Joanne Harris, Noirmoutier island
I first saw the island of Noirmoutier when I was only two weeks old. I think it's probably safe to say that I didn't fully appreciate it at the time; but I grew to love it as year after year I spent holidays there at my grandparents' cottage. This small, sandy island off the Vendée coast has been a home to my family since just after the war, when my aunt Claudine caught pneumonia and was told that she needed a change of climate. The doctor suggested the Riviera – or possibly the small, and mostly unknown, island of Noirmoutier, whose micro-climate makes it significantly warmer than the nearby coast.
In those days the island was free of tourism, separated from the mainland by a causeway, accessible only at low tide. Now there is a bridge too, though I still prefer the causeway, with its sense of imminent peril and the basket-shaped balises, wooden towers where anyone surprised by the rising tide can take refuge. The bridge – and the influx of tourism that came with it – has made some changes to the island, but not enough to alter its essential charm and character.
It's an island of dunes and salt-marshes, crisscrossed with little canals that make it a haven for bird life. The beaches are long and sandy, lined with tamarisks, blue thistles, dune pinks and rabbit-tail grass. The houses are typically whitewashed, with red terracotta roofs and hollyhocks and Russian vines growing along the dusty walls. The principal town is Noirmoutier-en-l'Ile, home to a the castle and the remains of the monastery from which the island takes its name, but much of the rest of the island is made up of small communities, living from tourism as well as the more traditional island trades of fishing, farming and the cultivation of salt.
Each village has its own market, selling local fruit and vegetables, flowers, cheeses, bread, meat, oysters and other shellfish. Each village has its church, its beach, its bakery. Island communities are very close: when I was a child there were still people there who had never set foot off the island. Things have changed a little now, but my favourite haunts are still untouched: the rocky beach of L'Anse Rouge and the sea-pine woods of the Bois de la Chaise, thick with gorse and mimosa. There are stretches of beach that I know so well I could paint them from memory: miles of deserted, pale sand, broken by the occasional windmill, or German blockhouse from the days of the sccupation, now tumbling like giant Lego blocks out of the dunes towards the sea.
And of all the places I remember the best, the one to which I return the most is a small and unremarkable beach, bracketed by two long dykes to keep the tidal erosion at bay. This is the view from my grandfather's house, just below a sea wall that floods a dozen times a year, sweeping sand across a narrow road that grandiosely calls itself Boulevard de l'Océan. This is my favourite place on earth, with its view of the distant white cliffs of St-Jean-de-Monts on one side, and the Pointe de la Loire on the other. This is where I go to recharge, with a bottle of Gros-Plant and a cornet of crevettes grises (brown shrimps) to watch the sunset from the beach, to listen to the Atlantic waves and to breathe the pungent sea air – a mixture of seaweed and tidal mud – which, to those not used to it, can seem a little overripe, but to me, is the scent of home.
• Return ferry crossings from Portsmouth to St Malo with Brittany Ferrie(0871 244 1400) cost from £323 for a car and four passengers. It's about a three-hour drive from there to Noirmoutier. Or fly to Nantes, just over an hour away, with Flybe from several UK airports from £60 return. Gites Noirmoutier has two flats and 14 cute white cottages sleeping two to seven close to the Bois de la Chaise from €300 a week
Joanne Harris's new novel, Peaches for Monsieur le Cure (Black Swan £7.99) is out in paperback on 28 March. To buy a copy for £6.39 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
Graham Robb, Ancient Gaul
The settlements of the ancient Gauls would make a perfect theme for a misanthrope's holiday. Most of the hilltop towns of Gaul, known as oppida, are deserted heaps of rubble on the outskirts of the Roman cities that replaced them. They stand on the top of ferociously steep hills at the end of dirt tracks. Often, the only sign that the place has been discovered is a rough plank of wood like a signpost in an Astérix comic, etched with the words oppidum celtique.
When I began to visit these iron age ghost towns in 2008, I assumed that the French were proud of their Gaulish ancestors. Amused disdain verging on total indifference would be closer to the mark. At a museum in Vienne, south of Lyon, a collection of Celtic gold coins had been hidden away in a storeroom. The curator told me that no one cares about the Gauls 'because they lost' (the unspoken addition was 'to the Romans'). So much for Gallic national pride.
Long before Julius Caesar marched over the Alps, bringing civilisation in the form of slavery, genocide and underfloor heating, Celtic Gaul was one of the most highly developed parts of Europe. It had long-distance roads and high-speed chariots. The tribal capitals were comfortable, friendly and had a good range of shops. The first writer known to have taken a second home in Gaul is Julius Caesar. After his final campaign, which left 2 million Gauls dead or enslaved, he decided not to return to Italy for the winter. Instead, he stayed in Gaul and wrote up his account of the war in 'a very large and well-supplied' oppidum in Burgundy.
The name of the oppidum was Bibracte. It stood on the summit of Mont Beuvray near modern Autun in Burgundy, and now has a superb museum. But like many oppida, Bibracte is a remote and chilly place. The delights of life in a Gaulish town are easier to picture in the little oppidum of Ensérune, near Béziers. Its pine-scented terraces look out towards the Mediterranean. Far below, the arrow-straight Heraklean Way, which became the Roman Via Domitia, can still be seen bisecting the coastal plain. Along that road, enormous quantities of Greek and Italian wine were brought to Ensérune. The Gauls were addicted to the red nectar and appalled the Romans by drinking it undiluted.
The exhibits in the quiet museum at Ensérune paint a sunny picture of life in the Iron Age – a hand-held sundial, counters used in a game, a child's puppet, and a dish with a small ceramic frog grinning up from the base. Outside, there is a lovely example of a murus gallicus. These walls of stone and timber were once thought to have been built as fortifications. In fact, they were a poor defence against fire and battering-rams, and archaeologists now believe that they were built that way because they looked nice.
There is no cafe at Ensérune. Take your own (undiluted) wine, gaze at the murus gallicus and the beautiful view, and imagine how much more civilised and cheerful ancient Gaul might have been without the Romans.
• Fly to Perpignan with Ryanair or Montpellier with easyJet (easyjet.com). Train travel from London to Beziers via Paris with RailEurope takes about eight hours. Hotel Résidence (+33 4 6737 0063, hotel-residence.com) in the centre of Nissan lez Ensérune has individually designed rooms from €69 a night and superb dining on its poolside terrace
Graham Robb's prize-winning book The Discovery of France is published by Picador (£9.99). To buy a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
Charles Glass, Sunday market, Reillanne, Provence
In the northern Provençal region known as the Luberon, plane trees shade the rolling highway in the long valley between Forcalquier and Céreste. A side road leads north to the summit of a prominent hill, where on Sunday mornings valley residents gather in the ancient village of Reillanne. Local traders, whatever the weather, lay out their wares in the square beside the Church of the Assumption. From a variety of open lorries, carts, barrows, tables and boxes, they display fresh fruit, vegetables, sausages, hams, cheese, local wine, lavender honey, kitchenware, handmade children's toys, flowers and second-hand books. When I am staying in Provence, I can obtain all the week's necessities within an hour. Of course, I take longer. Why rush?
Reillanne market is a place I expected to meet Pierre Magnan, the chronicler of Provençal life whose mystery stories featuring the world-weary Commissaire Laviolette rank with Georges Simenon's as classics of the genre. Alas, the old second world war résistant and prize-winning author died in May last year, at the age of 89. But his people are here every Sunday, some direct from the pages of his 1988 book La Maison Assassinée (The Murdered House), in which he demonstrated knowledge of his folk and their connection to the land reminiscent of Thomas Hardy and his Wessex natives.
The cast at Reillanne's market comes straight from Magnan: men, women and children with ruddy peasant faces, an old man wielding a shepherd's staff, a village burger reading a book on a bench, nubile waitresses carrying trays of wine and beer across the road between the Café du Cours and the pavement. Her customers are spectators, observing the market below as if it were a Roman arena.
British friends with houses nearby, as well as French neighbours, often turn up. It's our weekly venue for the exchange of gossip. If I'm on my own, I settle in with Le Journal du Dimanche and a coffee or beer. It's vital to get to the bakery before 12.30pm, when it closes. The market shuts soon after, usually by 1pm, when the traders slowly pack up and head home for lunch. I drive back to the highway, where the Restaurant Les Granons' wood-fired oven turns out the best pizza in the Luberon.
• EasyJet (easyjet.com) flies to Marseille (just over an hour's drive from the Luberon) from £60 return. Direct trains from London to Avignon, on the edge of the Luberon, take just over seven hours, with returns from £109 through Rail Europe . For gîtes in the Luberon see theluberon.com. Auberge de Reillanne , a traditional French house up a long tree-lined drive, has six huge bedrooms and excellent set dinners
Charles Glass lives part of the year in Provence. His latest book, Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War (Harper Collins, £25), is published on 28 March. To buy a copy for £20 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
Richard Davenport-Hines Largentière, Ardèche
Largentière is a French market town, with a population of less than 2,000, in the Monts d'Ardèche regional park. It's in the north-eastern foothills of the Cévennes, those bigger-than-hills, smaller-than-mountains that Robert Louis Stevenson explored with his donkey. Crammed into a bend of a narrow valley, its harmonious stone houses climb and fall in steep, tight, crooked streets.
I loathe places where the changes of season are imperceptible. Largentière is dank under grey skies and glorious through long springs and autumns; it endures life-threatening downpours in the flood season, and in August is as stifling as a explored . There can be few towns where the weather so affects the communal mood.
The name derives from the silver-bearing lead mines which were first exploited by the Romans, and came into their own as a source of funding for the Crusades. The medieval chateau, and the fortress towers of the surrounding villages, were built to protect the Crusaders' revenues.
The town's sombre 13th-century church is called Nôtre-Dame-des-Pommiers, Our Lady of the Apple Trees, and the surrounding valleys also include steeply terraced orchards of cherry, plum and fig, among the vineyards and olive groves. For years I have lived in a converted silk farm among these orchards, and I go whenever possible to the Tuesday market in the town. I started to go for convenience's sake, and now go for love.
There are many quiet pleasures to be enjoyed in Largentière. I have a particular fondness for Madame Martin's quincaillerie. 'Ironmongers' doesn't begin to describe this two-storey shop bristling with hunting knives, glittering with highly polished pots and pans, and arrayed with every household necessity, plus a super-chic line in kitchen- and tableware. An added bonus is that there are often several kittens scampering about.
A few miles south-west of town, far along an unmade lane that teeters above a deep valley, there is the Roseraie de Berty the garden of renowned rose-grower Eléonore Cruse. Open to the public from mid-May to mid-June, when the roses are flourishing, the garden is laid out in a semi-English manner, which French gardening formalists may find untidy. I have bought many of my roses from Mme Cruse – as well as her useful and enjoyable books. Her garden is a place of perfect repose, full of heady scents and rich colours. It is the sanest place I know on earth.
• Fly to Nîmes (two hours' drive from Largentière) from Luton or Liverpool from £62 return with Ryanair or take a train from London to Avignon (seven hours direct, then about two hours to Largentière) from £109 return through Rail Europe . Les Marroniers 3km away near La Prade, has a gîte sleeping six from €320 a week, B&B doubles from €43 a night, plus camping pitches and mobile homes
Richard Davenport-Hines's latest book is An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (HarperCollins, £20). To buy a copy for £16 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.
