Friday 24 August

Carennac is a tiny storybook village (370 inhabitants) on the Dordogne, with an impressive 11th Century Clunisian priory, village houses with half-timber overhanging balconies, and a grassy shoreline walk along the little canal fed by the river.
It’s only a few kilometers from the amazing Gouffre de Padirac, a dramatic cavern with a cathedral-like chamber and an underground lake—and Rocamadour, built on a soaring rock, which became a major pilgrimage site in 1166 when a perfectly preserved corpse, believed to be Saint Amadour, was unearthed at the entrance of the village’s first chapel.
But what brings me here is a book I read ten years ago and re-read regularly: At Home In France, by Ann Barry, a New York Times travel writer, a single woman who fell in love with Carennac, and bought a house on a crest above the village, even though she could only carve out a few weeks a year to be there.


Here’s an Amazon.com review by Robert Ruiz from several years ago:

There is subtle artistry in the way it's written, gentle looks into the basic human goodness of the French people in her circle. Knowing that the author died of (breast) cancer in middle-age before seeing this book published brings a bittersweet feel that grows as the last page nears. (She mentions in the final chapter, for instance, that she will skip a planned trip to a spa that year to be at a village event, saying that the spa will always be there next year). You want to call out protectively to her, “Yes it will be there, but you will not”. I found myself transfixed by Ann Barry herself -- a loner who never feels so right in the world as when she is in France, as her truest self.

“I was happy in a way I’d never been before,” she wrote of her first stay in France. I know what she means by that, and I wanted to stand in front of her house high over Carennac and think about it.