Seven weeks looking after two cats, one dog and two fish in a little French mediaeval town in the Pays de la Loire region? Why not, we thought when we applied for the ‘job’ through the Mind my Home app. It would be a nice opportunity to settle into a touch of French life – which is what we came away for after all! The first surprise came when we arrived in our little town of Pouancé (pwansay) and the home/pet owner greeted us with three dogs and one cat (still just two fish). She had ‘just rescued’ a chocolate labrador from a puppy farm that was shut down and she had ‘lost’ one cat (though we are not sure how). Plus, she explained, (over the yapping, hyperactive French bulldog, Alfie) she was taking ‘this little bugger’ with her to England on her job assignment looking after people with dementia for 6 weeks. So we had two rescue dogs to look after (a large arthritic 9 year old Spanish farm dog and a 5 year old chocolate labrador that had been locked up her whole life having puppies – with a thyroid issue and yeast infection that needed daily medication). Pas de problem!

Our living quarters for 7 weeks was a rural farm house on a large corner block (one brick home with two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a loungeroom and kitchen downstairs plus an old stone dwelling that used to be another cottage but is now storage rooms). The feature was a big south facing, grassy back yard which gets lots of sunshine and is full of ramshackle plants – mostly rose bushes, herbs and fruit trees. The property is at the intersection of two main roads and a roundabout and opposite the house is a middle-years school (age 11-15) so a fair bit of traffic goes by – which would be perfectly fine if it didn’t trigger the Spanish farm dog who barks at everything that passes! There’s lots of lovely walks right near the house including a long gravel bike path that stretches about 50 kms and we took advantage of the soft surface to get back into running (after we took the dogs for their morning walk) each day. The are also two interlinked etangs (large shallow lakes) with fishing huts and pontoons dotted around their shores. We walked the dogs around one of the lakes most afternoons and we enjoyed picnic dinners, sunset drinks and after dinner walks around the lakes many nights.  When we arrived, it was still hot and there was a big inflatable waterslide in the middle of the lake for the summer school holidays and a muddy-sand beach set up with lifeguards and canoe hire and paddle boats. There’s a campground behind the beach and it was full until September 1^st when the new school year started after the 3-month summer break.

It was fascinating to arrive in August and find all the shops in the nearby towns and villages closed with a sign saying ‘Ferme pour les Conges’(closed for the holidays) with most saying they’d re-open 2^nd September. Then to see the town come back to life, with school busses dominating the road each morning and night (there’s 4 schools in Pouance) and farmers ploughing their new crops in, the queues at the boulangerie and the municipal hedge trimming tractors sawing three metres of summer-growth foliage off with 3 spinning car tyre sized blades. If you’d like to read more see my post on the delights and oddities of life in rural France (link coming).

The towns and villages of the Loire

We’ve explored some lovely little towns and interesting sites in our area, which crosses between three departments: The Pays de la Loire, The Loire Valley and Brittany. I’ll just cover the Loire regions here and you can read about our time exploring the Brittany towns in this post (link coming)

France has a clever system of ‘classifying’ tourist towns by their features and what they offer a tourist to stop by to see.  We used this as a guideline for where to visit and so I have included what each category represents and how a town can earn each ‘label’.

• Les Plus Beaux Villages de France (The most beautiful villages of France) label is given to the most beautiful villages of fewer than 2,000 inhabitants that have a rich natural and built heritage and at least historic monuments.
• Ville des Fleurs label means the town has put significant effort into developing their gardens and parks. Another version of this is Villes et Villages Fleuris (The Floral town / village) label is awarded each year by the National Council of Towns and Villages in Bloom after a competition for best landscape/ plant heritage, floral displays, respect for the natural environment and living environment.
• Petite cité de caractère (Small town of character) label is awarded to small towns that boast a high-quality, coherent architectural heritage, and undertake to preserve their heritage and promote it to inhabitants and visitors.
• City of art and history label is awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Communication to towns with a rich heritage that implement a policy of bringing to life and promoting their heritage and architecture.
• Most beautiful detour in France label, is given to medium-sized municipalities (between 2,000 and 20,000 inhabitants) which posses a rich heritage and an interesting environment with permanent facilities for welcoming tourists.
• The Village stop label is awarded to small municipalities located near a major road, offering an extensive range of restaurants, accommodation and shops, as well as high-quality public amenities in a welcoming environment.

I’ll identify what each town is labelled as, where I can, starting with our town of Pouance then I’ll go through the towns we visited in alphabetical for ease of navigation.

Pouancé  – Ville de Fleurs and Petite cité de caractère

Pouancé (pronounced pwansay ) is a small medieval commune (town) in the Maine-et-Loire department in the Pays de Loire region in the west of France. In 2016 it was merged into the commune of Ombrée d’Anjou which is a tad confusing as the town now goes interchangeably by the name of Pouancé and Ombrée d’Anjou on street signs and maps.  The centrepiece of the town is the Castle of Pouancé which was built in the 11^th century to create a strategic stronghold between the Kingdom of France and the Duchy of Brittany. It was heavily fortified to protect against repeated invasions – particularly during the 100 Years War. It was ruined during the 16^th century and in the 1800s people who owned land in the area were allowed to use the stone and materials from the castle to build their own homes, so it was pulled apart bit by bit. It was saved from destruction in the 1960’s by a resident of Pouancé and now the council of Pouancé maintains what is left of it.

The ruined castle is a ten-minute walk up our street and was our go to for sunset drinks before hitting our fav little pizza restaurant the Crevache d’Or for crispy-crust-delicious-toppings on a Friday night. There’s really only this one restaurant in town – there’s another pizza-pasta café open for lunch each day and dinner on a Friday night and on Thursdays a Burger truck pulls up outside the Tabac for and we enjoyed getting takeaway burgers on the terrace drinking 2-euro glasses of the local Rosé. There’s three boulangeries and we tried them all and prefer the baguettes and eclairs from the one closest to us in Avenue de la Gare. On Thursdays there’s also a local market in the town square with two Crepe/Galette vans, two butchers-meat-deli vans, two fresh vegetable stands, a cheese truck, a fresh yoghurt and butter stand and a tourist info van.

Amazing Amboise

Amboise, a small market town on the banks of the Loire river, was once home of the French royal court and has a beautiful chateau to contest to this! We visited in the peak of summer and had to squeeze through the busy little cobblestone streets with a lot of other tourists. We enjoyed a delicious coffee gelati while walking along the river to get away from the crowds – but it was easy to see why everyone was there as there are many lovely cafes, squares, shops and the grand chateau.

Ancenis on the Loire

This little town on the Loire river is now called Ancenis-Saint-Géréon and has the Floral town / village label. It is very old, with Ancenis Castle first built on an ancient castle mound in 984. There are a few quaint cafes and hotels down near the river and some nice little restaurants and the remnants of the old fortified city wall stand guard near the Loire. We enjoyed a walk along the river and in amongst the little cobblestone streets.

Glorious Angers

This was our favourite town, just 55km and about 45 minutes east south east of Pouancé and is a medieval city and the capital of the province of Anjou. It has a young vibrant feel – possibly due to the fact that ¼ of its population are students (40,000 students out of a population of 160,000). Angers might have a young population but it is very old with the largest most intact fortified castle –  Chateau d’Angers – in the Anjou region. The 13^th century castle is truly grand and in good nick as the English never besieged the castle and it remained the seat of power for the Angevin kings throughout medieval times. Today, the old moat is filled with stunning topiary gardens and flowers but the item it is most famous for is the 140 metre long Apocalypse series tapestries of Nicholas Bataille. We visited the tapestry and tried to unravel the story in French which is tells the story of the ‘book of revelations’ – the last text in the New testament.

We love Angers for three very different reasons – 1 it has the most enormous-delicious fresh food market on Saturday mornings – in two locations – the biggest one at Place L’eclerc and a smaller on at Place Lafayette but both with amazing fresh fruit and veggies, a mouth-watering fresh pasta and arancini van, superbly stinky cheese trucks, lots of artisan breads, cakes and biscuits, great meat and charcuterie stalls and fresh eggs, herbs, butter and yoghurt too.  2. It has so many beautiful buildings and shops – there’s the Mussee des beaux arts mansion, the Cathedral Saint-Maurice and quite a few 15^th century half-timbered houses. There’s also a lovely big square – Place du Raillemant with cute covered picnic tables, fantastic shops and the best baguettes we’ve ever tasted – – which brings me to reason 3 which is that Angers has the best treats ever – from the locally specialty chocolate called Le Quernon d’Ardoise which is like a flat square of toffee-hazelnut praline covered in white chocolate dyed a distinctive mauve colour! And the best Baguettery we’ve found yet. The fillings are laid out on a long thin dish and they cut open a crusty baguette fresh for you and fill it with your choice (my fav is the curry chicken, Jamie’s the Jambon-buerre) for just 4euro.

Charming Chateaubriant – Ville de Fleurs.

This is our closest service town about 15 minutes drive west of Pouance and, as we’ve come to expect, the town has a great big chateau! The good news here is that it is free to visit and it has a great multi-media show that demonstrates how the castle was first built, fortified, attacked, rebuilt, attacked again and rebuilt then turned into a council owned exhibition space and park. We enjoyed touring its porticos and ramparts and walking around the outside of the chateau walls where you get great views and can find a nice little pond.  Cheataubriant old town has some lovely little streets and shops, an impressive church and a big Tourismo, plus on the outskirts there’s a huge commercial park with two hypermarches (gigantic supermarkets) – our favourite E. Leclerc (has a sushi kitchen, butchers, fromagerie, boulangerie, clothing, household goods – you name it) and an Intermarche plus big outlet sports and clothing stores.

Gorgeous Château-Gontier

This town gets the most beautiful detours in France label and deservedly so! It is a sprawling thousand-year-old town on the banks of the River Mayenne,. There’s two sections – an historic centre in the upper town, with narrow streets dotted with private mansions, that gives you a glimpse of its rich past as a linen cloth trading town. And down along the river is the old fisherman’s cottages that lie in juxtaposition to the grand Chateau that runs along the far side of the river.

Coseé-le-Vivien and La Frénouse – the House of artist Robert Tatin

We drove about 40 minutes to visit this remarkable sculpture and art park in the little hamlet of Cosseé-le-Vivien – which is where the artist Robert Tatin was born in and he returned to fulfil his artistic dreams.

There’s the Walk of the Greats (Allée des Géants), where 19 statues of people like Charlemagne, Vercingetorix, Joan of Arc, Jules Verne, Toulouse Lautrec and Pablo Picasso rub shoulders with each other. Plus the artists house called the Dragon, for the sculpture that adorns it, full of his textiles, ceramics and paintings, and the Meditation Garden which has about a dozen of his sculptures.  It took Robert Tatin and his wife Lise twenty-one years to create this imaginary world and we visited twice we were so enamoured!

Crumbling, cute Craon

This little town is about 20 minutes from Pouancé and the has the l’Oudon river running through it (that flooded the town in June this year). It has a couple of old streets with vintage shops and an old timber covered market from 1850 which is now used as a carpark and an old church. Many of the smaller towns no longer have fresh produce stores and some have taken to making basic lunch items available via a vending machine like this one which has replaced the Charcuterie and Boucherie in Craon. It is a crumbling but cute town – and of course there’s the impressive Château de Craon nearby which has 47 hectares of parks and an 18th century château used for weddings and receptions.

Esse and the incredible La Roche aux Fées

This ancient rock formation in Esse was a real surprise find. Located in the little hamlet of Esse about bout 20 mins south of Rennes (about 40 minutes from Pouancé) lies the oldest Dolmen in Europe.

A dolmen is a Neolithic funerary monument used to bury the dead. This dolmen is nearly 20 meters long, six meters wide and four meters high, and made from forty slabs of schist, the heaviest of which weigh 40 tons. The total weight of the megalithic ensemble is around 500 tons and the stone was harvested from the Theil forest in Brittany four kilometres away! How they got this stone here and assembled it nearly 5,000 years ago is a real mystery. We walked in and around the dolmen and were fascinated by its strength and durability.

Lovely Laval

Almost an hour from Pouance, this town is known as a town of Art and History and was founded in the 11^th century when the castle of the counts of Laval was built. The castle was later fortified with ramparts and watchtowers built, and today it houses the museum of Naïve Art and other exhibitions (One of it’s the castle’s towers was the birthplace of the painter Henri Rousseau).

During the summer months there’s a guinguette (food truck) and tables and chairs set up in the chateau’s front garden which services cheese and charcuterie platters and drinks which we enjoyed one early evening gazing at the ancient chateau.Laval has a lovely old town with narrow cobblestone streets, a big Hotel de Ville with an expansive terrace and a large market hall which was under renovation when we visited but promised to be grand when finished.

Le Lion d’Angers

Labeled a  Ville fleurie, this little town 30 minutes from Pouancé is home to several treasures: the Saint-Martin-de-Vertou church and its 16th century murals, as well as the Isle Briand departmental park, classified as a Sensitive Natural Area. we took a walk around the park and were very impressed with its cross country, dressage and steeplechase courses inside the park. The l’isle brand started life as an Abbey then a chateau and in the 19th century the Count of Tredern and owner of the estate introduced horses and a racecourse . In the 1960s it was turned into a horse stud and in 2017 it was sold to a conglomerate. It is now the national training facility for equestrian events and hold many competitions and races at the various courses around the island.

The right Royal Loches

We stayed in a teeny tiny apartment attached to an old Manor house about 1km from the town of Loches, in the middle of August and it was pretty hot and our first night we had to wait until the sun went down to walk into town to explore the old Royal castle. We could see the DonJohn from our apartment and it was magnificent in the golden evening light. There’s more than 2 km of fortifications, and 1000 years of history and the huge, solid towers, dungeons, walls, castle keep/DonJohn and prisons of the castle are testament to how much life from the 11^th to the 20^th century was about defending your territory/title/life.

This royal city and castle is built on top of a promontory of white rocks dominating the Indre valley which provided the perfect strategic location for keeping an eye on activity on the popular trade route which passed through Loches from Paris to Spain. Huge figures, such as Henry II Plantagenet, Richard the Lionheart and Louis XI , have all lived or ruled in this area. The Royal Lodge was built from the 13th century and housed the (mad) King Charles VII has and his favourite mistress/muse, Agnès Sorel . She had her own wing in the palace and bore four daughters to him and was apparently the brains behind his rule (the woman he was forced to marry being disinterested). Women played a big role in this royal city – with Joan of Arc visiting to advise King Charles to defy the English and be crowned in Reims (we all know how that ended – but can you believe she was only 19 when she was killed!) , and in the 14th century, Anne of Brittany stayed in Loches regularly as well. We toured the castle and the Donjohn and we also enjoyed walking along the outer walls of the old fortified town where there are many little old houses carved into the limestone cliffs that used to be the homes of trogladytes and some have now been converted into art studios and dwellings. There’s also a pretty walk through the Prairies de Roy (the royal meadown) along the canal that has great views of the castle from down below.

Fantasy, Tree art and nature galore in Nantes

Nantes, about an hour or so from Pouancé is the largest town we visited with over 300,000 people. It has an international airport and a large train station and a commercial district. We were first attracted to go there as I’d read they had a Melbourne Coffee house so that was our first destination – and it turned out to be Ok but was not owned by a person from Melbourne and only offered a token nod to Aussie coffee and food (lamingtons and vegemite toast – but only on weekends!).

The city has a neat green line painted on the pavement that takes you around all the sites to see so we just followed this past a whole array of marvellous places starting with the large, lush botanical gardens – the Jardin des Plantes with waterfalls, ponds, rolling lawns and 10,000 international plant species. We pured out of here on to Rue Clemenceau, and past the grand old Musée des Artes and past archaeological remnants from the 3rd – 15^th century including the  Porte Saint-Pierre and the Cathedrale Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul (which was under renovation). We followed the green line down cobbled Rue Mathelin Rodier past lots of lovely little cafes – many vegetarian and on towards the Chateau. We crossed the drawbridge over the moat and walked around the gardens and ramparts for free – but didn’t go inside to see the  history museum.

We also followed the Trees in the city art exhibition and discovered a few of the many dozen sculptures woven in up and around the significant trees in the city. Another curiosity was the four drinking fountain sculptures which copies Paris’ fashion of designing beautiful drinking fountains to draw people to enjoy the towns free water.  We didn’t go across to the Les Machines de l’île which houses the artistic fantasies of Jules Verne (who was born in Nantes) in the old shipyards. There’s gigantic dinosaurs and elephants which you can ride and all sorts of sci-fi machines – looks incredible but we ran out of time.

The rural communes of Rougé and Ruffigne

The two little communes are both about 30 mins from Pouance. Rougé. Has about 2000 people and a rather large, brutalist church with startingly beautiful stained glass windows inside. There’s a little tabac and a few shops but it was more of a drive through than stop off town for us. Ruffigne is similar to Rougé but with a smaller church and tabac.

Simply stunning Sainte-Suzanne

The medieval town of Sainte-Suzanne, has the label the most beautiful villages of France, as well as the small town of character label.

It is perched on a rocky promontory overlooking farmland, and has spent a lot of effort on the upkeep of the old stone houses and castle. Sainte-Suzanne castle was re-built in the 17th century so is in fairly good nick and the original 11th-century Romanesque keep still stands and is the only stronghold to withstand the assault of William the Conqueror’s troops! You can walk around the castle gardens and ramparts for free but there is a charge to go in to the castle interior. There are a few sweet cafes and shops and a pretty Promenade de la Poterne, at the foot of the ramparts, and its beautiful viewpoints over the surrounding countryside.

Historic caves of Saulges

About an hour north east of Pouancé is the town and valley of Saulges which is famous for its many caves dating back 20,000 years. There’s not a lot in Saulges itself except 2 churches, one Romanesque, one Merovingian and a Marie (with a baguette vending machine) where you can park your car then hike about 45 mins to reach the Margot cave and the Rochefort cave which contain a number of prehistoric remains of man and mammoths. we scrambled up and around the rocky cliff faces that form the Erve valley and imagined mankind living in these caves alongside mammoths and minotaurs 20,000 years ago!

Segres-d’Anjou Bleau

This town about 30 minutes from Pouancé was settled in the 10th century, by the Count of Anjou Foulques le Roux who built a castle on the schistose spur overlooking the two rivers.  Theres some lovely old squares, streets and buildings and a nice walk along the river. We stopped off a couple of times to walk along the rivers and on Saturday 31^st August we went to their Tout Art Fer – a festival celebrating the history of steel mining in the area and steel sculptures. It was a bit of a hoot as it was held in the large car park where they had a ‘Plat du Jour’ for 5euro which got you the local Bretton specialty – pork sausages wrapped in a galette, a serve of French fries and a desert crepe. The bar had wine nad beer and there was a band which we thought we might dance to until we saw it was square dancing French style with partners and callers and some pretty expert moves that were way beyond us! A bit of fun to see a local fair and local town life!