Where to stay: l’Auberge gites and B&B ( ) has double rooms from £60, including breakfast. That done, roam a much-beflowered and rather lovely village before exploring the deep green and watery surrounds. “It remains barmy, but on a bigger scale.” To get conkering, head for the bar. “It started off barmy,” says Stewart Edwards, the Northants man in question. Abjat is now the headquarters of the French Conkers Federation and hosts the annual National Conkers Championship (this year, October 7). Unknown in France, the crack of conkers arrived in Abjat with a couple from Northants who took over the village bar, renaming it the Entente Cordiale. Of the many admirable villages in the Dordogne only Abjat, off the beaten track in the north of the county, can assure you a game of conkers. Where to stay: Château de Fources chambres-d’hôtes ( ) has double rooms from £138, including breakfast. It has the flowers, the market, an auberge where £15 buys a rattlingly good three-course lunch, and denizens whose Gascon accents you can cut with a knife, like saucisson. Established by both the French and English to fix the rural population, making them easier to tax and defend, bastides like Fources retain a sense of sunlit certainties redolent of simpler times. Fources is, in short, of forceful character – like all medieval bastide villages, it is the perfect setting for the hum of country life. She is a lovely woman of strong views she will not sell to you if she suspects you intend to use her Armagnac for cocktails (“No!”) and will occasionally have a nip herself at 10am with friends. The key outlet under the arcades of Fources’ central square (which is round) is the family Armagnac shop run by Manon Ladevedèze. Where to stay: The Tour d’Auxois ( ) has double rooms from £98. The place, in short, has pretty much everything. Thirdly, it’s a grittily disarming gateway to the Morvan granite uplands, the wildest bit of Burgundy. It still is, with the terrifyingly expensive Côte-d’Or at its heart. The second reason is gastronomic: halfway between Paris and Lyon, Saulieu has been a foodie stop-over for centuries. The original sculpture is in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, but there’s a great copy guarding the main drag through Saulieu, plus other fine works in the village’s small but splendid Musée François Pompon. He was born in Saulieu in 1855, went on to work with Rodin, and finally found fame with the bear in his 68th year. The main reason for coming here is to celebrate François Pompon, creator of the Polar Bear, the greatest of all animal sculptures. Where to stay: Hotel O’Mineola ( ) has double rooms from £51. ![]() Now people say hello, and the surroundings are as uplifting as the Scottish Highlands. Back then, in the most profound bit of la France profonde, few had ever seen an Englishman, let alone an English bridegroom. Roll into Rieutort, a centre of rural life with cafés, shops, loads of farmers and a sense of sufficiency – plus a church where I once attended a wedding during which the priest wore wellies, for he was gardening later. Rambling or driving through the remoteness, you’ll seek a spot with a few facilities. Villages apparently grow organically from the granite uplands (rocks, forest, rolling pasture-land) of the Lozerien Margeride. Where to stay: The Manoir des Montagnes ( ) has double rooms from £129.ġ7. Last time I visited, I drank my first beer in France, my second further along the bar in Switzerland. ![]() The bar, stairs and bedrooms are bisected by the Franco-Swiss frontier. You might meet normal Swiss nearby at the Arbézie hotel. The smell down there is ample to keep any rogue Swiss at bay. ![]() The fort faces the Swiss, who don’t attack much these days, so it’s of most use for the games, or maturing 140,000 wheels of local Comté cheese in the cellars. When all that pales, there’s golf, an adventure park, or commando games in France’s second-biggest fortress. Some 3,700 feet up in the Jura, Les Rousses is where the inside exists mainly to send you outside: skiing, biking, hiking, riding, zip-wiring and being overcome by the ambient mountain grandeur. They are, in short, the French villages that I get most excited about returning to. I’ve tried to avoid too many of the blindingly obvious (La Roque Gageac, Mont Saint Michel) in favour of those with substance and maybe a story to tell, and attempted (in most instances) to pick the quietest offerings with a population below 3,000. But it’s quite fun, and not to be taken too seriously. In a sense, the selection is nonsensical: there are so many variables, and some 36,000 French communes to choose among. But which villages? I’ve compiled a list of my top 20 – counting down to my favourite. Some people will be going to France and seeking out French villages – the ones fabled for markets, bars, boulangeries and a sense of communal purpose we sometimes think we’ve lost in Britain.
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