Périgord Noir

Sarlat-la-Canéda, the “capital” of Périgord Noir, lies in a hollow between hills 10km or so back from the Dordogne River and is undoubtedly the big tourist draw of the region. You hardly notice the modern town, as it’s the mainly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century houses of the vieille ville in mellow, honey-coloured stone that draw the attention.

In a region famous for its markets, Sarlat’s twice-weekly (Wed & Sat) offering is particularly notable for its size and the range of produce on offer. Of the two, the Saturday market is the largest, spreading down from northerly av Gambetta to place du 14-Juillet. The stalls that crowd the main drag are a rather uninspired selection of clothes, shoes and mass-produced crafts; veer off towards place de la Liberté, however, and you’ll find stalls selling everything from seasonal fruit and veg (not to mention truffles) to foie gras, walnut wine and nougat. It’s an irresistable Sarlat experience, but get there early as most stalls start packing up at around 12.30pm.

The main base for visiting many of the region’s prehistoric painted caves is Les Eyzies-de-Tayac,a one-street village lined with gift shops and foie gras outlets. There are more prehistoric caves around Les Eyzies than you could possibly hope to visit in one day; in addition, the compulsory tours are tiring, so it’s best to just do a couple rather than attempt them all. In town, it’s worth visiting the excellent Musée National de Préhistoire, which contains many important prehistoric artefacts found in the various caves in the region. Look out for the oil lamp from Lascaux and the exhibits from La Madeleine, to the north of Les Eyzies, including a superb bas-relief of a bison licking its flank.

Since its discovery in 1901, dozens of polychrome paintings have been found in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume. The cave was first settled by Stone Age people during the last Ice Age – about 25,000 BC – when the Dordogne was the domain of roaming bison, reindeer and mammoths. The entrance is no more than a fissure concealed by rocks and trees above a small lush valley, leading to a narrow twisting passage. The first painting you see is a frieze of bison, reddish-brown in colour, massive, full of movement and very far from the primitive representations you might expect. Further on comes the most miraculous image of all, a frieze of five bison discovered in 1966 during cleaning operations. The colour, remarkably sharp and vivid, is preserved by a protective layer of calcite. Shading under the belly and down the thighs is used to give three-dimensionality with a sophistication that seems utterly modern. Another panel consists of superimposed drawings, a fairly common phenomenon in cave painting, sometimes the result of work by successive generations, but here an obviously deliberate technique. A reindeer in the foreground shares legs with a large bison behind to indicate perspective.

Stocks of artists’ materials have also been found: kilos of prepared pigments; palettes – stones stained with ground-up earth pigments; and wooden painting sticks. Painting was clearly a specialized, perhaps professional, business, reproduced in dozens of caves located in the central Pyrenees and northern Spain.

The Grotte des Combarelles was discovered in 1910. The innermost part of the cave is covered with engravings from the Magdalenian period (about 12,000 years ago). Drawn over a period of two thousand years, many are superimposed one upon another, and include horses, reindeer, mammoths and stylized human figures – among the finest are the heads of a horse and a lioness.

Not a cave but a natural rock shelter, the Abri du Cap Blanc lies on a steep wooded hillside. The shelter contains a sculpted frieze of horses and bison dating from the Middle Magdalenian period, about 14,000 years ago. Of only ten surviving prehistoric sculptures in France, this is undoubtedly the best. The design is deliberate, with the sculptures polished and set off against a pockmarked background. But what makes this place extraordinary is not just the large scale, but the high relief of some of the sculptures. This was only possible in places where light reached in, which in turn brought the danger of destruction by exposure to the air. Cro-Magnon people actually lived in this shelter, and a female skeleton some two thousand years younger than the frieze was found here.

The enormous prehistoric dwelling site of La Roque St-Christophe is made up of about a hundred rock shelters on five levels, hollowed out of the limestone cliffs. The whole complex is nearly 1km long and about 80m above ground level, where the River Vézère once flowed. The earliest traces of occupation go back over 50,000 years. There are frequent guided visits in summer, or you could just take an English-language leaflet and wander at your own pace.

The small, attractive town of Montignac is the main base for visiting the Lascaux cave.

The Grotte de Lascaux was discovered in 1940 by four boys who stumbled across a deep cavern decorated with marvellously preserved paintings of animals. Executed by Cro-Magnon people 17,000 years ago, the paintings are among the finest examples of prehistoric art in existence. There are five or six identifiable styles, and subjects include bison, mammoths and horses, plus the biggest known prehistoric drawing, of a 5.5m bull with an astonishingly expressive head and face. In 1948, the cave was opened to the public, and over the next fifteen years more than a million tourists came to see it. Sadly, because of deterioration caused by the heat and breath of visitors, the cave had to be closed in 1963; now you have to be content with the replica known as Lascaux II.

Opened in 1983, Lascaux II was the result of eleven years’ painstaking work by twenty artists and sculptors, using the same methods and materials as the original cave painters. While the visit can’t offer the excitement of a real cave, the reconstruction rarely disappoints the thousands who trek here every year.

The gorgeous Jardins de Marqueyssac, sitting on top of a wooded promontory that rises above a wide meander in the Dordogne, are one of the most magical sights in the region. At times, the gardens feel like a Tim Burton fantasy – quirky, maze-like topiary is the first thing that greets you upon entering – while at others it’s like being in the heart of a forest, with only the rustle of birds in the trees above disturbing the peace. Though the gardens were originally laid out in the seventeenth century, what you see today is the result of extensive restoration work from the late 1990s.

Three paths lead through the grounds to the Belvedere, jutting out from the cliff with stupendous views over the river towards La Roque-Gageac and, in the opposite direction, Castelnaud. The gardens are even more magical during the special candlelit evenings in July and August when you can explore to the accompaniment of a live jazz band.

For eight hundred years, until 1935, the twelfth-century Cistercian Abbaye de Cadouin drew flocks of pilgrims to wonder at a piece of cloth first mentioned by Simon de Montfort in 1214 and thought to be part of Christ’s shroud. In 1935 the two bands of embroidery at either end were shown to contain an Arabic text from around the eleventh century. Since then the main attraction has been the finely sculpted but badly damaged capitals of the Flamboyant Gothic cloister. Beside it stands a Romanesque church with a stark, bold front and wooden belfry roofed with chestnut shingles (chestnut trees abound around here – their timber was used in furniture-making and their nuts ground for flour during frequent famines). Inside the church, the nave is slightly out of alignment; this is thought to be deliberate and perhaps a vestige of pagan attachments, as the three windows are aligned so that at the winter and summer solstices the sun shines through all three in a single shaft.

The partially ruined Château de Castelnaud is a true rival to Beynac in terms of impregnability – although it was successfully captured by the bellicose Simon de Montfort as early as 1214. The English held it for much of the Hundred Years’ War, and it wasn’t until the Revolution that it was finally abandoned. Fairly heavily restored in recent years, it now houses a highly informative museum of medieval warfare. Its core is an extensive collection of original weaponry, including all sorts of bizarre contraptions, and a fine assortment of armour.

Clearly visible on an impregnable cliff on the north bank of the river, the eye-catching village and castle of Beynac-et-Cazenac was built in the days when the river was the only route open to traders and invaders. By road, it’s 3km to the château but a steep lane leads up through the village and takes only fifteen minutes by foot. It’s protected on the landward side by a double wall; elsewhere the sheer drop of almost 200m does the job. The flat terrace at the base of the keep, which was added by the English, conceals the remains of the houses where the beleaguered villagers lived. Richard the Lionheart held the place for a time, until a gangrenous wound received while besieging the castle of Châlus, north of Périgueux, ended his term of blood-letting.

The first place of any size east of Sarlat is Souillac, at the confluence of the Borrèze and Dordogne rivers and on a major road junction. Virginia Woolf stayed here in 1937, and was pleased to meet “no tourists … England seems like a chocolate box bursting with trippers afterward”; things have changed little today, and the town has an understated charm.

Roofed with massive domes like the cathedrals of Périgueux and Cahors, the spacious interior of the twelfth-century church of Ste-Marie creates just the atmosphere for cool reflection on a summer’s day. On the inside of the west door are some of the most wonderful Romanesque sculptures, including a seething mass of beasts devouring each other. The greatest piece of craftsmanship, though, is a bas-relief of Isaiah, fluid and supple, thought to be by one of the artists who worked at Moissac.

In a picturesque spot on the banks of the Dordogne, 8km upriver from Castelnau-Bretenoux, Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne boasts one of the great masterpieces of Romanesque sculpture, on the porch of the church of St-Pierre. This doorway is unusually deep-set, with a tympanum presided over by an oriental-looking Christ with one arm extended to welcome the chosen. All around him is a complicated pattern of angels and apostles, executed in characteristic “dancing” style, similar to that at Carennac. The dead raise the lids of their coffins hopefully, while underneath a frieze depicts monsters crunching heads. Take the opportunity also to wander north along rue de la Chapelle past some handsome sculpted facades and down to the river.