Dordogne

This is a pretty area of mostly wooded hills, with small towns and villages, built here of sandstone instead of the limestone used in the Loire, and with tile roofs instead of slate.

The local rock is mostly limestone, though, and river valleys are cut through it with impressive cliffs, sometimes undercut and up to 100m high.

The limestone is full of caves, and it is here that the area's main attractions are hidden.

Sarlat le Caneda

I stayed in this small town, so as to keep in range of the Internet. It is the tourist centre of the area, and the whole of the historic centre is restaurants and souvenir shops.



Pretty, but I'm starting to prefer places where people actually live. The campsite was a short bus-ride from the town, though the bus was one of those planned on the theory that if you go down every street in the region someone is bound to get on. As a consequence, it took 25 minutes to go 3km, and very few people used it. For me, it was a nice tour.

Lascaux

This is the big pull of the region, and the main reason I was there. Arguably the oldest 'fine art' known, it was painted about 17,000 years ago by people very much like ourselves - they are referred to as 'Cro-Magnon' but there is really no difference in the biology.

I had a mental picture of what was there which was completely wrong. I imagined people living in caves, casually daubing pictures of their everyday lives on any handy surface. Sort of caveman grafitti.

Well, they didn't live in the cave - they may not have lived in caves at all. And they were very selective in what they painted - their main diet was reindeer, and they didn't paint a single one. It is all oxen, deer and horses. There was a separate cave deep below the others, perhaps a secret area, where there is one picture of a reindeer, and one very stylised picture of a man.

And it is not daubed. They incised outlines with flint, they drew fine lines with pointed sticks, they daubed large areas with brushes, and they actually airbrushed parts of it, with a hollow reed. Different parts of the figures used different techniques, consistently across the cave. Their horses look exactly like the chinese and japanese horses painted in the middle ages.

And, it is not on the walls. The cave is domed, the main area about 4m by 8m, and the paintings are on the dome. They actually used wooden scaffolding to paint parts of it, and removed it later. There is no natural light in the caves, they would have been seen by tallow candles. The guide pointed out different parts of the work by shining a flashlight, and you got the impression that it may have been shown in a similar way originally.

When you see it from inside, you get a completely different experience from seeing it in a picture. The guide points out a head or a tail, and the figure seems to leap out of the wall. Some of the oxen in particular are huge, bigger than lifesize - the effect was awe-inspiring from a modern perspective, it must have been amazing for people who were not used to seeing images of things.

They only just hint at this in the commentary, but it is very clear to see - the cave was designed as a religious experience, a sort of Cro-Magnon cathedral. Certaily did things to my head.

Disclaimer time - you don't actually get to see the real caves. In the 60's, they discovered that the paintings were starting to be damaged by the air and light from visitors, and they created over the next twenty years an exact replica, with the same shape and texture on the walls and painted with the same techniques and tools as the original. That is what you see. Obviously it's impossible to tell how accurate the reproduction is, but it is certainly convincing. I have no pictures because they don't allow it (it would mess up the experience having flashes going off), and anyway pictures don't really show the place. You have to see it.

Grotte de la Grande Roque

'Big rock cave' - very creative. This is one of the many small natural caves, with limestone in all it's permutations, stalactites and stallagmites, beautiful ripply floors and an unusual crystalline formation of triangles on the floor. They didn't allow photography either, and my attempt at a sneaky natural-light one was not entirely successful.