Travel: Berry, France

The 19th-century proto-feminist writer,

whose real name was Aurore Dupin (becoming Baroness Dudevant through an unhappy marriage) conducted a passionate nine-year relationship with Frédéric Chopin. But, spending much of her time at her grandmother's estate at Nohant, deep in this southern area of the French province of Berry, she was also steeped in local folklore and music, including its rich bagpiping traditions. So much so that she wrote a pastoral romance about rival pipers, Les Maîtres Sonneurs, illustrations for which, by her artist son Maurice, hang on the walls along with his engravings of ghaisties and ghoulies and other local légendes rustiques.

This is distinctly la France profonde, and while, officially, we're in the southern Loire valley, Berry tends to be off the beaten tourist track, compared to the more visitor-frequented north.

Elsewhere in the Sand house, amid Venetian glass chandeliers and portraits of Chopin, who composed some of his best-known works there, are the mementoes of a wide-ranging intellect – books, insect and fossil collections, a dinner table still with place settings marked for the likes of Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Flaubert, the charming little theatre she had constructed for amateur dramatics and to indulge Maurice's interest in puppetry.

In the gift shop, a Chopin CD is playing, but from beyond the estate gates, the sound of bagpipes, and not the Scottish kind, drifts from a house beside Nohant's venerable church. Les Gas du Berry – which translates roughly as the lads of Berry, a folk music circle of which Maurice Sand was once president – are at their weekly practice. This is the real thing, as opposed to a tourism ploy – big, long-droned, sweet-toned pipes, inlaid with pewter, churning out dance tunes as a woman sits cranking the handle of a vielle or hurdy-gurdy, and two teenage girls swing themselves insouciantly round the floor in a bourrée.

In Berry, villages can reveal sometimes surprising secrets. Walk into the sleepy main square of Sainte-Sévère-sur-Indre, under the heavily timbered canopy of its 17th-century market, and you find an old-fashioned wagon, of the kind once associated with travelling circuses or fairs, and across from it the statue of a mustachioed postman. In 1947, the village's post-war languor was dispelled in no uncertain manner as Jacques Tati rolled into town with a film crew to make his classic debut, Jour de Fêtes, about a rural postman who becomes obsessed with the American postal efficiency he sees on newsreels.

Just last April, the village opened a charming museum, Maison de Jour de Fête, which captures the eccentric whimsy, and more than a little nostalgia, of the film and its period. You enter through a reconstruction of the film's post office (suitably littered with dismantled bicycle parts) and sit down in the travelling film tent, where Pathé newsreels transport you back to 1947 before recreating the world of Tati's manic postman using a clever mixture of film, stage effects and 3D.

You emerge back into a tranquil reality – Sunday afternoon and the locals queuing in the village patisserie to buy traditional cakes to take visiting.

It's not all quaint rurality, however. The provincial capital of Berry, and now administrative centre of the department of Cher, is the medieval town of Bourges, with its ancient ramparts and half-timbered houses and its magnificent Cathedral of Saint Étienne. Built without a nave, the cathedral resembles a giant upturned boat, supported by spectacular flying buttresses and bristling with hysterically grimacing gargoyles (not to mention, yes, the odd carved bagpiper). Within its vast and airy interior, glorious stained-glass windows dating from the 13th century filter afternoon sunlight into glowing fragments of spectra.

The cathedral, as well as the nearby "palace" of Jacques Couer, an elaborately adorned 15th-century merchant's house and other notable buildings (including several free-entry museums) are illuminated every evening over the summer in the town's Nuites Lumière walk-round sound and light show. Bourges is also a reminder that George Sand is not Berry's only literary association. Alain-Fournier, author of one of the best-selling French novels of all time, Le Grand Meaulnes, went to school in Bourges for a short while, and the city now boasts a Lycée Alain-Fournier.

With its rolling countryside and woodlands concealing or revealing hidden ponds or wide river bends, squat, amber-lit Romanesque churches or inscrutable chateaux, Berry certainly evokes the kind of "lost domain" evoked by Fournier, that sense of timelessness and otherworldliness not far removed. It can also be picture-book pretty, as in the case of two villages, both boasting official endorsement as "one of the most beautiful villages in France". There is Gargilesse, favoured by artists and clinging to the side of a river gorge, its old houses curving like a promontory to a chateau. As well as yet another Romanesque church, the village also has a homely cottage, now a museum, in which George Sand used to take refuge when society proved oppressive at Nohant.

Then there is Aprement-sur-Allier, with its ruddy expanses of pantiled roofs and its riverside willows, a place so picturesque and sleepy the stunned cynic might wonder whether it must surely harbour some dark, Stepford-like secret. What Aprement does harbour, however, is its magnificent Park Floral, a garden established in the 1970s by Gilles de Brissac, whose family chateau presides over the village. The garden's entrance area, modelled on the "white garden" at Sissinghurst, opens out, via a 130-metre long wisteria pergola, to gentle slopes which in May were rich with tree blossom and occasionally punctuated by pavilions, their tile paintings by Jacques Robinet lending them a slightly surreal presence.

Strange, too, is the nearby converted stable housing a collection of ballet costumes amassed by Jacques Namont, a local resident and former premier danseur with the Paris Opera. The faintly disquieting ambience generated by these extravagantly dressed mannequins was heightened as I realised the names above the stalls – "Prince", "Daisy" – applied to their former tenants rather than to the dancers associated with the costumes.

Memorable, if in a less bizarre way, is the beautifully restored 12th-century Prieuré d'Orsan, a labour of love on the part of architects Sonia Lesot and Patrice Taravella, who converted the ruins into a luxuriously and warmly welcoming boutique hotel, surrounded by wonderfully tranquil and meticulously laid-out grounds inspired by medieval monastic gardens.

Here, where swallows flicker under archways and vines and plum hedges twine around trellises, are productive kitchen gardens alongside herbal physic gardens and cloister-style groves where plants bear religious or other symbolism.

There's nothing monastic, however, about the priory's dinner table, which on our visit included delectable roasted vegetables, langoustine risotto, figs with goat's cheese and a rather splendid fresh pineapple and ginger soufflé, the frothy top of which quivered like the head on a pint of stout.

La cuisine berrichone is very much of the land – the local crottin de chèvre appears with most salads, and you can even visit one of the goat farms it comes from. We had a heartily convincing introduction to local cooking in the Bourbonnoux restaurant in Bourges – mushroom terrine and inevitable but delectable duck confit washed down with a red, rather than a white, Sancerre and a wonderfully stone-accented Reuilly. Then there were the unashamedly indulgent desserts of the Cake-T room concealed under the massive stones vaults of the old city wall. Our final night's dinner, in St Chartier's comfortable Château de la Vallée Bleue, included sturgeon served with crayfish and a honeyed Coteaux de Layon dessert wine.

Crayfish, we were assured, was a favourite dish of George Sand. In the hotel foyer, a log fire crackled to a backdrop of recorded piano music – Chopin again. They may have parted company in 1847 but here, in the very heart of France, the pair remain inseparable. smFactfile berry and the loire valleyHOW TO GET THERE

n Jim Gilchrist travelled from Edinburgh to London by National Express (www.nationalexpress.com) and from London to Paris by Eurostar. Return tickets from Edinburgh to Paris start at £92 return. See www.eurostar.com or call 08705 186 186. Bookings for onward connections by SNCF TGV or Corail trains are handled by Rail Europe (www.raileurope.co.uk), with fares from London to Bourges starting from £87 return.

WHERE TO STAY

n Maison de Jour de Fête (www.maisondejourdefete.com)

n Park Floral (www.aprement-sur-allier.com)

n Prieuré d'Orsan (www.prieuredorsan.com)

n Château de la Vallée Bleue (www.chateauvalleebleue.com)

AND THERE'S MORE

n For information on Berry and the Loire valley, e-mail Maison de la France on [e-mail] or tel: [phone].

Visit www.visaloire.com or www.franceguide.com or bourgestourism.com