If you like cheese, Selles-sur-Cher needs no introduction. The town gives its name to a small, flat disc of goat's cheese coated in charcoal ash, with a bluish rind and a dense, slightly nutty interior, made under a protected designation in the surrounding area. Buying one from a local shop and eating it with bread on the riverbank is a simple pleasure that justifies the stop all by itself.
Selles itself is a quiet town on the Cher, between the Loire valley and the Sologne, with an abbey church dedicated to Saint Eusice and a château by the river that mixes medieval and Renaissance elements. It is the kind of place where the main square has a bakery, a bar-tabac and a few benches, and where life does not rush. The river here is wide and slow, lined with poplars, and in summer you can watch people fishing in the evening light.
The riding around Selles is gentle. To the north, the Sologne is a flat land of forests, ponds and hunting estates, crossed by straight roads under pines and birches, with misty mornings and the occasional deer bounding across. To the south and west, the Cher valley offers pleasant curving roads through vineyards and fields towards Saint-Aignan and the château country of the Loire. The roads are generally well surfaced and lightly used outside the main tourist season, though tractors are common, and in hunting season you may see gatherings of hunters and dogs at forest edges.
With fewer than five thousand inhabitants, Selles has the everyday basics, cafés and somewhere to eat, but if the tank is low the safer bet is Romorantin-Lanthenay, about eighteen kilometres north, the nearest larger town. Spring, when the Sologne is green and the ponds are full, and early autumn, when the light softens and the vineyards are being harvested, are the most pleasant times. In midsummer the heat can be heavy, but the shade of the riverside trees and a cold drink at a terrace make up for it.