Hiking Périgord: La Roque-Gageac

The weather finally cleared enough on Friday for us to take a long hike (well, long for us – three hours). We’d managed to sneak in a shorter walk between the rain showers on Thursday, where we got to see some localized flooding along the Dordogne:

On Friday, though, we were excited to see some blue sky when we got up. After lunch we headed out on a hike that looped up behind La Roque-Gageac, mainly passing through woods, partly on trails and partly on (lightly-traveled) roads.

The recent storms had done a fair amount of damage – or else they don’t do a lot of trail maintenance here. There were a number of downed trees and stone walls sliding on to the paths – never mind the wires. This cable was still taut, but others were just lying among the trees…

It was interesting to see that the water had washed a couple of inches of leaf litter off the path, revealing that it was actually a stony roadbed, not just a dirt road.

We saw quite a few structures that had succumbed to time and the weather. Were they houses, shepherd’s huts, storage?

Water can do amazing things:

We definitely wondered what animals would be foolish enough to walk right up to a bunch of parked cars; this dilapidated building, surrounded by hunting stands, says “Hunt Parking”…

A fairy mushroom ring around a dead tree trunk… edible? Who knows? The pharmacist, apparently – our French tutor tells us you can take mushrooms to the local pharmacy to find out if they are edible…

Everywhere we walked, we were surrounded by old stone work – crumbling houses, roads, walls, terraced hillsides. It’s amazing to think how much work it all took.

These are green oaks – which are supposed to be good for truffles. (How do we know this? The French kindly posted an explanatory sign, as they do for many sights of interest.)We saw a couple of cars drive out and park in what looked the middle of nowhere, then the drivers walked into the woods – perhaps they were checking their special truffle trees?

And then we got back to La Roque Gageac, where the stonework is mostly in better repair – and borrows from the cliff side where needed!