Step Back In Time On A Road Trip Of Medieval France (Discover the Places Time Forgot)

I’m constantly being teased about dreaming about the Middle Ages and what life was like in medieval times. It’s hard not to, when my home here in southwest France is built in what was once a 12th-century castle, and I can still sit on the wall that formed part of the defenses, with my back against the old well.

France is full of places you’ve never heard of that are like walking into a time warp. Take away the cars, and you could almost be in medieval France. I almost wouldn’t be surprised to see a knight galloping down the street on his horse in full armor.

But ask most people to name a medieval town in France, and you’ll get Carcassonne, Rouen, Rocamadour and Mont Saint Michel, all fabulous places, but rammed with tourists in high season. I’d rather send you somewhere you can actually hear your own footsteps on the cobbles.

The North: Where Flanders Meets France

Start in Bergues, up near Dunkirk in French Flanders, about 6 miles from the Belgian border. If the name rings a bell, it’s because the 2008 film Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis was shot here and became one of the highest-grossing French films ever made. That put it on the map, but almost nobody outside France knows it exists.

The town’s ramparts were rebuilt by Vauban in the 17th century, but the medieval bones are still there beneath the surface: the belfry, listed by UNESCO as part of the Belfries of Belgium and France, has been ringing since the 13th century, in one form or another. 

The current tower is a postwar rebuild, because the Germans blew the original up in 1944 as they retreated. What went back up is the same silhouette the townspeople had looked at for 700 years.

Walk the Couronne Saint-Winoc, the outer defenses, early in the morning when the mist is still coming off the canals, and it takes your breath away. The abbey of Saint-Winoc, founded in the 11th century, is mostly gone, but 2 of its towers still stand in a field, almost like broken teeth.

There’s a Monday morning market that’s been running in some form since the Middle Ages, and you should definitely try the local cheese, Bergues, a soft cheese that was a bit of an acquired taste for me.

The East: Alsace Without The Crowds

Everyone heads straight for Riquewihr and Colmar. Meanwhile, about 20 miles south of Strasbourg, Boersch has 3 original medieval gates still standing and a Renaissance well in the middle of its main square that the locals still gather around. 

It’s tiny, maybe 2,500 people, and the historic core hasn’t changed shape since the 15th century.

The town belonged to the Bishop of Strasbourg from the 12th century onward, which is why it has the fortifications of a place three times its size. 

The Porte du Bas, the Porte du Haut, and the Porte des Ânes (the Donkey Gate, my favorite) all funnel you into a grid of half-timbered houses painted in the ochres and blood-reds you get all through this bit of Alsace. 

Stop at the pewter workshop Étains du Prince Bishop, which has been making pewter here since 1968 and uses techniques dating back to the guild system of the Holy Roman Empire.

For a bigger detour, drive 25 minutes west to Andlau, where an abbey was founded in 880 by Richardis, wife of the Emperor Charles the Fat. She was accused of adultery, cleared herself by walking through fire in a wax-soaked shirt (allegedly), and was canonized. 

The crypt of her abbey is the oldest in Alsace, and you can go down into it for free.

The Center: Auvergne’s Volcanic Fortresses

Auvergne is so underrated and gets missed off most road trip lists, which is a shame because it’s where medieval France piled its castles atop extinct volcanoes and left them there. 

Salers, in the Cantal, sits at just over 3,000 feet on a basalt plateau, and the whole town is built from the black volcanic stone quarried out of the hill it stands on. Approach it from the west in the late afternoon, and it looks like it was carved out of a single block.

Salers received its town charter in 1428 from Charles VII, the same king Joan of Arc crowned at Reims a year later, and was granted the right to fortify itself against the routiers, the mercenary bands roaming central France after the Hundred Years’ War wound down. 

The five gates and the ramparts went up in the following decades. The Renaissance houses inside came later, when Salers became a regional seat of justice, and lawyers moved in with money to spend.

Eat the beef. Salers cattle are one of the oldest breeds in France, red-brown with lyre-shaped horns, and the local AOP cheese made from their milk is aged in wooden buchers for at least 3 months. 

The tourist office runs a walking tour that takes you past the Maison de Bailliage where trials were held, the church of Saint-Matthieu with its 15th-century tapestries, and out through the Beffroi gate. 

The West: Brittany’s Corsair Ports And Ducal Towns

Skip Saint-Malo. I know, blasphemy, but it was flattened in August 1944 and what you see is a very good reconstruction of what was there. If you want the real medieval fabric of Brittany, go to Dinan instead, 18 miles inland on the river Rance. 

Around 2 miles of ramparts still ring the old town, and inside them you’ll find some of the best-preserved 13th to 15th-century half-timbered streets in western France, particularly the Rue du Jerzual, which drops steeply down to the port.

Dinan was the town Bertrand du Guesclin, one of the great French military commanders of the Hundred Years’ War, defended in 1357 against the English. He famously took on the English knight Thomas of Canterbury in single combat in the Place du Champ Clos, won, and lifted the siege. 

His heart is buried in the Basilica of Saint-Sauveur here, in a small stone tomb on the north wall. The rest of him is in Saint-Denis with the kings of France, which tells you what the French thought of him.

A bit further south, if you want a second Breton stop, look at Rochefort-en-Terre, about an hour east of Vannes. It’s small, maybe 700 residents, and it was voted Village Préféré des Français in 2016, which brought a brief rush and has since died down. 

The 12th-century castle grounds are open, the Renaissance houses along the Grande Rue are painted every color you can name, and the whole place is festooned with flowers because a local ordinance dating back over a century requires it. Odd rule, lovely result.

The Southwest: Bastides And Pilgrim Roads

The southwest is bastide country, the grid-planned new towns founded in the 13th and 14th centuries by French and English lords competing for control of Aquitaine. 

There are hundreds of them. Monpazier, in the Dordogne, is the textbook example, but I’d point you to Monflanquin in Lot-et-Garonne instead. 

It was founded in 1252 by Alphonse de Poitiers, brother of Louis IX (Saint Louis), and its central square, the Place des Arcades, is still surrounded on all four sides by the original stone arcades where merchants set up shop.

What makes Monflanquin interesting is that it kept switching sides during the Hundred Years’ War. English, then French, then English again. The Maison du Prince Noir on the square is named for Edward the Black Prince, who supposedly stayed there. 

The town’s medieval center museum, the Musée des Bastides, is the best explanation I’ve seen anywhere of how these towns were designed, who paid for them, and why so many failed. Worth an hour on a rainy afternoon.

A long drive southwest of there, in the Gers, sits La Romieu, a stop on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. Its collegiate church was founded in 1312 by Arnaud d’Aux, a cardinal and cousin of Pope Clement V, who was pouring money from the Avignon papacy into his hometown. 

The two towers, the cloister, and the octagonal chapter house are all UNESCO-listed as part of the pilgrim routes. There’s also a strange local legend about a girl named Angéline who saved the village cats during a famine, which is why stone cats stare down at you from windowsills all over town.

The Southeast: Provence Beyond The Postcards

Everyone goes to Gordes and Roussillon in the Luberon and takes the same photo from the same lookout. Go instead to Séguret, in the Vaucluse, tucked into the flank of the Dentelles de Montmirail with the vineyards of Gigondas and Sablet spread out below.

It has a 12th-century church, a 14th-century belfry with a working clock, a fountain from 1638, and a population of about 900. The main street is car-free because a car couldn’t fit down it.

Séguret was a Papal territory from 1274, when Philip III of France ceded the Comtat Venaissin to the papacy, until the Revolution swept it back into France in 1791.

That’s over 500 years as a bit of the Pope’s private estate, which is why the church of Saint-Denis has that particular ornate southern-Gothic style you see all through the old Papal lands around Avignon.

Christmas here is fabulous, as the village stages one of the oldest living nativity scenes in Provence, with locals dressed as santons walking through the streets.

For a final stop, drive east into the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence to Entrevaux, on the road between Nice and Digne. It sits on a bend in the river Var, with a citadel perched 500 feet above the town, reached by a zigzagging covered ramp that Vauban designed in the 1690s atop medieval foundations.

The drawbridge over the Var still works, still gets raised for maintenance, and you cross it to enter the old town through the Porte Royale. Inside, the streets are barely wide enough for two people.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption dates from the 17th century but sits on a Romanesque base, and the whole place has about 800 residents and one very good boulangerie. Get there for opening, buy a fougasse aux olives, and eat it walking up to the citadel.