In the nineteenth century, a gentlemanly sort of archaeology took place in the Vézère valley. Édouard Lartet, a French geologist, and Henry Christy, an English banker and ethnologist, came to the cliffs near Les Eyzies in the 1860s and began digging in the rock shelters at the foot of the cliff, the Laugerie sites. They found worked flint and bone, and above all engraved objects: a reindeer carved on an antler, a fish, and a small figure of a naked woman that the finders, with Victorian delicacy, called the Vénus impudique, the immodest Venus. These finds helped to show that people had lived here alongside reindeer, in a cold climate, many thousands of years ago.
Laugerie-Basse is the lower shelter, a long overhang beneath a limestone cliff just beside the river, in the Magdalenian period, about fifteen thousand years ago. The cliff leans out so far that you can imagine the camp: hearths, hide tents, tools and the long dark winter. The reindeer have long gone, but the valley still has a particular quality of light, with the pale rock, the green river and a thin mist in the morning.
The road along the Vézère here is one of the best in the Périgord for an unhurried ride. It follows the river with the cliff on one side, passing farms, walnut trees and the occasional château. In summer, caravans and bicycles slow the pace, so go early or on a weekday. The surface is good and the bends are easy, and on a cool morning the smell of woodsmoke and wet leaves hangs in the valley.
Le Bugue, a few kilometres away, has fuel, and Les Eyzies has food and a few hotels. Try the local walnut oil, cheese and a glass of Bergerac, and leave room for a plate of confit de canard. The ride from here goes west toward the Atlantic coast and the great Vauban fortress at Blaye, on the Gironde, and then the Médoc, so the day trades prehistory for seventeenth-century military engineering, and the vineyards are never far.