Villages of the Dordogne

We thoroughly enjoyed this trip. Everything went smoothly. The notes were excellent and we found the time guides for sections of the walks matched our pace perfectly. The countryside was varied in its beauty and offered a good mix of easy walking and challenging ascents and descents in some places. We recommend walking poles to assist with slippery surfaces and steep sections. Nothing was too difficult and the notes clearly indicate where care needs to be taken.

We enjoyed meeting other walkers from Australia and America. The guest house, Domaine de la Vaysse, was a wonderful experience. The owners couldn’t have been more welcoming and we thoroughly enjoyed their company and home cooked food.

This was our fifth Inntravel holiday. As with our other walking vacations, we thoroughly enjoyed it. This area of France is lovely and the walking was varied and interesting. The towns and villages we visited were charming and the history surrounding each one was fascinating. The weather was not very cooperative during our week, but this did not diminish our enjoyment of this beautiful region. We highly recommend the Gouffre de Padirac trip out of Loubressac. It is important to book your tickets online before leaving for the walk. It is quite busy but definitely worth the time. We also did the other day trip out of Loubressac and enjoyed walking down into the gorge. Climbing back up was not as fun, but the views were breathtaking. The set lunch special at the restaurant recommended in the notes was very good.

The food at every location was memorable. Do not miss the desserts at Hotel Les Flots Bleus. They were amazing works of art and were delicious. We also particularly enjoyed the meals at Relais de Castelnau. The view from the dining room is spectacular, the service was excellent and the food was top notch. The communal table at Domaine de la Vaysse was a lot of fun and provided the chance to socialize with our fellow walkers.

Some of the walking days were long but we enjoyed them all and would highly recommend this holiday.

The holiday was managed immaculately from beginning to end, quick to answer questions and easy to contact. The hotels were all excellent especially regarding the food and all very different. To have a swimming pool at both the Relais de Castelnau and Domaine de la Vaysse was a real treat. The walks were easy to follow once we got used to the really comprehensive descriptions. Some way signs were not always easy to see as they had faded or even on rare occaisions, missing as it was coming out of the Padariac Caves. It was unusually hot (33 degrees) so we adapted our walks to try to stop walking from mid afternoon onwards. For example, after our visit to the caves we walked straight back on the same route rather than continue on the route circuit. On day 5 we chose to stay for the morning in Carennac and explored this lovely town spending maybe 3 hours there. It has the most incredible Cloisters attached to the Abbey and we enjoyed our picnic lunch down by the river. We then asked the Tourist Info Office to arrange a taxi to take us on to The Domaine de la Vaysse. The owners were quite amused to see us arrive by taxi! However, our change of plan enabled us to explore Carennac which we would not have been able to do if we wanted to complete the walk as it would have meant walking into the hot afternoon. It suited us mixing the walks with exploring the lovely towns and villages.

We've just returned from a fabulous trip to France with Inntravel and will definitely book with them again.

Best bits: varied hotels but all good, excellent dinners, glorious countryside (good routes), very well organised all the way from start to finish.

Not so good: French picnics not always what we'd choose (too much salami!)

The villages and countryside were a total delight. We could have never put the walking route together on our own and it was spot on precise and accurate but needed enough interpretation on our part with use of map and Gaia maps. It was fun to find our way. The countryside was dreamy. The trails were devoid of people. The few locals we encountered were warm and welcoming. We totally recommend this trip and will do more.

Wildflower meadows loud with grasshoppers; buzzards and kites and ancient buildings: dolmen, tumble down barns and red cows. The food at all the hotels was wonderful and I particularly recommend Le Petit Moulin restaurant for lunch in Martel where there is a small market on Saturdays. You could not hope for a warmer welcome at Domaine de la Vaysse.

Lovely week walking through the beautiful villages of the Dordogne. Even though the weather was not co-operating, we enjoyed ourselves! The walking notes were excellent as was the food and hospitality. Highly recommend this trip and Inntravel. 

All the walks were excellent. We particularly enjoyed the tourist Chemin de Fer at Martel - a last-day bonus! Another bonus was hearing the cuckoo every walking day. One point about Les Flots Bleu. When we arrived we found that we were expected on the Thursday (16 May), not the Wednesday, for which Inntravel had booked us. Consternation! The problem was eventually resolved and we were given a small attic room. This was clearly the Hotel's fault and not Inntravel's. This hotel seems generally rather disorganised and we didn't much care for the food. In general we thoroughly enjoyed the walk - our thirteenth with Inntravel!

Our Dordogne walk would have to rate as one of the best, if not the best, of the various holidays we've had over the years. Beautiful weather, gorgeous villages, excellent walking notes. Loved it!

This was our ninth Inntravel holiday and perhaps the best yet overall. The walking was very good - the longer routes were just about the right challenge for our group. The scenery was outstanding, the walks well-constructed with lots of flowers along the way, the villages visited were extraordinarily beautiful and the food was probably the best we have encountered on our Inntavel holidays. We would make special mention of the incredible warmth of the welcome from Pascale and Thierry at Domaine de la Vaysse. They joined us for supper the first night and we had some great conversation - they appreciated our efforts to converse in French for the whole evening! They are truly a couple who go the extra mile to make the stay memorable.

Our highlights on this holiday were the first stay in Beaulieu-sur Dordogne at l'Hotel les Flots Bleus, the Chateau de Castelnau, the walk to Autoire and the final stay at La Vaysse. Autoire was probably the most amazing of the villages, and coupled with the dramatic descent and even more dramatic ascent by the waterfall, was the best part of the whole tour. We would certainly recommend the longer of the two options between Carennac and La Vaysse. 

This is a region of France that we had not previously explored and the holiday was a perfect way of experiencing this beautiful and historic area. So many highlights, but special mention of the food at Les Flots Bleus, as well as the location on the river; the views from Relais de Castelnau plus the pool; the hospitality and convivial atmosphere at La Vaysse, along with their delightful pool and very individual rooms. We stayed three nights at these hotels and really enjoyed being able to get to know each area a little better.

We also enjoyed the food and hospitality at the Hostellerie Belle Rive although just for one night.

The Gouffre de Padirac is spectacular and well worth a visit. However, it is worth mentioning that the snack facilities had already closed for the season and only the Auberge was available for refreshments.The walk into the Gorge to Autoire was another highlight and the walk down surprisingly trouble free, although a walking pole is helpful especially after rain, or when, as when we were there, after a long period of dry weather.

The trip on the tourist train in Martel is also well worth taking with spectacular views most of the way.

Our Inntravel trip was fabulous. It was extremely well organised and we enjoyed the freedom that came with trusting that all would flow well.

Walks were a good challenge to be rewarded by great meals. We particularly enjoyed the hospitality and dining with the hosts at Domaine La Vaysse.

We thoroughly enjoyed our first Inntravel holiday. The booking process was straightforward with very friendly staff on the phone. The travel arrangements were well planned and we were very impresssed with the folder of information sent. The walks and their descriptions were very easy to follow and showed the diversity of the surrounding countryside. All the hotels were excellent for different reasons. The accommodation and food ranged from very good to outstanding! Day 3, although a long walk in 32 degree heat was perhaps our favourite. The caves at Padirac were well worth visiting - we booked online prior to leaving the UK. We will almost definitely holiday again with Inntravel and would not hesitate to recommend them to our friends and family.

Easy, beautiful days. The autumn colours and views in September were spectacular. We will especially recall the warmth of the sun, the smell and taste of plums and figs that littered the paths, the new vistas awaiting us as we came to the top of the hills. 

We had a wonderful holiday despite the extreme heat which rose to 37/38 degrees in the shade, but as a result we did cut short the walk from Loubressac to La Vaysse by asking the taxi driver to drop us at Floirac instead of Carennac....he was very kind and stopped in Carennac for a few minutes for us to have a brief look. We loved Loubressac and the Relais de Castelnau and were pleased we had booked for a third night which enabled us to do both the recommended circuits...both beautiful and we would recommend doing the same.  The Gouffre de Padirac is amazing, unlike anything we had experienced, and lovely at a temperature of 13 degrees underground! We booked online 10 days before leaving UK. Again because of the high temperature we returned to Loubressac the way we had come because the full circuit duplicated part of the Autoire circuit which we did the following day...again we recommend.  The Domaine de la Vaysse is a real contrast to Relais de Castelnau; a chambre d'hote in a lovely rural setting and the food, home-cooked by Pascale the owner with her husband Thierry was beautiful and original... a chocolate mousse to die for, home-made jams and yoghurts.

This was one of the most satisfying of many Inntravel walks we have done, with beautiful scenery, lovely medieval villages and comfortable and friendly hotels. Pascale and Thierry, hosts at Domaine de la Vaysse, deserve special mention as do the restaurant at Les Flots  Bleus, the picnic area at Chateau de Castelnau, the village of Loubressac and the hotel pool there.

We enjoyed this walk and our 21st Inntravel holiday! The notes were straightforward and the paths were good and well signed - with lovely scenery and lots of interesting flowers and wildlife along the way. The opportunities to stop en route and see Chateau de Castelnau and the caves at Gouffre de Padirac are worth taking up and added to the overall experience. Food was excellent on the whole - in particular the first meal at Hotel Les Flots Bleus was exceptional and the friendly atmosphere and pretty rooms at Domaine de la Vaysse made for a relaxing end to our holiday.

The view from the outside dining area and pool at the Relais de Castelnau is breathtaking; you could easily stand in the pool all day admiring the fantastic uninterrupted view of the castle and surrounding area that you can see for miles. 

It was a wonderful combination of walking adventures through gorgeous countryside with the reassurance of excellent route notes, topped by delicious food at the end of each day. We also enjoyed exploring local options for lunch. The Hotel Lou Cantou in Loubressac, and the Hazard de Balthasar in Martel were both excellent and gave a wonderful experience of local flavours and local life.

We absolutely loved this trip! We were originally attracted to it because of the lovely photos on the website, but the actual beauty of the Dordogne region from the vantage point of walking surpassed our expectations. It certainly helped that we had perfect weather (last week of May) and that the flowers were at their peak. We were quite pleased with the accommodations and the food, especially at such a reasonable price. The owners and other people we encountered were all so friendly and helpful in spite of our poor French. The routes were quite varied and interesting and the notes thorough and easy to follow. We would definitely recommend this trip to others, and we look forward to trying another walking trip with Inntravel in the future!

I have just returned from my first Inntravel trip, two wonderful weeks including the Villages of  the Dordogne and the Land of the Crusades, a part of France that may not be particularly familiar to many Americans.  The Inntravel experience was especially rewarding in that it emphasized both the journey and the destination. Where some other walking trips I have taken have been more about the journey to an incidental overnight stay, the various inns and the people who ran them were some of the most memorable aspects of the trip. Without exception, the innkeepers took immense pride in their businesses and were eager to share the history of their establishments and of the local area and its cuisine. All of the luggage transfers and taxi transfers were seamless, even when I created a bit of a "contretemps" by joining the wrong taxi company in my first transfer. The walking notes are the best I have used, and I soon learned that if the course did not make sense it was because I had not been paying close attention to the notes. The maps were useful in providing an oversight of the walking course in the landscape, but I never once had to consult them en route or wish I had brought a compass to find my way--the notes were that accurate. Over the course of the trip several of my hosts volunteered unprompted that Inntravel was one of the best companies to work with, which I think is a particularly eloquent endorsement.  

The Villages of the Dordogne trip passes through forests, upland causses, and a prosperous and picturesque countryside with numerous old villages and towns. During the last week of April, the walking paths were almost deserted, and I encountered no more than twenty people the whole week, almost all of them French. All of the walking days I took involved moderate climbs out of the river valleys to open uplands which often provided striking views of the Perigord countryside.  There were a few tourists in Beaulieu, Loubressac, Carranac, and Martel, but none of those places felt remotely crowded, and the evenings were very quiet. For me one of the most memorable aspects of the walk was the variety of the places I stayed, the elegance of the setting and cuisine of the Flots Bleus at Beaulieu, the warm and efficient hospitality of the husband and wife team at the historic Auberge de Vieux Port on the river at Gagnac, and becoming part of the family at the Domaine de la Vaysse table d'hote near Martel. The Relais de Castelnau is a small conventional hotel, but it has a wonderful view over the Dordogne valley and friendly service. Everybody I interacted with had at least enough English to make for easy communication, but to truly experience this part of la France profonde, even a modest amount of French goes a long way. 

The Land of the Crusades is in an area which felt more remote than the Dordogne, and with the exception of the Gaillac wine area around Cordes, it seemed less prosperous and forgotten by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The hilltop bastide towns, even though they have been (most of them) restored, give a real sense of how threatening the outside world must have been in medieval times that so many people would have been packed into these small fortresses. The walk begins in the largely forested upland area along the Aveyron River, and then from Puycelci moves to open, rolling countryside with many vineyards in the Gaillac area. During the first week of May the walking paths were virtually deserted, and at night the villages were almost eerily quiet. As with the Dordogne walk, the inns  and meeting their proprietors were one of the highlights of the trip, and each was unique and historic in different ways. The Chambres d'Hotes Cornelia in Bruniquel is a small inn run by a husband and wife team in two ancient buildings welded together just below the hilltop fortress. Chez Delphine in Puycelci is in an 18th century police station built on top of a 14th century house which once housed twenty policemen and their families (!). At the included two dinners at Le Roc Cafe at Puycelci our group was treated like royalty, and on Saturday night they had a very good pair of musicians performing on the patio with a view of the valley below. Les Vents Bleus is a chambre d'hote in an 18th century estate house in the hamlet of Donnazac in which the proprietor and his wife outdid themselves with lovingly presented food, including perhaps the best picnic sandwich I have ever had. And finally the Maison Bakea in Cordes is a one of a kind 13th century manor house with a courtyard, lovingly restored and decorated with a designer's eye with period antiques. Particularly for an American living in a part of the country where written history begins in the nineteenth century, staying in these places was like visiting an historical fantasy world. 

With both of these walks I was able to see and stay in places I would never have been able to find on my own, and I would return to enjoy them again and to meet my hosts again in a heartbeat, except that there are so many other walks to explore.