“Green was the silence
wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly”
Pablo Neruda

Arthur Rackham, Edmund DuLac, Anton Pieck…they are all illustrators whose depictions of fairy-tale villages, castles and general other-worldliness captured my imagination from the very first time a bed-time story was read to me. How I longed to escape into the captivating scenes they conjured from their imaginations.

Houses with turrets, and higgeldy-piggeldy garret windows, creaking shutters, timber frames, cobbled lanes that snaked their way uphill to bewitching and bewitched castles, whilst sinuous rivers coiled their way through verdant forests and wildflower meadows.

They are images that engendered a love of English villages, but somehow they were missing a vital ingredient.

All that changed the first time I visited the Black Perigord and saw the daisy-chain of chateaux clinging to the banks of the Dordogne, and the golden villages clinging to their sheer-drop skirts.

Here was all those images made flesh, or stone.

The turrets, the shutters, the cobblestones, the ornate signs swinging above shop doors.

This past weekend I spent three nights in the hilltop Bastide of Domme, with its imposing gates and crumbling ramparts circling the village. This sense of containment and being easily able to define the villages boundaries is immensely satisfying, I find. It is akin to being on an island. But this elevated island is surrounded by the fertile Dordogne valley.

Situated above the ramparts, the three wings of this beautiful village house, opening onto a large, shady, flower-filled garden, offer an idyllic setting for a stay full of charm and relaxation. After the day’s visits the spa (open from April to end of October), with its panoramic view, awaits you for a delicious moment of relaxation“

My only thought as I drifted off to sleep in the softest of French linens was that I had to get up in time to see the sun rise, and hopefully, bear witness to a morning mist rising from the river.

And so while the house and everyone in it slumbered, I tiptoed out into the garden, with roses, lavender and thyme releasing their perfume into June’s ‘trembling air’ as I brushed past them where they had flopped onto the densely flowered pathways. Flower filled this garden certainly is…in beds, in pots, climbing walls and heroically climbing over frames and pergolas, ruffled and layered like “old ladies petticoats”, not a square inch is neglected. It is glorious.

And there, way down below, was a carpet of sinuous white mist, coiling around the red rooftops, slowly revealing a village in glimpses, like the return of Brigadoon…

It is a garden that is perfect for those of us of a crepuscular disposition, that is preferring the extremes of the day. The light, the silence, the scents, the sounds.

Later that day, returning to it after watching the sun setting from the ramparts at the other end of the village, I settled down in a chair to watch the moon rise, the house cat on my lap, whose name I never did discover, his deep vibrating purrs echoing my deep contentment perfectly, although he had the clear advantage of not having to leave.