Poitou-Charentes

You won’t get lost on a self guided walking or cycling vacation in Poitou-Charentes, however, staying at a traditional maison d’hôte or family run guesthouse in a village such as Scillé. Here your hosts will send you on your way every day along different walking routes such as the Cinq Communes Trail or Route du Busseau, all with carefully crafted itineraries along ancient lanes, cool streams, orchid filled woods and lakes such as Le Beugnon. Or if you are cycling and you don’t mind a bit of a challenge, you can easily take on as much as 90km every day for a week with different, French fancies every day. These include the Fôret-sur-Sèvre, medieval town of Sainte Ouenne and the aforementioned Marais Poitevin.

Just as birds don’t pay too much attention to regional borders in France, neither do guests in the Poitou-Charentes region which has the French département of Vendée as a welcoming neighbour. Walkers and cyclists often take a step over the invisible line into the Pays de la Loire, which is the overall region’s name, to enjoy the likes of Vouvant, a medieval town tucked into the la Mère River with prettiness as its middle name. Nearby is the Forêt de Mervent which stretches for 5,000 hectares and where you can cycle or walk along 200km of trails through beech, oak and sweet chestnut trees. The forest is 12km north of the Renaissance town of Fontenay-le-Comte, which definitely competes for prettiest town status. We give it ‘douze points’ in fact, given the fact that it is also one of the gateway towns to Marais Poitevin.