Pont-en-Royans: The Hanging Houses Over the Bourne

Required Activities

• From the riverbank below the bridge, look up at the maisons suspendues hanging off the rock, then work out how much of the gorge wall is now bare: there were three times as many of these houses over the gouffre in the 19th century before they were knocked down to widen the road for the timber carts

• Climb the stepped medieval lanes to the Tour de l'Horloge, the one surviving gate of the old ramparts, then stand on the bridge — barely three metres wide — and look down into the gouffre Picard, a hollow about ten metres deep in the Bourne underneath it

• Go into the Halle Jean Gattégno on the Grande Rue, built on the ground the demolished hanging houses once stood on, and see what is hanging in its art centre alongside an intercommunal library of some 140,000 items

• Drive or ride the first few kilometres of the route des gorges de la Bourne east out of the village towards Choranche — a corbelled road cut straight into the rock face, rated three stars by Michelin — and stop where the Bourne runs directly beneath the overhang