The places around the houses

Périgord Noir · Dordogne, France

River, cliffs, castles and the oldest painted caves in Europe.

La Roque-Gageac sits with its back against a limestone cliff and its feet in the Dordogne. Within half an hour you can drift downriver in a canoe, climb to a castle held over the valley, or stand in a cave in front of paintings made seventeen thousand years ago. Almost everything worth doing here is outside, and almost all of it is within twenty minutes of the front door.

Carlingford · Ireland

A mountain, a sea lough and a medieval village between them.

Carlingford is squeezed between the Cooley Mountains and the lough, with Slieve Foye behind it and the Mourne Mountains across the water in Northern Ireland. It is a walking, sailing and eating village — old, small, and busy in the best way — and it sits inside some of the oldest storytelling landscape in Ireland.

KwaZulu-Natal · South Africa

The Valley of a Thousand Hills, the Drakensberg and the Indian Ocean.

Crestholme looks out over Inanda Dam and the Valley of a Thousand Hills, half an hour above Durban and its beaches. It is a good base for two very different things: the birds, gardens and reserves right on the doorstep, and the bigger journeys — the Drakensberg escarpment, the battlefields, the game reserves of Zululand and the coast.