Although it lies 9,000-kilometre south of Paris in the Indian Ocean, the volcanic island of La Réunion is a true French department, making it the most far-flung corner of the European Union.

Soult and Wellington never met face-to-face during all the years they spent fighting each other in Portugal, Spain, France and Belgium. But according to a tale I was told during a visit to the Château de Soult-Berg, this long-overdue encounter took place at the coronation of Queen Victoria in London.

​Naurouze is one of those places that seems to attract legends and history, as well as being notable from a geological and geographic perspective. It is located south-east of Toulouse, conveniently close to the main road between Villefranche-de-Lauragais and Castelnaudary.

Two places to the east of Toulouse are known as le cimitière des anglais, or the English cemetery. The question is, are any Englishmen buried there? 

The Battle of Toulouse 1814 between the armies of Wellington and Soult would never have taken place if a couple of colonels from Paris had ridden their horses a little faster.

This posts recounts a visit I made to La Ferme aux Bisons in the hope that a face-to-face encounter with a living, breathing bison might help me to understand why this beast inspired so many prehistoric artists. Curiously, the animals that were hunted the most often were not the same as the ones most frequently painted. 

The cave known as the Caune de l'Arago has given us the oldest human remain yet found in France (a child's tooth). But the greater part of its fame is due to Tautavel Man, the hunter who spent time here with his family 450,000 years ago, and parts of whose skull was dug up in 1971.

The most astonishing aspect of the Grotte de Mas d’Azil is that you can drive right through it on the D119. Although the road seems out of place, its construction in the 1850s was the first step towards the discovery of the cavern’s archaeological importance.

If you want to see prehistoric handprints made by men, women and children, the Grotte de Gargas is the best place in the world.

At first sight, the Grotte de Bédeilhac does little to evoke thoughts of prehistory. A wide concrete floor leads through the cavernous entrance and melts away into darkness. In the half-light, a small aircraft offers a misleading clue to the origins of this unusual surface.

The Grotte de Niaux on the outskirts of Tarascon-sur-Ariège is famous for its prehistoric paintings of bison, deer, ibex, horses and even a fish.

Aurignac is an unpretentious cave barely the size of my garage, but it has played an outsized role in the development of prehistory as a scientific discipline, and it gave its name to the oldest modern human culture in Europe.

This is a circular journey of 470km made entirely by train, which you can start and finish at many stations along the way. An optional 5.6 kilometre walk in the high Pyrenees turns the journey into an international voyage that takes in the Spanish town of Puigcerda.

The town of Limoux lies on the river Aude 25 kilometres upstream from Carcassonne. It has two claims to international fame: its carnival and its sparkling wine.

Traditionally they were trained to defend flocks of sheep from bears and wolves, but during the second half of the 20th century the Pyrenean Mountain dog all but disappeared from its home range, along with the predators it used to confront. With a little help from Slovenia, this iconic dog has made a come back in recent years.