche can stand this. History and geography have structured the region well to absorb the “accourus” (in this context, “off-comers”) without ceding anything essential. Mortagne itself is layered with centuries of crypt and cloister, conspiratorial stone streets, town gates and town houses, and a sense of ancestral self-sufficiency. The Saturday market probably boasts more folk in camel-hair coats, avant-garde glasses, Saint Laurent blouses and Bottega Veneta boots than usually attend rural retail, but that just means there’s loads more money irrigating a life lived well for a very long time.
Out of town and along the Huisne valley, manor houses with damsel-in-distress towers, lots of them, underline the story. Well-heeled, well-bred people have been holing up here for generations. Of these houses, the Manoir de Courboyer at Nocé contains the Perche’s eco-museum, about which I would tell you more had it not been closed whenever I went. It’s now closed again through to spring this year.
However, I can tell you of two crucial elements of the Perche eco-system. First, the Percherons, or “horses of Lancelotian stature”, as writer Colette Rossant once said. They are apparently what happened when local mares met stallions brought back from the Crusades; powerful beasts blessed with litheness whose very presence has a calming effect. In the 19th century, 10,000 a year were shipped to the US to pull wagons west, and 20,000 worked in Paris. Now – after times when they were valued mainly for meat – the Percherons are slowly coming back, doing farming and forestry work and collecting bins and schoolkids around towns. This is a splendid development.
Secondly, cider, of which Perche people are proud. Up the road from Nocé, Jean-Françiois Leroux makes a cracking version at his Domaine du Ruisseau farmstead, to find which you’ll need an equally cracking version of GPS as the road splinters into lanes outside CourMaugis-sur-Huisne. Leroux will talk of
‘Newcomers idolise nature and landscape. Barbed wire shocks them because it could hurt the cows!’
56 varieties of apple, how his cider is entirely natural – unpasteurised, no added gas or yeast – and should be considered “a cider of gastronomy, not of thirst”. If you’re a five-pints-of-scrumpy person, then, you’re probably in the wrong place.
A few farther miles lead to the medieval castle of Nogent-le-Rotrou and then on to the slightly softer château of Montmirail. Monumental on its hill, Montmirail harbours memories of Thomas Becket. The exiled Archbishop of Canterbury travelled there in 1169 to try to patch things up with his English sovereign, and former chum, Henry II. It ended badly, on Becket’s insistence that God outranked the King, and the King’s insistence that He didn’t.
But neither the château, which is ele
It is feasible that Céline Dion, the Trudeaus and Ryan Gosling have distant roots here
gant with guest rooms, nor the landscape, which is unflappable, lend themselves easily to thoughts of assassination. It’s a wonder, in truth, that anyone would ever want to leave… but they did. From the 17th century, the Perche sent way more than its fair share of emigrés off to establish Canada. It is feasible that Céline Dion, the Trudeaus and maybe even Ryan Gosling have distant roots around here. The story is told at the Museum of French Emigration to Canada at Tourouvre-au-Perche.
A hop away from Montmirail, the Musée de la Musique Mécanique at Dollon testifies to man’s determination to invent anything rather than learn to play a musical instrument. In the setting of a 1930s bistro, there’s a fairground organ, obviously, and pianola, but also an entire 1960s Belgian disco band which works at the flick of a switch, a machine to teach songbirds how to improve their singing, and an automatic drum for armless war veterans. It’s only open on Sunday afternoons, but try to make it. Few and far between in France are opportunities to witness a Salvation Army music box playing What a Friend We Have in Jesus.
This will spur you on, north, to La Ferté-Bernard. On a visit not that long ago to the town’s gothic church, I should have been admiring the stained glass. Everybody does. Except that I got diverted by the visitors’ book, where a recent French passer-through had written: “Why does misfortune pursue me? It’s always one problem after another. Why don’t you ever think of me, God, just for once?” Crikey. Maybe not everybody in the Perche had a friend in Jesus.
That said, the Almighty had certainly put the hours in on the countryside towards Bellême. The arrangement of woodland, fields, pastures and hills had clearly been designed to instil mellow. Also for trotting through in a vintage carriage or phaeton pulled by Percheron heavy horses. Bellême Attelages will sort this out for you, from mid March ( gerardbeaute.wixsite. com/bellemeattelages).
Bellême itself is an undisputed Percheron star, a rumbustious past rendered picturesque for the chattering classes. It’s a fine up-hill and downstreet wander. Then you roll along farm lanes, dodging tractors, to La Perrière. Climbing up a rocky outcrop, this tiny spot (pop: 252) – once given to farming and spinning – is now Parisian exile HQ where, more than anywhere else, rural and metropolitan worlds meet and sometimes merge and sometimes don’t. As village mayor, Daniel Chemin has said the two populations read the countryside differently. Locals are rooted in agriculture, while newcomers “idolise the idea of nature and landscape. Barbed wire in fields shocks them. [It] could hurt the cows!”
The blending looks OK, mind. Recent money has tidied up past poverty. The stone and ochre spot is doubtless more charming now than it ever was in its working days. That’s how it is when you’re host to lingerie designer Chantal Thomass and artists from all over. It’s a boon, too, for visitors. No other French village of 250 souls offers two restaurants, an organic bakery, a handful of antique shops, an interior concepts store and a boutique hotel where access to the bedrooms is via QR code.
Even so, an afternoon there and you’re done. I’d return to Mortagne. It’s livelier and more substantial, taking full advantage of a picaresque past now shorn of squalor. The Saturday market is the key moment, cacophonous commerce pumping through the veins of the town. On March 19, the market hosts special black pudding events to compensate, a little, for the absent festival.
It is important to tackle as much black pudding as a God-given constitution can handle on the grounds that a) it is not topping to eat, and b) also astoundingly healthy. “Contains six times more iron than spinach,” says Jean-Claude Gotteri, grand master of the Brotherhood of the Knights of the Black Pudding. “It ought to be provided free by social security.”
The Knights will be out in force, in their red capes (symbolising the blood) trimmed with white fur (the fat), the whole topped off by a black hat (the final pudding). They’ll maybe tell you that our word “pudding” is an English mangling of their word “boudin”. They’ll certainly tell you that, though the festival is cancelled, the international black pudding competition will go ahead in late September (listen up, Bury!). Then they may direct you to Mortagne’s five black pudding producers. Whether you are a Parisian executive or an underwear designer or an artist or, like me, a general issue tourist, there is nowhere better to be on a Saturday morning. I thought you ought to know.