Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert

The gorge swallows you. The road narrows, the limestone walls rise, and the abbey appears at a bend of the Hérault — golden stone in a green cleft, exactly the kind of place a Carolingian warrior would choose to renounce the world. Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, in France's Hérault, sits at the valley floor, its medieval lanes climbing from the river to a cloister whose finest carvings are in New York.

Guilhem, count of Toulouse and companion of Charlemagne, founded the abbey of Gellone here in 804 and ended his days in it; the abbey church that survives is Romanesque, and the village that grew round it is a listed beautiful village and World Heritage on the roads to Santiago de Compostela. The cloister was dismembered in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its carved capitals and columns were bought for The Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum's medieval branch in New York; the abbey museum here shows what remains and tells the story. Below the village the Hérault runs green through its gorge to the Pont du Diable, the medieval bridge downstream, and the pools between are among the best wild swimming in the south — in summer a shuttle runs from the car parks at the bridge because the village lanes take no cars. The terraces above grow the Terrasses du Larzac reds.