Uzerche: The Pearl of the Limousin in a Loop of the Vézère

Required Activities

• Go down into the crypt of the Holy Bodies under the church of Saint-Pierre, where the relics of the two Breton bishops, saint Léon and saint Coronat, drew the Compostela pilgrims, then come back up into the church — all that the vicomte de Turenne's Huguenots left of the abbey when they sacked it in 1575

• Walk the rue de la Justice and count the three towers on the front of the hôtel du Sénéchal, said locally to stand for the rights of high, middle and low justice, then find the two pepper-pot towers of the Château Pontier, the consuls' house, and the Maison Eyssartier, home of the apothecary who sold the arsenic in the Lafarge poisoning case

• Walk through the Porte Bécharie, the one town gate kept intact, and stop under the arch to look up at the carved niche above the vault, with its modern statue of the Virgin in it

• Walk out onto the Pont Turgot, finished in 1753 to link the Sainte-Eulalie suburb to the old town, and look back up at the turreted houses on the spur — then pick out the terraced kitchen gardens that step all the way from the top of the rock down to the banks of the Vézère, and are still worked