French leave
Red-headed ants, confit de canard and medieval villages were some of the delights Claudia Massie and her children found in the Dordogne
Insects are different in France. My son, Luca, will happily list the many ways in which they are bigger and better than their Scottish counterparts. His chief interest upon arrival in Dordogne last summer, aged six, was scrutinising the activities of the rival red-headed ant colonies that occupied the garden, tracking their paths and observing their responses to his devotional gifts. Rotten fruit was always popular, but less thrilling than the time they carried off his dead snail.
Luca had come to France reluctantly. The opportunity to spend three months with French cousins near Bergerac and attend the local school for a term had not enthused him. Nevertheless, we softened his resolve with a tantalising photo of a praying mantis and bundled him into the car alongside his ten-year-old sister, Florence, an eager traveller, and their younger brother, Magnus, just six months old and completely indifferent.
We drove south following a regime dictated by the baby’s sleeping and eating habits. This allowed around three hours on the road each morning and afternoon, with the three-day journey from Perthshire to Dordogne broken up by Airbnb stopovers in strangers’ back gardens and leisurely roadside lunches: milk for Magnus, croques and éclairs for everyone else.
We arrived in Monbazillac, our new home, a few days before the summer term and just in time to attend the Mayday Fête, when the entire village congregates in the market hall at 10am to drink wine and consume a gigantic, communal omelette studded with spring onions. The weather was atrocious, colder than Scotland and pouring with rain, but the plates of steaming eggs and the cheerful conviviality were a warming welcome to the region.
When school began, the kids managed to acquire sufficient French to make friends, and even do some work, but it was the food that made the biggest impact. Free melon slices in the playground on hot days, and buttered radishes, veal cutlets and chocolate fondant on the lunch menu would all make welcome additions to Scottish school life.
Another marvellous aspect of school, for the children anyway, was how little time they actually spent there. The summer term in France revealed itself to be effectively one long fête, meaning that the school week often involved just three and a half days in the classroom. This may not have accelerated the children’s language skills but it did at least allow plenty of time to explore the attractions of the region.
The first visit was to La Roque Saint Christophe, a massive limestone cliff that peers down upon the Verzère valley. It has a human history stretching back to Neanderthal times, with the cliff-face terraces inhabited by successions of civilisations. The most remarkable of these was probably the sophisticated medieval troglodyte township that flourished here until the 16th century and has been partially recreated for today’s visitors.
The facilities on display, such as the slaughterhouse, the smokehouse and the huge winch system that lifted supplies up to the village, offer a sense of what life might have been like for the thousand or so inhabitants of that extraordinary, vertiginous village. The drop from the main terrace to the valley floor, guarded nowadays by an iron fence that inspires no confidence, is terrifying for anyone accompanied by small people but there are at least wonderful views across the fertile Verzère basin to distract you from the peril.
Further up the Dordogne, we found Château de Castelnaud, an 800-year-old fortress that was forever shuttling between English and French hands while the troglodytes downriver were concentrating on winching cattle into their caves. Appropriately, Castelnaud hosts a Museum of Medieval Warfare at its heart, replete with stuffed warhorses and every conceivable weapon of assault and torture. The village that clusters around the foot of the château is a cluttered, ochre knot of typical Périgord houses. The narrow streets, which echoed during our visit with the drifting tones of a melancholic cellist, exclude cars, and it is easy to imagine the place cowering from attack during the Wars of Religion, when Geoffroy ‘The Battler’ de Vivans ruled the castle above.
The châteaux and prehistoric attractions are undoubtedly the biggest tourist draws of the Dordogne, but, in so large a region, it is never hard to escape into unexplored territory. Tiny medieval villages litter the countryside, each one unspoiled and still alive with markets, boulangeries and cafés. One of the finest of them all is Saint-avit-sénieur, which is situated on the pilgrim Route de Compostella, surrounded by small pastoral farms, micro-vineyards and orchards, and distinguished by its quite extraordinary 11th-century church.
The building is enormous and imposing, utterly disproportionate to the size of the village. Its origins centre on the legend of Avitus, who, in the 6th century, engineered through prayer the destruction of a pagan temple on the same site. Remains of the pagan structure have been discovered beneath the current church, and the ruins of a later abbey can be explored next door. Inside the church, rare medieval frescoes and elaborate decorative motifs can still be seen on the walls, vestiges of a time of episcopal power and plenty.
Dining out in the Dordogne can be disappointing, with the same familiar dishes artlessly churned out everywhere, but beside the church in Saint-avit-sénieur is a little bistro, ‘La Table de Léo’, where the food is exceptional. We sat in the shadow of the church and enjoyed foie gras, unctuous confit de canard, a platter of cheese and an impeccable tarte des framboises. It was not an ambitious menu but the quality of ingredients, all extremely local and expertly handled by a serious young chef, made it outstanding. Magnus, who began weaning in France and quickly became an infant gourmand, seized fat fistfuls of confit; locals pointed at his stout figure and chortled approvingly, ‘rugbyman!’.
I enjoy forcing my kids into medieval churches and demanding they admire the frescoes but, occasionally, I do capitulate and take them to spectacles they actually want to visit. ‘Prehisto Parc’ was one such place; a wooded valley full of peculiar, and sinister, life-size models of prehistoric people in loin-cloths, wrestling in the grass and fighting off mammoths and lions. Nothing moves, there’s no interactive opportunity, it’s just a trail through the trees populated by these weathered vignettes of cave-man life, and the kids thought it was absolutely the best thing ever.
Or nearly, for when we returned to the car, Luca discovered a pea-green grasshopper, longer than his hand, resting on the windscreen. It transferred itself to his arm and, ultimately, nothing in all France could beat that. Perhaps it was worth coming after all.