Beautifully restored, the Lot’s second city is also famously linked to the Rosetta stone.
Figeac, at the very south of the Pays de Figeac, is just as attractive as Cahors but quite different. It is less constricted. There is already the feel of the arid foothills of the Massif Central.

There are many thoughtfully-restored, Renaissance, half-timbered merchants’ houses with their distinctive drying galleries for flax and later tobacco on the top floor.

The Hôtel de la Monnaie and the churches of Saint-Sauveur and Notre-Dame-du-Puy… in fact the whole old town is well worth time spent. Here, it really pays to follow the tourist route or risk missing much which is of interest. Get the free guide map from the local tourist office and just follow the numbers.

Figeac has benefited from being the home of a local politician who made good as a minister and made sure that the money was there to restore the town – a job well done.

Figeac is the birth place of Jean-François Champollion, the man famous for deciphering the Rosetta stone. There is a museum to him and his work, and a massive reproduction of the Egyptian text which he deciphered on the stone.

Moulin de Cassell,
Labastide-Murat and World War II
The best views of the Causse are along the ridge from the monument to the Resistance at the Moulin de Cassel, on the junction of D677 with the A20, to the pretty market town of Labastide-Murat, birthplace of Napoléon’s remarkable, heroic brother-in-law Maréchal Joachim Murat, King of Naples and son of a local innkeeper. The house where he was born is an interesting little museum. The Moulin de Cassel is one of the few remaining windmills which were once dotted all over the Causse. It overlooks a vast expanse of the south-west – on a clear day you can see the Pyrénées, five hours’ drive away. The tiny village of Soulomès nearby, with its Templar church, also has a fine view. Its name derives from the time when only one inhabitant – un seul homme – survived an attack of the plague.

The monument commemorates the Resistance fighters who died in June 1944. Despite the unfortunate concrete memorial, this is a very poignant spot. The former N20, now a motorway, was the road to Normandy for the SS armoured division Das Reich stationed at Montauban. The Resistance did its job successfully and slowed them down: it took the tanks a fortnight to get to the Allied invasion bridgehead.

French civilian casualties were heavy and there were a number of massacres in the area, notably at Lacapelle-Marival and Gabaudet, near Gramat, where every year an open-air memorial service commemorates the dead. The tiny village has been left as it was on June 7, 1944. Max Hastings has written a book about it called ‘Das Reich’.