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Explore France Holiday Guides Lot Quercy Blanc
| Quercy Blanc |
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| Monday, 26 February 2007 | |
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The ‘white’ Quercy is an area of intimate, flowerstrewn uplands and gentle, fertile valleys.
The light in summer reflecting off the white stone buildings with their external stairs (or bolets) overhung by gently pitched canal-tiled roofs is notably southern in character. Here is a picture-book landscape of small villages, rolling hills and valleys with poplar trees, fields of sunflowers, tobacco, melons and vines. In the surrounding hills there’s a profusion of wild flowers. Rare wild orchids happily co-exist on the slopes with scrub oak and juniper. Despite this, as elsewhere in the Lot, winters can be harsh. Garden plants have difficulty coping either with the long summer droughts or the hard winter frosts. It’s not for nothing that balconies and gardens are ablaze with numerous tender pot plants during summer. Hard to believe also that all the conflicts and waves of invaders during the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of Religion should have left so few permanent scars on this landscape. Quercy Blanc – untouched by the industrial upheavals of later centuries and, until recently, increasingly depopulated – is today in the best sense a rural backwater. It is to be hoped that a viable future can be found for its largely uneconomic form of smallscale agriculture which contributes to its landscape and gives so much pleasure to those who cherish its very special character. Castelnau-Montratier on the southern fringe of the Lot is a 13th-century bastide town with a medieval arcaded square dominated by a belfry. Its northern entrance is guarded by no less than three adjacent windmills. Sadly, none of these remains in working order though a few kilometres away the windmill of Boisse is in the hands of a thriving local association and can be seen operating on several days in summer. Montcuq, a favourite of the British for its quintessential village character, has long had a somewhat dubious national reputation which belies its size – its name in French translates as ‘my bum’ (which is enough to make every French schoolboy smirk!). Nevertheless, it has its own character with two cafés facing each other in the centre of the village dominated by an impressive 12th-century castle keep. |
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