Photographers in Sarlat & the Dordogne

Sarlat-la-Canéda has one of the densest medieval centres left in France — around sixty listed buildings inside a few hundred metres, all in the same warm ochre limestone, all roofed in heavy grey lauze slabs. Nothing modern intrudes because the whole centre was restored as a block in the 1960s, so a session here can walk from the Place de la Liberté up the Rue des Consuls and back down past the Maison de La Boétie without a single parked car in frame. Morning is the moment: the Saturday market fills the square with people and awnings from about eight, and the lanes off it stay quiet all week. The other half of the destination is the valley. Half an hour downstream the Dordogne loops between limestone cliffs with a castle on nearly every spur — Beynac standing two hundred metres above the water on a bare rock, Castelnaud facing it across the river, and La Roque-Gageac pressed in a single line of houses between the cliff and the current, best seen from the far bank or from a flat-bottomed gabare on the water. Above La Roque, the gardens of Marqueyssac run a kilometre of hand-clipped boxwood along a belvedere with the whole valley below, and Domme's own belvedere at the top of its bastide gives the widest view of all. Practicalities: castles and gardens are ticketed and most close in January, the lanes into the valley villages are narrow and park badly in July and August, and the softest light on the river is the last hour before sunset in late September.