Southwest France Walking Tours: Routes and Practicalities

The walking in this part of France is genuinely good and genuinely under-used. There is a dense network of marked routes, the terrain is varied without being demanding, the landscape is worth looking at, and on most paths on most days you will meet nobody at all.

The catch is that the information is almost entirely offline. A search will surface a handful of commercial itineraries; the several hundred local circuits that make up the real network exist in booklets sold at tourist offices and on signboards outside village halls.

This is a guide to what is there and how to get at it.

The three kinds of route

GR — Grande Randonnée

The long-distance national network, waymarked with red-and-white horizontal bars. Several GR routes cross the south-west, including sections of the historic ways to Santiago de Compostela.

You do not need to walk the whole thing. Most people use GRs in sections, either as a there-and-back or by arranging transport at one end.

GR de Pays

Regional loops, generally taking several days, waymarked yellow-and-red. They circle a defined area and are designed to be walked as a circuit.

PR — Promenade et Randonnée

The local circuits, waymarked yellow, and the backbone of walking here. Nearly every commune has at least one, typically between five and fifteen kilometres, starting and finishing in the village. They are designed to be walked in a morning or an afternoon.

These are what you will use most, and they are the ones that are hardest to find out about.

Reading the marks: two parallel bars mean carry on. A mark with a turn in it means the path changes direction. A cross means wrong way. Marks appear on trees, posts, walls and rocks, and they are generally well maintained.

Finding the routes

Tourist offices — including very small ones — sell topoguides and booklets of local circuits, usually for a few euros. These are the single best resource and they are frequently available nowhere else, in any language, online or off.

Village noticeboards often carry a map of the local circuits.

Signboards at trailheads in most communes show the routes starting there, with distances and rough timings.

IGN maps, the 1:25,000 series, show waymarked routes along with tracks, field boundaries, springs and buildings. They are excellent and worth carrying regardless.

Local associations run group walks, often weekly, and visitors can generally join. Ask at the mairie.

The landscape you walk through

This is not wilderness and it is not meant to be. It is a working, inhabited landscape, and that is what makes it interesting.

Routes typically link a village to its surroundings by way of vineyards, sunflower and maize fields, oak and chestnut woodland, small valleys with streams, farm tracks and quiet lanes. You pass working farms, ruined barns, dovecotes standing alone in fields, wayside crosses, springs with stone basins, and the occasional château at the end of an avenue.

Gradients are mostly gentle, with steeper sections where routes climb out of valleys or up to a hilltop bastide. Nothing is technical. Underfoot varies from good tracks to farm mud, and after rain the clay soils here become genuinely heavy.

Themed walking

Vineyard trails run through several appellations, sometimes with interpretation panels and sometimes finishing conveniently at a domaine. Combining a morning's walk with a tasting is a legitimate and popular arrangement.

Bastide circuits link several planned towns, which is the best way to understand them — seeing three on foot teaches you more than seeing six by car.

Pilgrim sections on the routes to Compostela have a different quality, partly because of the architecture built to serve them and partly because you will meet people walking a very long way.

Voies vertes — greenways on former railway lines — are flat, traffic-free and suitable for anyone, including families with young children and anyone on wheels.

River paths follow the Dropt, the Dordogne, the Lot and the Garonne in sections, and are the right choice in hot weather.

Practicalities

Water. Carry more than you think in summer. Village fountains exist but are not reliable, and some are marked eau non potable.

Timing. Routes are usually signed with a duration rather than a distance. Those timings assume a steady walking pace with no stops.

Sundays. Many village shops and bakeries are shut, so buy food the day before if you are relying on picking something up.

Lunch. Restaurant service ends around two. A walk that finishes at half past one is fine; one that finishes at half past two means eating what you brought.

Signal. Patchy in valleys. Download offline maps or carry paper.

Footwear. Boots after rain, trainers in dry summer. The clay is the deciding factor.

Livestock. Close gates. Give cattle room, particularly with calves.

Hunting season, broadly autumn into late winter. Areas being hunted are usually signposted at access points. Wear something bright, stay on marked paths, and avoid woodland at first light on Sundays. It is well regulated and the risk is low, but the courtesy of visibility matters.

Ticks are present in woodland and long grass. Check afterwards; Lyme disease exists in France as elsewhere.

Five walks worth building a day around

Not specific routes — those change and are best taken from the local booklet — but five shapes that work anywhere in this country.

The bastide-to-bastide. Two planned towns a few kilometres apart, walked one way with a car left at each end or as a there-and-back. You arrive on foot, which is how these towns were meant to be approached, and the difference from arriving by car is surprisingly large.

The ridge loop. Up out of a village through vines to high ground, along the ridge for a few kilometres with the valley open on both sides, and back down by a different track. The best views in this landscape are all from ridges and none of them are visible from a road.

The river walk. Flat, shaded, cool in summer, and usually passing a mill or two. The right choice on a hot day and the right choice with anyone who does not much want to walk uphill.

The vineyard morning. A circuit through the vines finishing at a domaine, timed to arrive before midday. The tasting is the reward and the walk is the excuse, or possibly the reverse.

The market walk. Park a few kilometres out, walk in along a marked path, do the market, eat, and walk back with the shopping. It sounds contrived and it is genuinely one of the better mornings available here.

Walking through the year

Spring is the best of it — green countryside, wild flowers, orchids in some of the limestone areas, and comfortable temperatures. April can be wet; May and June are usually reliable.

Summer requires an early start. Inland heat makes midday walking unpleasant from July, and shade is not guaranteed on farmland routes. River and woodland paths are the sensible choices.

Autumn is arguably as good as spring. The vendange is on, the light is exceptional, temperatures ease, and the mushroom season fills the woods with quietly secretive locals.

Winter is underrated. Without leaves, the structure of the landscape — castles, valleys, field patterns — becomes far clearer, and views open that are closed for eight months of the year. Paths are wet, days are short, and the hunting season is active, but you will have the countryside to yourself.

Cycling, since the same network serves it

Much of what applies to walking applies to riding, and a good number of people here do both.

The roads are the attraction. Départementales through this country carry almost no traffic, are well surfaced, and pass through exactly the landscape the footpaths do. Drivers are markedly courteous to cyclists — a cultural norm rather than a legal one — and the gradients are gentle in the valleys and interesting on the ridges.

Voies vertes on former railway lines give traffic-free riding suitable for children and for anyone who would rather not share tarmac at all.

Mountain biking circuits are waymarked in several areas, generally on the same forest tracks and farm paths as the walking routes, and signed in purple.

Bike hire is available in the larger towns and at some campsites; outside the season it can be harder to arrange, so ringing ahead is worthwhile.

The one practical caution is that rural roads have no shoulders and hedges can be high, so on a blind bend it is worth riding as though something is coming.

Where to stay if you are walking a route

For anyone stringing several days together rather than doing loops from one base, the accommodation pattern here is worth knowing.

Chambres d'hôtes — bed and breakfast in a private house — are widespread, inexpensive by northern European standards, and often the best of it. Hosts frequently cook an evening meal, the table d'hôte, eaten with the family and other guests, which is one of the most sociable ways to travel.

Gîtes d'étape on the long-distance and pilgrim routes provide simple dormitory or shared accommodation aimed at walkers, at low cost.

Small hotels exist in the market towns, generally family-run and modest.

Camping is well provided for, from municipal sites in villages that cost very little to larger commercial ones with pools.

Booking matters in July and August and rarely otherwise, though in winter you should ring ahead simply to confirm anything is open.

Organised and self-guided tours

Several operators run walking itineraries across the region, either guided in a group or self-guided with a route pack and luggage moved between accommodations. They work well for anyone who wants distance without logistics, and the Dordogne valley and the pilgrim routes are the usual focus.

The cheaper and more sociable alternative is a local walking association. They meet weekly, walk routes chosen by people who know the ground, and welcome newcomers. For anyone living here, this is also one of the fastest routes into both a social circle and functional French — three hours a week of conversation you actually want to have.

Walking from Duras

The country framed by Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Bergerac, Villeréal, Lauzun and Marmande is walking country of a particular kind: not dramatic, but endlessly varied and almost entirely unpeopled.

The Dropt valley provides the structure — a small river in a broad, gentle valley, with bastides strung along it and vineyards on the slopes above. Local circuits run from Duras, Monségur, Eymet, Lauzun and most of the villages between, and the booklets for them are sold in the local tourist offices for very little.

What you get on a typical morning is a loop out of a village square, up through vines to a ridge with a long view over three départements, down through oak woodland to a stream and a mill, past a dovecote and a farm with a dog that barks, and back into the square in time for a coffee. You will pass perhaps two people, both of whom will say bonjour.

The variety comes from the meeting of three départements. Walk north and the country tips towards the Dordogne, with steeper valleys and darker roofs. Walk west into the Gironde and the vineyards become Bordeaux's. Walk south and the land opens out towards the Garonne. All within a short drive of one another.

The great long-distance walking of the region — the Dordogne valley, the pilgrim routes, the causses of the Lot — is within an hour or two when you want a day of it. But the everyday walking, the kind you actually do on a Tuesday, is straight out of the door.

That is the distinction worth understanding. Spectacular walking is something you drive to a few times a year. Good walking from your own village is something you do weekly for a decade, and it is worth considerably more.

Tina lives in the Duras area and walks it. She will point you at the circuits worth a morning, and tell you which ones turn to clay after rain — in your own language.