Further south in the Rhone Valley we drive past Dombes, a marshy stretch of land made up of field after field of artificial lakes. The water is piped in and out of these depressions to create fish ponds one season, or a grain farm another. Amazing bit of engineering and decision-making. Nice to be able to make your own wildfowl and fish hunting grounds just through irrigation.
We coffee in a little village on a hill, Perouges, another of the Most Beautiful Villages in France that we follow each time we come through a different department in France. Perouges is now my favourite of all we have seen so far. It is straight out of a Medieval film set, with a street encircling the tiny village like a moat, sunny piazza's and narrow twisting alleyways running off it.
Any Shakespeare play could be filmed here with very little need for change: each building has been renovated so carefully, so authentically, right down to the external light fittings and the studded doors and windows. Once these were farmers' and linen weavers' homes, until the day when roads and railways passed it by, then the village fast became neglected and derelict.
Now, it is smart again, and the folk who live here cater mainly to the tourist market in summer, selling slices of delicious burnt sugar galettes from window boxes, and prepping gourmet lunches for the hoards, while proofing rustic breads in sun patches through half-opened windows under half-timbered eaves made of ancient galleon woods that bend and twist with age and beauty. Delicious espresso too.
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