Cadouin, Limeuil and Belvès: The Abbey, the Confluence and the Cave Dwellings

Required Activities

• In the flamboyant cloister at Cadouin, which Louis XI paid for from 1482 with 4,000 livres tournois a year, find the carved stone abbot's seat in the north gallery, then step into the church, consecrated in 1154, and line up the three round oculi — one in the façade, two in the dome — that a sunbeam crosses at each equinox

• Climb the lanes of Limeuil, one of the Plus Beaux Villages de France, to the top of the village and pick out the exact seam where the Vézère comes in on the right bank of the Dordogne opposite Alles-sur-Dordogne, then walk out to Beauregard for the listed panorama over the cingle, the great meander below

• Go six metres down under the place de la Halle at Belvès into the eight cut-rock dwellings the town's poor lived in from the 13th century to the 18th, then come up and count the 23 pillars of the 15th-century halle, find the stump of the old pillory on the outside of one of them, and work out the seven bell towers Belvès is named for, starting with the tour de l'Archevêque where Bertrand de Goth lived before he was crowned Pope Clement V in 1305

• Find the facsimile of the Suaire de Cadouin, shown since 2012 because light was destroying the original: a cloth venerated here for seven centuries as a relic of the Passion until a Jesuit historian read the Kufic bands along its edge in 1934 and found it had been woven in Fatimid Egypt at the very end of the 11th century — one of only two intact Fatimid cloths known, and the reason the bishop cancelled the pilgrimage in 1936