A 15th-century charter of the Abbey at Souillac describes the Quercy as the richest and most fertile land in the whole of the Duchy of Guyenne, containing the most beautiful, populous towns, cities, châteaux and fortresses:
“Icelui pays du Quercy fut le plus riche et le plus plantureux qui feust en le duché de Guyenne, et il y eut les plus belles villes, cités, chasteaux et forteresses qui feussent au dict duché, lesquelles étaient grandement peuplées et habitées ...”

The Lot is based on the northern part of the old royal province of the Quercy – le Haut- Quercy. It is sharply divided into two areas: the Causse in the centre, which dominates and gives the landscape its distinctive character; and, around this rocky region, the gentler hills and valleys of the Quercy Blanc, the Bouriane to the west and in the north-east the not so gentle hills and valleys of the Ségala.

Most striking to the visitor and, in places, quite spectacularly beautiful, are the cliff-lined river valleys: the Lot, the Dordogne, the Célé, the Alzou, the Ouysse and the Vers. Over millions of years they have carved their way through the limestone plateau of the Causse to form mini Grand Canyons.

Geography and geology apart, the distinctive feel to the département comes from the almost total absence of industry – just France’s biggest jam maker and one of the world’s two manufacturers of hi-tech propellers. Tourism is very low key. There are no large towns and not many small ones, a very low population – just 160,000 – and a wonderful domestic architectural heritage almost totally unspoilt by modern development; no destructive war for hundreds of years, no industrial revolution and not a town planner in sight.

The traces of Prehistoric man are unspectacular but everywhere. Dozens of typical villages are scattered across the countryside and most of them have great charm; some of them are exceptional. Most of the houses are built in a soft attractive limestone. Many have kept their typical steep brown-tiled roofs.

If ever an area benefited from being forgotten by the rest of the world, this is it. However, after centuries as a backwater, the Lot is in danger of becoming fashionable – almost smart. The arrival of the motorway A20, and an influx of foreign and French house buyers has quite suddenly given this sleepy area unexpected prominence. Nevertheless, this is still a place where you can wander at will and rarely be disappointed. There are some nationally famous sites to visit – Rocamadour, the Gouffre de Padirac, the Grotte de Pech-Merle and the perched village of Saint-Cirq-Lapopie.

The richness of the architecture and the Prehistoric remains give clues to a prosperous past. In the Middle Ages this was as wealthy an area as any in France. In his history of rural France, Georges Duby describes how, after the Hundred Years’ War, the limestone plateaux of the Causse were brought back into cultivation at the same time as the area around Paris and before Provence. This was thanks to the richness of the cloups – the strange, deep depressions in the Causse at the bottom of which fertile soil collected.

Two revolutions brought the Lot from relative prosperity to relative poverty – the arrival of the railway and the modernisation of agriculture. The railways took the traffic from the rivers and the busy Toulouse-Paris road and the tractor made the little enclosures of the Lot uneconomical. But why should we complain? The economic upheavals of
the 19th century have left us a refuge from the modern world which is unique.