Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val and the Aveyron Gorges: Canoes, the Roc d'Anglars and the Castles of Penne and Bruniquel

Required Activities

• Find the Maison Romane of 1125 in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, built for a lord named Archambault and the consuls' house from 1313 — reckoned the oldest town hall in France — and look at the carving on its façade, a programme about dispensing justice rather than governing a town, and at the wing Viollet-le-Duc rebuilt from 1846

• Paddle the Aveyron downstream from Saint-Antonin towards Penne, swim from one of the shingle beaches on the inside of a bend, and look up from the water for the castle standing on its pinnacle above you

• Climb the via ferrata on the Roc d'Anglars above Saint-Antonin, or walk up the path to the clifftop instead and scan the face with binoculars for the peregrines that nest on it and close the route each spring, with the paragliders launching from La Bicyclette beside you

• Climb to the castle of Penne, built to the exact shape of a jagged pinnacle more than 120 m above a bend of the Aveyron, held for the Cathars against Simon de Montfort's men and left in ruins for 450 years — and see how far the current restoration has got up the walls

• Visit the two castles of Bruniquel side by side on a cliff 90 m above the Aveyron — the 13th-century Château Vieux and the Château Jeune built from 1485 to 1510 by a cousin who had bought half the lordship — and find the damage in the knights' hall of the old one, left by three centuries of feuding between its Catholic owners and the Protestants next door