Reserve a nine night farmhouse stay in the Causses and the Tarn

The Tarn has cut about 1,500 feet down through Jurassic limestone between Ispagnac and Le Rozier, and the country at the bottom is not the country on top. Down at the river there are walnut trees, kitchen gardens, six villages with one street each, and a road that follows the water for 33 miles. On top there are the causses, flat stony grazing plateaus at 3,000 to 3,600 feet, box scrub, dry stone sheep pens, and about one farm every twenty minutes of driving.

Reserve a nine night farmhouse stay in the Causses and the Tarn and what you hold is a set of keys to one converted farm on the Causse de Sauveterre, a car parked outside it for the same nine days, and two bookings that will not wait until you land. The days themselves stay yours. Nobody knocks at eight in the morning.

That is rung 4 of the five on this ladder, and it is not a better or worse rung than the others, only a different amount of the trip left in your hands. Rung 1 puts a guide beside you every day and costs what that costs. Rung 5 holds very little and leaves the arranging to you.

The farm stands 1.3 miles up a single track off the D998, at 2,900 feet, with 30 inch walls, two bedrooms under the roof, a bath downstairs and a wood stove you will be lighting every evening from the third week of September. The owner keeps 180 ewes and lives 900 yards down the same track. Water comes off the roof into a cistern, as it does at every house on the causse, because the nearest running stream is four miles away and 1,400 feet below.

The car is a compact, held for nine days at a counter in Montpellier, which is two hours on the motorway and then forty minutes of climbing. Take the climbing seriously. The four roads that lift you from the river onto the plateau gain 1,300 feet in three to four miles, and the one out of Sainte-Enimie does it in thirteen hairpins with a stone parapet and no shoulder.

The narrows, the punt and the birds over the Jonte

Between La Malène and Les Vignes the gorge closes into a stretch called the Détroits, roughly 100 feet of water with 1,300 feet of rock on either side. No road runs through it at water level. The boatmen at La Malène take five people at a time in a flat bottomed punt, push off the gravel with a pole where the river shallows, and cover the five miles to Les Baumes Hautes in a little over an hour, with a minibus bringing you back up. The office holds two seats on whichever morning you name. That river passage runs under the boatmen's own licence, and they take the money at the landing stage rather than here.

Ten miles downstream the Jonte comes in at Le Rozier. Griffon vultures were returned to that gorge from 1981, after around sixty years with none, and several hundred pairs now hold the cliffs between Le Rozier and Meyrueis. They will not fly until the rock warms. Be at the viewing point above the river by ten and you can watch a bird with an 8 foot 6 inch span leave a ledge 900 feet up and cross the whole gorge without beating a wing.

Nine mornings and what people do with them

The days tend to sort themselves into three kinds. River days: the canoe run from Sainte-Enimie down to La Malène is eight miles and about three hours with two stops on gravel, and the water at Les Vignes sits around 68 degrees in late August and 53 in May.

Plateau days: Montpellier le Vieux, on the Causse Noir, is a square mile of dolomite that water has broken into towers and passages, with three marked loops running from 45 minutes to three hours. The Chaos de Nîmes le Vieux does the same thing on the Méjean with almost nobody in it. Aven Armand works the other way, 200 yards of tunnel into the plateau and then one chamber of more than 400 stalagmites at 50 degrees all year, the tallest close to 100 feet.

Village days: Millau holds its market on Wednesday and Friday mornings under the halle, and the viaduct west of the town carries the motorway 890 feet above the river on seven masts, the tallest of them 1,125 feet. South of that, on the Larzac, La Couvertoirade still sits inside the wall the Hospitallers finished in the 1440s, and the cellars at Roquefort sur Soulzon lie in the fissures of a collapsed hillside at 46 to 50 degrees and 95 percent humidity.

What is held before you go, and who sends you the bill

Three things are held ahead: the farm for nine nights, the car for nine days, and the two punt seats. A fourth, the table at the sheep farm above Hures, is held because that room seats sixteen at 7:30 and cooks one menu. Everything else written on this page is a suggestion, and none of it is reserved for you.

Nothing that carries you or houses you belongs to The Pine Gazette. The farm belongs to the family working it, the car to the hire company, the punt to the boatmen. Each of them holds its own licence for what it does and invoices you directly under its own contract. Pine Gazette Bookings LLC takes no money at any stage, and there is no card field anywhere on this site.

The flight out is yours to buy. This agency does not sell airfare and will not quote it. Settle the farm dates first and buy the flying afterward, in that order, because the farm is the part with a calendar and only three of its weeks in September are ever loose.

Putting a real figure on dates you have named takes two to four working days, because the farm, the counter in Montpellier and the boatmen all answer separately. Write to bookings@thepinegazette.com with a month, a rough number of nights and whether you need an automatic gearbox, or call +1 (504) 832-6194. The agency works from 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in Metairie, LA 70001, and takes bookings across New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana. Once you are out there, anything that needs changing goes to corrections@thepinegazette.com and reaches the same person.