France's Tarn Gorges & Beaux Villages Tour

Eleven nights from the Pyrenees to the Loire, escorted, in the guest’s own classic, with the ferries both ways included and the price quoted on application.

Starting with an overnight crossing to Santander is what makes this a proper touring holiday rather than a drive to France: no autoroute slog south, and the car arrives in Spain fresh.

Rioja comes first, the wine country along the Ebro, then the Pyrenees and down to Carcassonne for two nights, a walled medieval citadel restored in the nineteenth century and the largest of its kind in Europe. The Tarn Gorges follow for three nights in a sixteenth-century chateau hotel, in limestone canyons where the river has cut several hundred metres down through the causses and the roads thread along the bottom. Rocamadour and the Dordogne take two more, with the village built into a cliff face above the Alzou and more than a dozen of the villages officially rated among France’s most beautiful on the route. The Loire closes it, before the ferry home from Caen.

Four-star hotels, a three-course dinner every night, breakfast daily, rally plates, roadbooks with the daily itineraries, a Michelin atlas, a guidebook, a tour director throughout and both Brittany Ferries crossings are all included; lunches, coffees, drinks with dinner, entry fees and autoroute tolls are not. The price is given on application. Late spring and early autumn are the seasons, since the Tarn in high summer is both hot and busy. Twelve days with three nights in one chateau and two in the Dordogne is a gentle shape, which on a classic car tour matters: there is time to look at the car as well as drive it.