Reserve the Lot valley for a week, three weeks or a season

Reserve a stay in the Lot valley and the question that settles everything else is not which house but how many nights. Slow Latitudes holds one stone house in a village of about ninety people, forty minutes upstream of the valley town, and lets it for seven nights, for twenty-one nights, or for a season of fifty-six. Those are three different products. The house is the same house.

A week here is a list of errands. You drive in from the arrival city, you find the bread van, you walk the towpath that was cut into the cliff below the village in the 1840s so that horses could pull barges through a gorge with no bank, you get to one market, and on the seventh morning you strip the bed. There is nothing wrong with that week. But this valley runs on a calendar of fortnights: grapes from about the tenth of September, walnuts from the end of that month, saffron flowers picked at first light in the last days of October, truffle stalls on the plateau opening with a whistle at half past two every Tuesday afternoon from December until the first week of March. Seven nights catches one of those, or none of them.

Twenty-one nights catches the run-up and the week after. Fifty-six catches the fortnight when everybody is too busy to speak to you, which is the fortnight after which they do.

Limestone, the river, and the plateau above it

The river runs west through limestone, with a cliff on the outside of every bend. The plateau on either side stands at about 1,050 feet and the water at about 400, so every road out of the valley climbs six hundred feet in under two miles, in hairpins, with passing places rather than two lanes. Down on the floor there is river silt, vines, and the dark red wine the growers here have made from one grape for eight hundred years. Up on the plateau there is grass three inches deep over bare rock, dry stone walls, sheep, and oaks kept short because the soil will not carry anything taller. There is no surface water at all up there. The ponds are rectangular basins cut into the rock by hand so that flocks could drink, and you can walk five miles across the top and pass one building, a round hut with a corbelled stone roof put up by somebody who needed shade at noon.

The villages come in two kinds. On the floor there are bastides, laid out on a grid in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries around a square with a covered hall that is still the market. Above them are hamlets of eight or ten houses with a well and a shared bread oven. The house is in the second kind, at 830 feet, on a lane the postal van has to reverse out of. There is no shop. The bread van stops at the top of the lane on Tuesday and Friday at about a quarter past eight and is gone by nine. Full groceries are nine miles down the valley, and that store shuts from 12:30 to 3:00 and all day Monday, as does almost everything else.

Seven nights, and what a week reaches

Seven nights works out at $345 a night per person with two sharing. Inside it you can reasonably expect one market at the valley town on the Wednesday or the Saturday; the towpath walk, two and a half miles out from the bridge with three hundred feet of rock over your head and no gradient at all; the fortified bridge in the valley town, six arches and three towers, begun in 1308 and forty years in the building; one afternoon on the plateau among the dolmens; one swim off the gravel bar if you come between the last week of June and the middle of September; and three or four dinners cooked out of whatever that one market had.

What a week cannot do is wait. If the second and third days are wet, and in April and October they can be, a third of the stay has gone, and you will spend the rest of it driving to the two or three things you decided on before you came. A week also arrives and leaves on the same day of the week as everybody else, which means Saturday, which means the road from the arrival city is full and the house is being cleaned as you pull up.

The third week, when the loaf gets put aside

Twenty-one nights works out at $274 a night per person. The change from a week is not scenic, it is administrative. In the first week you buy bread when you remember it; by the third the woman on the van knows you take the big round loaf and keeps one behind the flap on Friday, which matters, because she brings eleven up the hill and they are gone by nine. In the first week you drive to the market; by the third you know that the second and third stalls on the left are one family, that the melons on the third came off the field the evening before, and that the garage in the valley town will put air in your tires without an appointment but locks up at 11:45.

The river changes too. Two days of rain on the plateau in October will lift the water four feet in a night and turn it opaque, and the gravel bar you swam off is under it for a week afterwards. Somebody here for seven nights sees one river. Somebody here for twenty-one sees a river as a thing that does something. The same goes for the walnut trees along the floor: in the first week they are trees, and by the third the nets are down under them and there are men with poles in the branches at half past seven in the morning.

A season in one village

Fifty-six nights works out at $194 a night per person. The three figures are not the same because a room let for eight weeks is not stripped, cleaned and let again every Saturday; there is one changeover instead of eight, and the family that owns the house prices it that way.

What a season buys is a routine, and the end of your novelty. Somewhere in the fifth or sixth week people stop explaining the village to you. The landlady stops itemizing the laundry and tells you to use the line in the yard. The man who cuts the hay in the field below asks you on the Tuesday to move the car on the Thursday, instead of leaving a note under the wiper. You are seated at the long table at the village meal in the second week of August, at about ten dollars a head, rather than pointed at a spare chair. And you are here for the whole of a harvest instead of a day of it: the eleven mornings of tractors on the lane at six, the smell over the entire floor of the valley, and the flat fortnight afterwards when the two restaurants are half empty and nobody wants to do anything.

Most of a season is ordinary. Out of fifty-six days, perhaps ten are the sort you would describe to somebody at home. The rest are a walk, a shop, an afternoon too hot to be outdoors between one and five in July, and a long light evening in June. If that reads thin, take the week instead; it is a perfectly good week.

Slow Latitudes takes the dates you name and places the reservation with the family that runs the house. They invoice you directly, on their own paper, and they hold the contract for your stay. No airplane, no bedroom, no boat and no vehicle in this valley belongs to this company. Getting to France is your own arrangement, and there is no air ticket inside any figure on this page. Entry rules are a matter between you and the authority that issues the documents, and this office does not advise on them.

Putting a firm number on the exact weeks you name takes two to four working days at this end, because the house is priced by the part of the year it falls in and the family answers in the evening. Tell us the dates and how many of you there are. Slow Latitudes is the name used by Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC, at 9422 Common Street, Suite 2, Baton Rouge, LA 70809, in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana; the telephone is +1 (225) 766-2418. Write to bookings@slowlatitudes.com with your weeks, or to corrections@slowlatitudes.com if anything on this page is wrong and ought to be corrected.