Our second medieval village of the day could not have been more different. If Sévérac felt organic and quietly lived in, Cordes-sur-Ciel was its theatrical opposite.

From a distance, it looked magical – a town suspended above the landscape, poised between earth and sky on a rocky ridge 328 ft (100 m) above the Cérou River valley. It isn’t hard to see why this part of southwest France is sometimes called La Toscane Occitane – Occitan Tuscany. Rolling hills topped with honeyed stone villages, pencil-thin Cyprus trees – and that soft southern light, so beloved of artists, that seems to flatter everything it touches.

In Southern France, history is not confined to individual locations, museums, or monuments; it is embedded throughout the landscape.

During the medieval period, Sévérac-le-Château or Sévérac d’Aveyron sat on a geographic, religious, and political fault line. On the edge of a region with a fiercely singular identity, it was caught between the Mediterranean world of the Cathar religion – condemned by the Catholics and Rome – and the tightening grip of power imposed by northern France.

For us, Sévérac is where the past got personal.