The Perigord is an ancient name that dates back to the pagan Gauls who lived here before the Romans came. It was revived in the 10th century when the Comte of Perigord was part of the great Duchy of Aquitaine which covered most of south-western France, which is why when Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, married the English King Henry II, he and his successors claimed the lot. It corresponds roughly to the current Department of the Dordogne. It is lovely country, formed by the valleys of the rivers Dordogne, Vezere and l’Isle, with gentle hills and wide views, with a temperate climate that is seldom too hot or too cold.

It can boast an awesome amount of history. As well as the caves with their prehistoric paintings, the Roman roads and the Gallo-Roman town of Vesuna (now Perigueux), there are abbeys and churches that date from before Charlemagne. And there are even place names that recall that the Arabs passed this way after their conquest of Spain, before their great defeat at the hands of Charles Martel at the battle of Poitiers in 732 AD, battle that saved Europe for Christendom.

There are over a thousand medieval castles (in various states of repair) and fortified hilltop towns called bastides where the French and English battled off and on for three centuries, even though they called it the Hundred Years War. The great castles of Castelnaud and Beynac still glower at one another across the river Dordogne, and remain in such splendid shape that the latest Joan of Arc movie was filmed at Beynac.

The glories of the French Renaissance are on display at Chateau Jumilhac, an old Knights Templar castle that was rebuilt in extraordinary style in the 16th century. The charming small Renaissance chateau of Monbazillac, amid its vineyards and gazing serenely over the plain of Bergerac, shows the old fortresses with their arrow slits of windows giving way to a gentler, more comfortable way of life. There are shrines to the dead of France’s wars of religion, to the great revolution of 1789, bridges built by Napoleon and war memorials to the 2 million French dead in the great slaughter of the First World War.

The observant tourist will also note, at street corners and at the end of bridges and at unaccountably remote spots along country roads, small monuments to Frenchmen “Fusilles par les Allemands.” The Perigord was an important centre of the Resistance in World War Two, and in the spring and summer of 1944, they paid a heavy price as specialist and brutal anti-partisan units from Yugoslavia and the Eastern Front were deployed to destroy them and to terrorise and intimidate the region. June was the worst month because of D-Day, when the British, American and Canadian liberators stormed ashore in Normandy on June 6. One of the great concerns of the Allied invasion planners was a German unit called the SS Das Reich panzer division. As an SS force, it was twice the size of the usual panzer division, with over 20,000 men armed with the latest Mark V Panther tanks. It was probably the most powerful single armoured unit on the Western front, and the allies feared that if it reached the Normandy beachheads before they were fully reinforced, it could smash the invaders back into the sea.

The SS Das Reich Division was based for its re-fitting and re-training at Montauban, near Toulouse, south of Perigord. To reach the Normandy beachheads, it would have to cross the Dordogne and Vezere rivers. Usually, the 300-mile journey to Normandy would have taken them four days. in fact, the first units did not reach Normandy until late June, and the Resistance, along with allied fighter-bombers destroying the bridges, played a critical role in delaying them. The story is told, in fictional form, in my earlier novel ‘The Caves of Perigord.’

At the town of Mouleydier, close to Bergerac, a small band of Resistance fighters with extraordinary courage held up the armoured division for an entire day. Just up-river at Lalinde, there is small monument to a brave band of fighters who died trying to defend the bridge across the Dordogne. They lasted just a few minutes. But they and many like them bought time with their own lives, and it was that time that helped secure the invasion’s success, France’s Liberation and the defeat of Hitler’s Germany.

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The Perigord is divided into four regions; there is the Périgord Vert in the north, the green Perigord, named for the great oak forests and greenery, with its centre at the town of Nontron, famous for its knives. In the south is the Perigord Poupre, the purple, named for its red wines with its capital at Bergerac. To the west is the Perigord Blanc, or white Perigord, the country around the city of Perigueux and which takes its name from the white chalk of the cliffs and soil. And then there is the heart of the place, the Perigord Noir, the black Perigord, with its centre at Sarlat. Some say it is named after the dark forests of oak, chestnut and walnut, others claim it is named for the black diamond of the truffle, heart of so much of French cuisine.

There is an old saying and complex pun about Perigord that dates from medieval times, first inscribed in the Chapel des Cordeliers in Perigueux. It says:

Petra si ingratis cor amicis hostibus ensis
Hoec tria si fueris Petra-cor-ensis eris.

Roughly translated it means: Stone for nasty people, your heart for your friends, iron for your enemies; if you are these three, you’re a Perigourdin.

Dordogne map
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The towns of Périgord

Each of the towns of the Perigord region has its distinctive charm. Sarlat is magical, a town whose centre was largely built in the 16th and 17th centuries and has changed little since. They could film another version of ‘The Three Musketeers’ here without changing anything except for a few modern shop windows. It stayed unchanged because of the surrounding swamps and malaria that put the town into a long decline with little new building until the use of DDT after World War Two tamed the mosquito.

Bergerac may be best known thanks to the fictional character created by the playwright Edmond Rostand in 1897, whose Cyrano de Bergerac was the poet and hero with the long, long nose. Cyrano sought to woo the lovely Roxanne for an inarticulate friend, but ended up falling for her himself. In the 1950 Hollywood movie, Jose Ferrer won an Oscar for his performance as Cyrano, and Gerard Depardieu played the role again in a 1990 movie. But there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, who was very proud of his long nose. A writer and soldier and noted duellist, he was a pioneer of science fiction, writing of space and time travel, and also of some celebrated polemics against Charles d’Assoucy, a writer and musician with who he seems to have a prolonged gay relationship that ended badly. While not being from this part of the world by birth, Cyrano fought alongside Gascons in the 17th century wars against the Dutch and adopted some of their aggressive, vainglorious but deeply honourable style. (D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers was a Gascon.)

Perigueux was a pagan town before the Romans came, and its Tower of Vesuna is one of most remarkable remains of ancient Gaul. A pagan temple, some 90 ft high and 90ft in diameter, and angled to open to the rising sun, it was built to the goddess Vesuna by the local Petrocorii tribes from whom stems the term Perigord. Christians later claimed the opening in the wall was where the defeated devil was hurled through the wall by the valiant St Front, who converted the region to Christianity. When the Romans defeated the Petrocrorii, they built a stadium for 20,000 people (the Jardin des Arenes) where gladiators fought and Christians were martyred. The excavated Villa Pompeia and the Porte Normande on the Rue de Turenne were built by Rome, but the great legacy is now the fine modern museum.

The cathedral of Perigord is built in the Byzantine style with domes and cupolas and looks as if might be more at home in Istanbul. It was restored in the 19th century by the great architect Abanie, and became the model of the more famous Sacre-Coeur that overlooks Paris from the hill of Montmartre. There are bits of the old church that date from 1074 at the western end, and on either side are the two ‘confessionals’ that are even older.

Some of the oldest parts, including the tomb of St Front, were destroyed by the Protestants when they seized control of the city in 1575 during the religious Wars. They secretly crept into the city on a market day, disguised as peasants with swords concealed beneath their cloaks, and kept control of the place for six years. The local Lord, Henry of Navarre, was a Protestant who finally ended the religious wars by converting to Catholicism as the price of becoming King of France. “Paris is worth a mass,” he famously said, and was crowned at Chartres cathedral in 1594, but in the Perigord they prefer to recall his remark that with its great food and wine, the region was ‘paradise on earth.”

The old centre of the city has houses that date back to the 12th century, like the Maison des Dames de la Foy on the Rue des Fargues, which was the home of the English governor in the 14th century and also a Templar headquarters.