I was now walking through the department of Le Gers - formed from the old provinces of Guyenne and Gascony, and now part of the Midi-Pyrénées region. (You can still occasionally hear Gascon spoken here - it's really a dialect of Occitan, the old language of south-west France.) This is a lovely area - characterized by bastide towns and quiet villages, isolated farms and rolling farmland, low hills, scattered woods, and fields full of sunflowers, grain crops, ducks and cows. It's quite depopulated - and a favourite place for English and other European immigrants. The local food is excellent - though I avoided the foie gras - and drink specialities include Armagnac brandy and Floc de Gascogne (which is a fortified sweet wine or vin de liqueur, a mixture of Armagnac and grape juice, normally drunk as an apéritif but sometimes with dessert). I did not avoid these! Here's a typical view of the landscape:
In the hilltop bastide of Monferran-Savès I emptied my rucksack of all unnecessary stuff and sent it back home via the very helpful post office. The fashionably dressed village postmistress (she was très à la mode - this is France, remember!) seemed to have all the time in the world to help me - nothing was too much trouble - and she directed me to an equally helpful grocery store, where they gave me a cardboard box in which to pack my things. It was a relief to carry a little less weight. On leaving the village I passed this old, brick-built bread oven:
And soon after that I reached my accommodation for the night - a private pilgrim gîte on the 1st floor of a beautifully renovated old farmhouse (Le Grangé) set in the middle of nowhere. It was absolutely superb. François, the owner and hospitalier, welcomed me, and we sat on the terrace in the warm sunshine drinking sirop de menthe and cracking walnuts from his own walnut tree. He also had some fig trees and an apple orchard, and a Russian vine - its leaves in fiery red autumn colours - swathing 2 walls of the house. Departing rather reluctantly the next morning after a quick burst of blues on the piano, I'd reached Gimont by lunchtime. Gimont was yet another bastide town:
In the town centre I was surprised to find the timbered roof of the old market hall entirely spanning the main road, the RN124:
