Exploring a Gallo-Roman grand design The idyllic setting and picturesque ruins of the Gallo-Roman villa at Montmaurin certainly would have appealed to the Romantics of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Set in a rural landscape against the backdrop of grazing animals and the distant white peaks of the Pyrenees, the ruined walls rise up [...]

It is a traveller’s story repeated throughout the decades. The first-time visitor to Paris arrives in the city armed with a checklist of ‘must-see’ wonders – sites viewed in photographs so often that they are imprinted in the mind’s eye. And, unlike so many other places, in Paris every monument equals or surpasses expectation: the [...]

According to Oscar Wilde, ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’. With the arrival this summer of a new direct train from London’s St Pancras to Avignon in France, the temptation to spend a few days in Provence was one not worth fighting. But Avignon, temporary home of [...]

Francophile David Miles pulls on his hiking boots, and sets off in search of Neolithic farmers in the South of France.

Former chief archaeological advisor to English Heritage David Miles travels to Arles in Southern France. There, he pays homage to a new exhibition featuring Caesar’s head and an array of other finds dredged from ‘la plus grande poubelle’ – AKA the Rhône at Arles.

Périgord possesses two superlative assets: unrivalled rock art and matchless cuisine. The two seem utterly incompatible: after all, it stretches one’s imagination to associate archaeologists of early humans with discerning culinary matters. In essence, these archaeologists are manqué fossil hunters, gripped by the metrics of fragmentary bones and stones. Yet again, perhaps for all their [...]