These villages are quaint and charming and all survive on their local craft, agriculture and service based economies. The buildings though are constructed from the locally quarried sandstone and their red colour blended wonderfully with the green tones of the countryside. Turenne and Collonges la Rouge are built on the local limestone. Both of these places are on the official list of France’s most beautiful villages and function as symbolic monuments to the Dordogne valley’s reputation.
It contributes much to the local character and culture.Įarly the next morning we set off for the villages of Turenne and Collonges la Rouge, not very far away. The Denoix distillery sells 70,000 bottles of the digestive spirit a year in both Paris and the local Brive area. Our testing of the produce helped us to quickly relax into our new, brief adventure in the Dordogne valley. Aperitifs and liqueurs are produced from varieties of the regional walnuts just as they always have been from the distilleries inception in the nineteenth century. The distillery also functions as an active museum and the Denoix family has operated the business for four generations and much of their family history of the previous 170 years is presented.
We thought that a tasting of the produce here was probably the best way to start any French visit. We had arranged to visit the Denoix distillery in the town centre. We arrived during the late afternoon and set off in our mini-bus to discover Brive. The aircraft departed exactly on time and the cabin crew provided a perfect service. The flight was the inaugural service by Ryanair and this now operates twice weekly on Wednesdays and Saturdays. We flew from London Stansted airport to Brive la Gaillarde in the Limousin region. We were only going to be there for three days but we wanted to see as much as we could of this stunningly beautiful piece of countryside. It was a bit like being in the ‘Secret Seven’ but we were one short. A group of six of us decided to take an express visit to the Dordogne valley in south western France.
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