A steady shower of rain accompanied us out of the main cathedral square of Sarlat and up a very steep, cobbled and rain-slippery street to a tiny road with a big name: the Chemin du Château de Trompette. It wound gently downwards, with wide views of the hilly countryside to our right.
It was still raining and we met an elderly lady out walking with her umbrella. She wasn't actually going anywhere, she was just walking up and down the road outside her modest bungalow. She told us that she does it every day, no matter what the weather and that she never tires of the scenery or of the tranquillity of living where she does.
The road took us to a crossroads with an even more intriguing name: the Domaine du Bras de l'Homme (literally, the place of the man's arm). No explanation was offered: it was just a crossroads, a meeting place of two tracks which have probably met there for hundreds of years.
The landscape here was flat and fertile. Market gardens mingled with small vineyards, probably for one family's consumption, with the occasional horse, donkey or goat watching us from a grassy meadow. The main crop, however, was the ubiquitous walnut: grove after grove of graceful trees, now fully in leaf and still lush-looking from the recent rains.
It was hot and sunny again now and we were glad when the path led us through a forest. The walnut trees appeared even there, in clearings seemingly in the middle of dense, uninhabited woodland, with no apparent vehicular access. Perhaps the owners carry their treasure out in baskets, having first shaken the ripe nuts out of the trees by hand.
In our garden, walnuts are impossible to harvest because the squirrels get there first. We can shout and wave and throw sticks all we like, but the squirrels either ignore us, or sometimes start throwing things back, even, sometimes, attempting to wee on us from a high branch to prove their point. Then they just get on with their job of picking our walnuts, which we often find springing up uninvited in plant containers on the patio, buried there for a mid-winter snack. The local walnut growers here don't seem to have that problem. Neither did the area appear to have the other pest problem which we have at home: rabbits. We didn't see a single rabbit or squirrel during our walks in the Périgord: perhaps they have all ended up, along with the walnuts, in paté en croute. They don't come back from that.
In between the walnut groves were other clearings growing crops of hay. At this time of year, they were filled with oxeye daisies, blue-mauve scabious and huge spikes and drumsticks of purple orchids.
We came eventually to the village of St Vincent de Paluel, famous for its medieval château. Before we came to the château itself, however, we stopped to admire another impressive, turretted, medieval stone structure, almost buried in the luxuriant growth of its own garden. An elderly man with flowing hair and beard was snipping at an unruly hedge. He saw us looking and started telling us about the building. It was his own home, bought many years ago and gradually restored - to a point.
He invited us into the garden to show us the rest of the building, which had been beautifully rebuilt at one end, with hand-crafted windows adorning a round tower. The rest, however, was roofless. It has been like that for 43 years. A retired photo-journalist from Paris, he has done all the work single-handed, learning each of the crafts he needed as he went along. He was now carpenter, glass-cutter, plasterer, specialist roofer. The local tradition uses solid, stone shingles for roofs, so even a small roof weighs many tonnes. This was not a small roof. As well as the building, the owner tends an extensive vegetable garden, growing immaculate aubergines, peppers, chard, assorted onions, twelve types of tomato, each with a precise use, and a potato for every occasion.
The other thing the ex-journalist excels at is talking. Words poured from him in a stream of consciousness, every idea he has had for the last 40 years of isolation apparently spilling out all at once. In the hour we spent with him, we veered from gardening and building restoration to Plato, to the Fibonacci sequence, to the essence of musical performance, to Rachmaninov, to world conspiracy theories, to cooking recipes, to European politics. We were relieved to find that our French was still just about up to it, but rather wished we could have sat down to talk with a nice glass of something. Even when it started raining again, we were invited to stand under a tree and carry on talking (or, rather, carry on listening) rather than go inside for a coffee.
Eventually on our way again, through another wood, where a bright, clear stream tumbled noisily under an old, stone bridge, we came to the Château de Paluel itself. It, too, is in the process of a very long restoration project, having been burned down by the occupying German army in 1944.
We came to a café outside the entrance, with a large sign asking for contributions to the restoration fund. We were happy to contribute to the fund by buying a coffee and a piece of walnut cake and looking forward to resting our legs for a while. People were sitting outside the café, drinks on the table in front of them - right next to a large sign saying "Closed". We looked at them and they looked at us, but nobody invited us in or even moved. No coffee for us this morning, then.
We started walking back on the road towards Sarlat, the clouds once again growing darker and more threatening. Our route led us off the road and into another forest, where the rain started again in earnest. At one point, the path disappeared entirely at an abandoned cottage in the woods. It was like walking into a fairy-tale, but a slightly disturbing one - not the kind that you read to your small children at bed time. Impenetrable-looking trees surrounded us and it seemed there would be no choice but to go back the way we had come. However, Komoot rescued us again. Following the arrow on our downloaded map, we found a tiny but just about visible path through the undergrowth and back on to the road to Sarlat.
The rain increased as we came back towards the Domaine du Bras de l'Homme and we decided to shelter for a while under some trees. To pass the time, I started counting the species of wild plants that I could see from my spot under a cherry tree, chosen for its thick canopy, which kept me nearly dry. I counted over 30, along with bird calls that I recognised (blackbird, kestrel, robin, cuckoo) and some that I didn't (small, twittering brown things, right next to me, but too fast to see).
As we came back along the Chemin du Château de Trompette towards Sarlat, the sun reappeared and the countryside shone in the rain. And there she was again - the same old lady, still walking up and down with her umbrella, now serving as a parasol. She had probably clocked up the 14 kilometres that we had walked. Still smiling, she greeted us cheerfully as old friends, telling us again how beautiful she found her surroundings and what a blessing it was to live in such a tranquil place. There must be lesson in there somewhere for the restless walker.
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