Continuing on from our beautiful stop at the Marqueyssac  Gardens we headed to our bed & breakfast just outside the medieval town of Sarlat-la-Canada.

La Belle Plane is based in a former winery and is run by the lovely husband and wife team; Claude and Martine. They only have 4 rooms and offer bed and breakfast. We chose it for it’s proximity to Sarlat (although you still need a car) and the fact it had a pool and enough space for the 4 of us (which was not easy to find in this area).

It’s a lovely base for the area as we had plenty of room and Claude and Martine are extremely welcoming. We all immediately fell in love with their dog and amazing breakfasts:

As a side-note: Martine made me the most wonderful gluten-free walnut cake which is a specialty of the Perigord region; it was so good that I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I’ve found a recipe for it so if it’s a success I’ll post it on here. Fingers crossed!

As we tend to book our holidays so far in advance when it actually comes around to the holiday itself, we have usually forgotten all the hours we’ve spent planning and booking it and the reasons for going to particular places. So when we arrived in Sarlat-Le-Canada we were completely awe-struck:

We couldn’t get over how big it was and how much of it was Medieval – it felt like being on a film set.

It does get busy here, so if you’re going in the Summer I would highly recommend booking tables at any restaurants you want to go to. My favourite was Restaurant L’Adresse.

We decided to go kayaking along the more peaceful Vezere River, which is a tributary to the Dordogne.

We used the company Canoe 24 who basically leave you to your own devices after dropping you up-stream, so if you’re not very confident or want more of a ‘tour’, then this company probably isn’t for you. We did the 20km St-Leon to Les Eyzies trip but they do, do shorter excursions.

There are so many beautiful villages in the Dordogne and as we weren’t there for very long we only really had time to see one. Having seen the village of La Roque-Gageac from the Marquayssac gardens, we knew this had to be the one:

Understandably this is one of the best-known villages in the area as not only is it beautiful; being set between the Dordogne River and a cliff, it also has it’s own castle and troglodyte caves.

It even has its own microclimate and small botanical gardens:

Pretty much a fairytale ending to our trip in the Dordogne.

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