Nontron: The Oldest Folding Knife in France

Required Activities

• Buy the classic Nontron from a cutler in the town — the number 25 folding pocket knife, pyrographed boxwood handle and brass ferrule — and before you pay, turn the ferrule to lock the blade open and shut, the catch Guillaume Petit put on the Nontron pattern in 1815

• Go into the 18th-century château of Nontron, the only building in the Dordogne picked for the loto du patrimoine in 2020, and find the exhibition room where the Pôle expérimental des métiers d'art shows what the craftspeople of the Nontronnais are making now, knives among it

• Come for the Fête du Couteau at the start of August, the third biggest knife show in France after Paris and Thiers, and work the stands of the hundred or so cutlers to compare a Nontron, a Laguiole and an Opinel in the hand before you choose

• Find the church of Notre-Dame-des-Ronces, built over a spring in 1872 and 1873 to Jules Mandin's plans, and look up at the organ in it — the one the parish bought second-hand from the cathedral of Saint-Front at Périgueux