We can but be grateful...

Le Fiscalou (81), Puycelsi, Monclar-de-Quercy (82), Villebrumier, Fronton (31), Canals, Verdun-sur-Garonne (82), Grand Selve, Beaumont-de-Lomagne, Lamothe-Cumont, Casteron (32), Mauroux

Someone has gone round and put up stickers reading "Vilatge occitan." It's not French. It's a reminder in the old language of the south, that you're entering a village in Occitania.

And what's that? Well, it's not always been so that French people spoke French. There were numerous languages of which the largest were spoken in the north, where the word for "yes" was oil, and in the south, where the word was oc. The power and money was in the north and it spread first from Paris to the surrounding regions, then to the south, bringing the language of the north with it. In time oil was corrupted to oui, which is the word you learned at school.

Parisian language never entirely dominated the south, though. While there is nobody who speaks only Occitan and no formal French, the singsong accent, the pronunciation of vin as veng and the Spanish or Italian habit of adding -uh to words, like France-uh and Amérique-uh, are the premature gravestones of a language which hasn't yet died.

It seems sometimes there's a sign for every village in France. It may not be a reminder that you're in Oc but it could be that you're about to visit "one of the most beautiful villages of France" (an official classification), or

Puycelsi: its ramparts have withstood siege and assault since the 1200s.

that it has "one of the markets of France" or that it has stars in a competition for France in Bloom.

Puycelsi is officially and truthfully one of the most beautiful villages of France. It stands on a hilltop behind 800m of ramparts that held off no end of religious disagreeables going back to a particularly fervent chap called Simon de Montfort, who besieged the place every year from 1211 to 1213 in a war with those who prayed in a different manner.

The view from the ramparts in more peaceful times.

You're never alone in Puycelsi because its reputation and that of neighbouring villages has spread. There's little commercialisation - I remember a restaurant or two, a small shop to buy food, a bar - but then again there's little space for it. There's little space either for tourists in mid-season. Now, though, I had it to myself. I was up on the hill before anyone else thought to make the trip. I reminded myself of the view from the walls where villagers once stared in fear at de Montfort's army, had a coffee and then rode down again. There's a benefit to late-season touring.

Having ridden south-east, I took it in my head to ride west. A bout of tendinitis behind one knee had cut my riding to zero for a month and I could feel the lack. If I went back the way I'd come, but more west than north, I'd cross a region I had ridden many times but never at that angle. Not only do roads look different in the opposite direction but so do entire areas when you string the villages together in a different order.

I dropped from the wooded hills of the Tarn to the flatlands of the Toulouse basin. I rode back through Monclar-de-Quercy, where I had changed both a tube and a tyre the previous evening, then through Villebrumier, a place of no note except that it marked the diversion from the previous day.

It was coming out of Villebrumier on a dull, slightly rolling road flanked by what Europeans call maize and Americans call corn - in British English "corn" isn't a crop but a generic for almost anything from waist level to as high as an elephant's eye - that I crossed with a

It may grow as high as an elephant's eye but here it's maize - for cattle - and not corn.

slightly fleshy chap dressed to ride the Tour de France. We waved and I thought no more. But he had. Curiosity got the better of him and the swish of narrow tyres announced his arrival beside me.

He was round-faced, around 55, puffing slightly from the chase and not reluctant to drop to my speed.

"Going far?" I asked. It's always the opening question. Hardly anyone says "yes", even if he is. Distance is relative to time and fitness, not an importance in itself.

"Oh, just here and there," he said in an accent without a hint of Occitan.

"Unknown territory?"

"Yes, a bit. I'm staying with my daughter. She lives here."

"And you?"

"I'm from Alsace."

To save your looking, Alsace is that bit of France up in the north-east that for a century changed hands between the Germans, who wanted to have it, and the French, who didn't want to part with it. The outcome is that people there speak not only French but their own regional language, which is in much better health than Occitan. To me, it sounds German; to a German it sounds French.

My man told me - in French - he hoped to move south. His mother, I think it was, was 90 and needed looking after. We could neither of us acknowledge it but he was waiting for her to die so he could get on with life.

"'It's good to cut your roots sometimes," I said, phrasing it as best I could. He agreed. I asked if he felt abroad on the other end of the diagonal across the hexagon of France. He thought, smiled and said yes, as abroad as he could in his own country. I told him what an old chap who ran a hotel in Fronton, down the road, had told me. He said that in his youth no end of Spaniards came over the mountains to escape the civil war and the rise of Franco. To this day, Spanish surnames are dominant.

"I remember my school class filling with Spanish kids," the hotel man had said. "There were Spanish families all round the village and on the farms, working the fields. We got on really well. We were cousins, people of the south. We learned some words of Spanish and they learned to speak French."

My riding companion listened with interest. This was new for him but he could sense more to come.

"And then," the hotel man had said, "the Germans invaded in 1940 and I remember a lot of people from Alsace coming down here. They were French but they were different. The Spaniards were warm and outgoing and they mixed and we got on. But the Alsaciens, they were so cold, so Germanic. And we felt more at home with the Spanish than we did with these other Frenchmen. I think most of them went home as soon as they could, so they must have felt the same way."

My colleague smiled. It's not an unfamiliar story, in principle if not in detail, if you come from the north-east. There aren't many people alive now who remember much of the second world war but,

Oradour-sur-Glane: an SS section on its way north to the D-Day beaches machine-gunned half the village, imprisoned the rest in the church and set fire to it, shooting the occupants in the leg so they couldn't escape. The soldiers spent the night in the village, then blew it up and moved on. It has been left as a shrine.

of those that are, many know that some of the worst atrocities by the SS as it moved north to counter the D-Day invasion were committed by French-speaking Alsaciens. Many who machine-gunned almost every inhabitant of Oradour-sur-Glane, an innocent village, and then blew up and set fire to the buildings, were French-speakers who found themselves on the other side of the border in the comings and goings of neighbours in dispute.

De Gaulle's courts tried the purely German members of the SS but he excused the Alsaciens. They had, he said, been in the SS malgré nous - against their will - and it served no purpose to pursue them.

"It's a sad story and unfortunately a true one," my friend said. "It seems so long ago and yet my mother would remember it. Things have changed. And for the better."

Simon de Montfort, religious cruelty, refugees from civil war, escapers from invasion, atrocities by the occupant: the area has seen them all. But now it lives in peace beneath the sun. We can but be grateful to be born when we were.

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