Excideuil

Excideuil sits in the Périgord Vert, the green, hillier, more wooded northern third of the Dordogne that gets a fraction of the visitors Sarlat or the river villages further south absorb every summer. We drove up almost on a whim, following a friend’s offhand recommendation, and found a market town built around a genuinely unusual castle: two separate keeps standing side by side, built by rival branches of the same family who apparently couldn’t agree on anything except that they both needed a fortress on the same hill.

Two castles, one very stubborn family feud

The dual castle is the result of a medieval inheritance dispute so entrenched that the family split the property rather than resolve it, and each branch built its own tower, close enough that you can stand between them and touch both walls. The older sections date to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the site’s strategic value on the road between Périgueux and Limoges made it a target during the Hundred Years’ War and, before that, during the Plantagenet-era conflicts between England and France. Local tradition holds that Richard the Lionheart, then Duke of Aquitaine, laid siege to Excideuil twice and failed to take it both times — the historical record is thinner than the legend, as it usually is with Richard, but the story is told with real pride by everyone we spoke to in town, and there’s a persistent local claim that it’s here, not at Châlus where he was fatally wounded, that his luck with sieges in this corner of France first ran out.

We climbed up to the castle grounds on a warm Saturday morning and had the place essentially to ourselves — a caretaker, a cat asleep on a low wall, and views out over the wooded Périgord Vert hills that felt entirely disconnected from the crowds we’d fought through in Sarlat two days earlier.

A market that still runs on its own clock

Excideuil’s Thursday market is one of the oldest continuously held markets in the Dordogne, with a charter reportedly dating back to the twelfth century, and it still fills the town’s central streets with an unhurried, entirely local crowd rather than the tourist-facing versions we’d gotten used to further south. We bought a wedge of tomme, a bag of walnuts still in their shells, and a jar of chestnut honey from a producer who spent five minutes explaining, unprompted, why this year’s harvest was weaker than the last.

The town itself is modest — a handful of well-kept old streets, a Romanesque church, a river, the Loue, running quietly along one edge — but it has the particular charm of a place that has never had to perform for anyone. We ate lunch at a small café on the main square, the kind with a chalkboard menu and no pretension whatsoever, and it was one of the more contented, unremarkable afternoons of the whole trip, which in its own way is the whole appeal of the Périgord Vert.

When to go: Thursday morning for the market, any time between late spring and early autumn — this is a genuinely quiet corner of the Dordogne, so there’s little seasonal crowding to plan around.