The Abbey of Flaran and the Bastide of Valence-sur-Baïse

Required Activities

• Go up into the monks' dormitory, converted in 2008 to hold the Simonow collection, and pick out your two favourite things among drawings, paintings and sculpture spanning the 16th to the 21st century, then come back down to the permanent display on the Compostela roads through the Gers — the only permanent one on that subject in the old Midi-Pyrénées

• In the cloister, find the one gallery that is older than the rest — the west range, with its paired columns and capitals carved with leaves and masks, is 14th century, while the other three were rebuilt in 1485 after the Hundred Years' War wrecked them — and stand there knowing the whole cloister was nearly shipped to the Cloisters museum in New York until the Gers archaeological society stopped it in 1913. Then go into the chapter house and put your hand on the four marble columns holding its nine vaults: they are Roman, reused

• Go into the church of 1180–1210 through its round-arched door, which has no tympanum, and look back up at the oculus above it — one slab of stone pierced right through. Walk round to the chevet for the carved scallop shell curling on its modillon, and stand in the nave remembering that when Flaran was a farm this was an Armagnac store and the chapter house was full of grain

• Cross the Baïse and climb to Valence-sur-Baïse, the bastide the abbot of Flaran founded jointly with the Count of Armagnac in the mid-13th century, and from the top of the slope look back down at the abbey — the four monks who survived the burning of 1569 came up this way and lived out their lives in ordinary houses here, having given up saying the office at all

• In the refectory, look up at the 18th-century plasterwork and pick out the birds worked into it — phoenixes and pelicans — then go out into the Jardin des simples and crush a leaf from three different beds to see which of the medicinal plants you can name by smell alone