The only guests in the village

Frédéric Coustols calls himself a 'landscape collector' and he has collected some rather fine landscapes in his 65 years, including a dilapidated Ming village in Yangshuo and a Renaissance palace in Lisbon, which he has lovingly restored into an eight-bedroom hotel. But his greatest achievement is a 13th-century fortified settlement atop a green hill in Gers, a picturesque French backwater. Coustols discovered the village, abandoned, crumbling and matted with ivy, 30 years ago and is still slowly teasing it back to life, brick by brick, using only local and historically appropriate materials. What he has created in the process is a magical living museum, which can be hired out in its entirety for parties or restful contemplation without the bother of cars (which are banned), televisions (ditto) and strangers. With its 12 beautifully renovated houses, Castelnau des Fieumarcon offers the ultimate in decadent privacy.

On the weekend we were in residence we had the village to ourselves, so my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and her cousin could sprint through the empty streets, long overgrown with grass, and shout as much as they liked without annoying anyone except their parents. The absence of vehicles meant the air was filled not with exhaust fumes but with the sweet fragrances of the mature plum, quince and cherry trees.

We were staying in the largest property in the village, Montréal, the house in which Frédéric himself lived in the early years of the renovation, and as befits a millionaire ecological entrepreneur with a keen eye for luxury, the place is suitably grand. The painted ceiling beams in the huge living area were salvaged from a nearby château that had fallen down, and modern art (a bedstead clad in dried bay leaves, a large wall sculpture of woven corn) sits alongside expensive antiques including an 18th-century Gaveau grand piano.

What the village is lacking, obviously, is any kind of shop. So out we all trooped, through the barrel-vaulted stone entrance hall, to our car. Gers is a gastronomic paradise, specialising in Armagnac and foie gras, and is predominantly farmed land, meaning excellent seasonal fruit and vegetables, the best of which are found at the many local markets. The nearby town of Fleurance has a wonderful colonnaded covered market area, where we bought asparagus, broad beans and three types of strawberry, and on the way back we stopped at La Romieu, a tiny village draped in roses with a 14th-century collegiate church and cloister, St Pierre, of intricately carved soft white stone. We drank bière à la pression and felt tired just watching the dusty pilgrims plod their way through town on the Santiago de Compostela route.

This part of France is agriculturally rich and there was once real wealth from the production of woad, a coveted blue dye that was the favoured shade of the Royal Family (sacre bleu!). It is complicated and expensive to produce and the local woad magnates were eventually put out of business by the discovery of indigo (today there is only one place that still produces woad, in nearby Lectoure, where you can buy blue soaps and pricey blue fabrics). But because it is far from the sea and from big cities, the region is untouched by industrialisation, which makes it the perfect destination for urbanites desperate for some peace.

Back at Castelnau we had apéritifs on one of the towers of the old battlements, which has been converted into a dining deck and from where we had a panoramic view of the landscape, an agrarian idyll untouched by modern life, the patchwork of green fields free of electricity pylons and bungalows, the only noise a solitary farmer watering his corn fields with an old-fashioned tractor, the swallows and swifts circling about our heads, joined, as darkness fell, by small, furry bats, one of which landed on my sister-in-law's neck and made her squeal and me laugh.

The following day we sampled more of the sleepy delights of Gers with a visit to the medieval village of Fourcès, which, unusually, has an oval-shaped village square, shaded by tall trees and hemmed by ancient timbered buildings. It was a blisteringly hot day and there seemed to be no one about, other than a couple of gnarled old locals who stared a lot, and so, after an ice-cream break, we sauntered around the outside of the village, which is encircled by a large public rose garden, and sat for a while next to a river that hardly seemed to be moving at all.

Not far away is the Roman villa of Séviac, once a very grand residence with fancy mosaics and a very snazzy swimming pool, which wouldn't look out of place in an oligarch's holiday pad, or, indeed, back at Castelnau des Fieumarcon, the most glamorous historical reconstruction I have ever seen. ES