South Vendée: The Tiger's Garden, Talmont and the Pointe du Payré

Required Activities

• In Clemenceau's five-room fisherman's longère at Belébat, find the clock whose hands were stopped at 1.45 in the morning, the hour he died on 24 November 1929, and the white tiger skin he brought back from Bengal lying across his bed; then walk the garden he made behind it, seven thousand plants left untrimmed with, as he wrote to Monet in August 1923, no beds, no borders, no clumps, no thickets and no paths

• At the ruined castle of Talmont, pick out what Richard the Lionheart added from about 1170 when he came here to hunt with his friend Raoul de Mauléon: the second ring wall with its round towers doubling the 11th-century one, the gatehouse set into it on the north, and the guard tower with its murder hole and dog-leg entry into the keep's courtyard

• Walk the coast path round the Pointe du Payré, where the drowned estuary of the Payré separates Jard-sur-Mer from the Veillon dune and forest on the Talmont side, and find on the shore the line where Jurassic beds lie straight on Armorican micaschist — the join between the Massif armoricain and the Aquitaine basin, running for kilometres along this coast

• On the rock platform at the Veillon, look for the three-toed tracks of bipedal dinosaurs pressed into the yellow Nankin limestone 204 million years ago, and pace out a stride of about 1.20 m — the gait of the largest of them, Eubrontes veillonensis, which stood some 3 m tall. Look only: the site is protected and nothing may be lifted or cast