Collonges-la-Rouge and Turenne: The Red Village and the Viscounts' Tower

Required Activities

• Walk Collonges-la-Rouge, first village on the Plus Beaux Villages list, and look closely at the stone: 2.2 per cent iron oxide, rusted to garnet and wine-lees red when this was desert at the latitude of today's Sahara. Then go into the church and find the two naves, used alternately for Catholic and Protestant worship through the Wars of Religion

• Climb the 12th-century Tour de César, the overlord's tower, and pick out Jugeals-Nazareth across the country the viscounts of Turenne ran as a state of their own — minting coin, levying their own taxes and ennobling men — until the sale of 1738 and Louis XV's order to pull the fortress down

• Walk Curemonte past its three castles — des Plas, Saint-Hilaire and la Johannie — and out to Saint-Hilaire de la Combe, an 11th-century Romanesque church among the oldest in the Corrèze and probably raised on Merovingian foundations, in the village where Colette sat out 1940 and began her Journal à rebours

• Walk down through Turenne from the towers to the collegiate church of Notre-Dame-Saint-Pantaléon, built between 1660 and 1680 with a bare vault 13.20 m up and a gilded retable of three tiers, and on the way count the noble houses that step down the hill

• Find a wall at Collonges that still carries its render, and see how the village looked before 1930, when restorers began stripping the masonry back to bare red stone; then walk the Meyssac fault at the Espace de découverte de la faille et de la pierre, opened in 2015, where the red sandstone meets the white limestone of the Quercy