I’m away on holiday at the moment, so this week’s posts are about previous un-blogged holidays from 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Today, it’s our 2019 holiday to the Dordogne in France.
For our 2019 summer holiday in France, we went quite a bit further south, to the Dordogne region (named after the river that runs through it). As well as the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo, we stopped off at a hotel in Poitiers and so it took the equivalent of three full days of driving to reach our campsite near Bergerac. We took our own car, but we had to abandon it after (what I presume) was a failed wheel bearing saw me skid off the road into a ditch, so the second half of the holiday was in an a hire car.
As this holiday was five years ago, in June 2019, my memories are not the best, which is why there’s not a lot of detail here. It’s thanks to checkins on Swarm and my own photos that I can recall what we did.
Here’s where we visited:
Beynac-et-Cazenac
Benyac overlooks the Dordogne river where it cuts through a deep gorge, and the village is built into the side of the steep valley. It’s a pretty little place with narrow, twisting streets and craft shops.
Château de Castelnaud
Castelnaud is quite a good castle. It sits high up, in a commanding position over the surrounding valleys, and the courtyard is full of catapults, trebuchets and over siege engines that might have been used during the various wars that it has experienced over the centuries. I remember that we treated our (then) three-year-old to a wooden sword and shield from the gift shop.
Gouffre de Proumeyssac
Known as the ‘crystal cathedral’, Gouffre de Proumeyssac is a huge underground cave full of stalagmites and stalactites. Clever use of lighting makes it a fascinating experience. Whilst nowadays there’s a wheelchair-accessible main entrance, you can also opt to be lowered into the cave in a basket, as the original explorers would have done at the beginning of the last century.
Le Bournat
Le Bournat is an open-air living museum – a bit like Beamish or the Black Country Living Museum. The aim is to recreate how people lived in the Dordogne region in the past, with farms and small industry to look at. Whilst I would argue that it’s not as realistic as its British counterparts, it’s very pretty and makes for a nice day out. Like many of the places we went to in 2019, I seem to remember visiting when I was much younger and it seems to have expanded significantly since then.
Eymet
Eymet (pronounced ‘ay-may’) is an example of a Bastide, or fortified town. This means that there are walls around the town centre, and buildings such as the church are fortified. There’s also quite a large British diaspora here, with British ex-pats making up around a quarter of the population. Like many small French towns, its communal wash house has been preserved.
Château des Milandes
Our second château of the holiday was the Château des Milandes. It was home to the American singer Josephine Baker, and so it has a number of her more famous (and infamous) outfits and tells her story. There are some nice gardens outside, along with an aviary which is home to a number of birds of prey. If you time your visit right, then you can watch a bird of prey show. I visited here with my parents when I was younger and had the interesting experience of having a harris hawk land on my head, which my dad took a photo of.
Aquarium du Perigord Noir
We usually end up at an aquarium whilst on holiday, as it’s a way to spend a wet day, and so we went to the Aquarium du Perigord Noir. Besides the many fish – mostly freshwater, as it’s a long way inland – they are a breeding centre for caimans, and have some coypu (also known as Nutria or Chilean beavers).
On the way back, we stopped off at a hotel in Le Mans, and also at Warwick Castle once back in England.
