The Corrèze countryside is genuine countryside. The local dialect has no translation for “teak decking” and 33 words for slug. If you tell a Corrèze farmer that you hired a limousine for your wedding, he’ll assume you went to church on a Limousin cow. It’s all so old-school, I even saw rectangular hay bales.
Corrèze, the département just to the east of Dordogne, is also — miraculously — one of the last refuges from the epidemic of Britannicus countryhousis that has swept across southwest France. In Corrèze you can still be sure that the old guy in a beret coming out of the boulangerie is not an ex-maths teacher from Surbiton.
This authenticity may not survive for much longer, however. Limoges, in Haute-Vienne, 30km north of Corrèze, now has direct flights from the UK. The wave of prospective home-buyers is beginning to break. Estate agents are already putting ads in windows announcing “English spoke”, and they’d doubtless love to rename the département Dordogne Est-Est and triple the house prices.
They’re right. Frankly, Corrèze has all of the winding-valley, wooded-hilltop, sleepy- hamlet charm of its famous neighbour, but in Corrèze’s country lanes, you can go 10km without seeing another car, even in midsummer. It’s like touring the Dordogne, except that last night you went out and punctured everyone else’s tyres.
You cruise along with your windows open and have plenty of time to take in the unreconstructed campagne. Woodpeckers stand in the middle of the lane and play chicken with you, puffing out their chests and waiting till the very last second to fly off and head-butt a chestnut tree. You pass fields of wheat only just big enough to make one loaf of bread, and drive through green tunnels of chestnut and oak that are not part of a national park, out-of-town jogging trail or timber business. They’re just trees that nobody has ever cut down.
The villages only a few kilometres north of the large town of Brive feel a bit like a landlubber’s version of the Mary Celeste. Where are all the people? The houses, as gold as a baguette crust, their slate roofs glistening in the sun, look deserted. The amber cows merrily chew the cud, unaware that their owners have disappeared.
But no, if you look carefully, they’re there. An old man in a vest filling a wheelbarrow with courgettes, a tractor mowing grass down by a dark stream, a tiny smocked woman who looks as though she’s trying to quell a rebellion of roses at the side of her house.
“You mustn’t exaggerate,” my friend Serge tells me. “There are lots of people in Corrèze. You wait till we have the vide-greniers [garage sale] on Sunday.”
Serge is deputy mayor of the village of St-Bonnet-l’Enfantier and he is doing his best to fight rural depopulation. He recently got the village cafe licence reactivated and clearly has a keen eye for the type of barmaid who will keep the males from moving to the city. I tell him that I want to have a good look around Corrèze before the Brits come en masse and turn it into the set for a life-change documentary.
“But les anglais are already here,” he says. “They’re in Estivaux and Le Bariolet.” He makes it sound like an invading army, which is very apt. If the region has so many castles and fortified villages, it’s largely thanks to the anglais who kept rampaging through here, trying to colonise the place during the Hundred Years’ War.
“Oh,” I moan. It seems I’m too late after all. I gloomily envisage the Estivaux cricket club and Le Bariolet sudoku evenings.
“Yes, there’s a Scottish couple in Estivaux,” Serge says. “And an anglais has bought a cafe in Le Bariolet.” Their presence is big news for 10km in each direction. Phew.
Serge lends me a book listing all of Corrèze’s historical monuments. The star attraction has to be Collonges-la-Rouge, about 15km southeast of Brive. It is inaccurately named. It is not red at all — it is pink, so pink that it’s probably the only place in the world where Barbara Cartland would have looked inconspicuous. It’s a fortified village built entirely of blushing limestone, the colour due to the high concentration of iron. So far, it has survived centuries of rust and war, and it seems to be resisting the onslaught of modern tourism pretty well, too.
