For my birthday, please can I have a death scene?

Marthon, St-Germain-de-Marthon, Chazelles, La Rochefoucaud, Agris, Coulgens, Nanclars, Mouton, Aunac, Chenon, Verteuil, Ruffec

Gentle villages, some with hilltop churches... almost none with shops or bars

We had light mist first thing this morning. And the countryside was flatter, giving an almost cathedral air. The fields were full of corn stalks and cylindrical bales of wheat. For the first time, we have begun to notice that the villages look prosperous but they have no services. The post office may be clinging on and there could be an infants' school, but the boulangerie has gone, and the little food shop, and the man who mends pipes or restarts cars.

The castle at La Rochefoucauld is more impressive than the hot chocolate sold outside. Pass the message on.

The first target was a road confluence with the resonant name of La Rochefoucaud. It stands by the river, surrounded by cobbled roads - new "faux" cobbles, I suspect - with a little bridge to the dominating castle. At the foot of the castle is a chocolate factory with its own café. Only a fool would resist cups of hot chocolate at a chocolate factory but they turned out disappointingly weak. In Italy, anything to do with chocolate has the consistency, although not the taste, of used sump oil. Here, the hot chocolate was anaemic enough not to trouble a virgin aunt.

It's a good view from the chocolate place, though...

I've ridden through La Rochefoucaud before. The last time, I found the camp site had closed for the season and the three hotels were full. I camped instead at the end of somebody's orchard, without his knowledge or my thanks, but only after getting tangled up in a jungle of traffic driven by people as frustrated as I was at not being able to get out of the place.

The traffic is obviously high on the mind of the town at the moment because a bypass is being built. It will run in a curve round the north of the town. Note the future tense. For the moment it is just a broad band of mud churned by yellow monsters with wheels the size of a railway station. Unless you take the main road, or a road almost as busy that shadows it, there is no way out to the north. Every little lane has been commandeered by the road builders and made impassable by barrages of earth and bright red plastic.

It may be a long time before I learn to love La Rochefoucaud.

There's not much to report of the rest of the ride because the countryside, pleasant enough, was nothing to write home about. So I'm not writing home about it. But we did see other cyclists. In the village of Coulegens (I love that name because, spoken aloud, it's the French for "cool people") we sat in the shade beside the village hall and made sandwiches. We'd bought the contents from a shop hidden behind the village bar. Beside us, a life-sized wooden cut-out of a cowboy pointed at an outdoor ashtray, a reminder that it is now illegal to smoke in a public building.

We looked up and there at the other end of the street, too far to shout but near enough to wave, were two more touring cyclists. They paused, their trailers lined obediently behind them, looked our way without seeing us, then rode on northwards. The same way we planned to go. I spent the rest of the afternoon expecting to see them again. We never did.

Could these be our first fellow Sem Fed fans, also heading for the Saumur valley? I made a note to look out for them, although how I expected to recognise them without their trailers, I don't know.

Just before the end we passed through the much-signposted historic town of Verneuil. It has a striking château with onion-like towers in each corner, but the nearer you get to it, the harder it is to see. I should have taken a picture when I first saw it. But since going back involved a hill on a hot afternoon when I'd already ridden enough, I decided that one château more or fewer wouldn't make a difference by the time we reached the Loire valley, which is chocker with them.

The perfect birthday present for a 15th-century lady

Instead, we were intrigued by a sign urging us to "Come and see our death scene", the sort of invitation that nobody with a morbid interest in other people's discomfort could turn down. It was a 15th-century sculpture, I suppose it was, of Jesus being prepared for the tomb. Some local woman had asked for it for her birthday. It seems mighty odd to me but there's no explaining women.

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