Voila Vincent: Village perche en Provence

Our next few days are astonishing in that the most frequent sounds we hear in just about every village we visit are American accents. Everywhere. We think this might be because we were now in the Vaucluse department, made so famous, or infamous, by Peter Mayle, the Englishman now married to an American, who popularised this area with his travel books on Provence, with a TV series and a romantic movie starring Russell Crowe: The Good Life.

This is the Provence of wild red poppies on the verges in spring, heady purple lavender marching in picture perfect straight rows across fields in summer, and the rich aroma of crushed grapes wafting on the breeze in autumn.

It is the Provence of perched stone villages, many of them listed among France’s Most Beautiful, decorating pretty hills dropping in terraces of grape vines.

It is the Provence of colourful markets packed with stalls selling fruits, vegetables, cheeses, wines, olive oils, lavendar sachets, pottery garlic graters and cheery Provencal tablecloths.

It is terribly, terribly touristy.

And after just a few villages, you end up with an ache in your head, trying to remember what differentiates one from another.

In Venasque, it is the ancient stone Baptistry, which once was a pagan temple, which helps sort it from the others.

The Baptistry sits low, between a church and a house, disconcertingly like a private basement, now, without the presence it must once have had. It was a special place for the Bishop to baptise catechumens – those who chose to be baptised, who prepared thoroughly for it. Inside the below-ground hollowed out crypt-like rooms there is a marble font believed to be an ancient olive oil press; the altar is old, probably pagan, recycled; little holes in the vaults are believed to have carried stone pottery pieces to improve resonance in the chamber, allowing all to hear.

The road to Gordes from Venasque is all rock and rumble. I often wonder who were the Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth explorers of old in these parts: who found their way in and around these amazing rocks and mountains.

Gordes is gorgeous. It looks like a giant took a bunch of Picasso-drawn house cubes and tossed them down a high hill, like bits of Lego.

Around these hills are many of the miniature dry stone bories that today look so picturesque, but which once were all that peasants could manage to lump together to form a home for themselves and their families.

Red ochre is what makes Roussillon different from all the others. This is one of the few villages perched on a red ochre pit and, as a result, the buildings all over town are rose-coloured stone, or harmoniously painted in variations of soft rouge shades. Lintels bear inscriptions showing many homes constructed in the 1770s – about when Captain Cook landed in Australia.

Saignon sits peeping down over the market town of Apt, cleverly built so high it keeps its own character-filled streets so much quieter than the mess in the busy traffic snarl below.

We looked up at the lights of Lacoste from our campsite. This is where the Marquis de Sade once had his castle, and from where he raped and pillaged the surrounding villages in order to satisfy his predatory sexual urges before being jailed for his perversions. Today, Pierre Cardin owns his castle ruins. He has fixed up part of it and holds musical gatherings there. So, still a party place.

Also from our campsite we could see Bonnieux, high up. This village has had a forest of cedars, imported from North Africa, growing on its slopes since Napoleon’s time. He had a thing about trees, Napoleon. He had many planted along French roads just to shade his marching army. These days avenues of plane trees almost define rural French roads, and are so gorgeous, I make Pete regularly stop and photograph them. No matter that they are similar.