We were way off the beaten path. Fortyeight kilometres from Carcassonne, and with the terrain becoming increasingly hilly, our route had led us into the sleepy thermal spa town of Rennes-les- Bains. Edged by a steep cliff, with the river Sals running through the middle, the town’s origins, we discovered, go back to the Romans and Visigoths.

According to the guidebook it bears little resemblance to its heyday at the beginning of the 20th century when the sick and the lame from all over France came to take ‘the cure’. At the time, I was editing a magazine about buying and restoring French properties and so our holidays tended to take us to whatever area of France I wanted to feature in the next issue. My husband and daughter tagged along uncomplainingly.

But I had an ulterior motive this time because I knew that my husband had been engrossed in a best-selling book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (you may recall its authors went to court a few years ago claiming plagiarism in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code). My husband mentioned something about a village called Rennes-le-Château and a mystery involving its priest, Bérenger Saunière. He was intrigued: it was a conspiracy theory made all the more irresistible by the exotic location and the historical context.

A BBC television programme took up the Holy Grail theme, showed us the landscape of steep hillsides and snow-capped mountains, sunflowers, lush valleys and vineyards, and ancient fortresses. We were hooked. I looked up the village in our French road atlas and booked fl ights to Carcassonne.

Unsolved mystery 

The mountaintop village of Rennes-le-Château is about 20 minutes’ drive from Rennes-les- Bains (Rennes refers to heraldic pennants), across a high plateau from which you can see foothills rising to the Pyrenees. It is a magical place where I have often pulled off the road to listen to the hawks, smell the wild herbs and gaze at the breathtaking view.

Climb the dizzying little road up to Rennes-le- Château itself, past the sign forbidding treasurehunters from digging, and the view is a 180° panorama of mountains. Off to the left stands a solitary peak – the Pech de Bugarach – the highest in the Corbières range at 1,130 metres.

Amazingly it isn’t this fabulous view that interests most visitors. Such is the strength of this particular conspiracy theory that they flock here from all over the world to see Saunière’s church and look for clues.

Saunière’s flamboyant Tour Magdala, glasshouse and grand residence, which enabled him to receive VIP visitors, have been preserved and there is a small museum.  The church with its demonic font is open at certain times of day, but the small cemetery is now closed to visitors because of the intrusive and sometimes destructive interest in Saunière’s tomb.

Countless books in many languages have been written trying to explain how a poor parish priest could have aff orded all this. Did he discover Templar gold or the Holy Grail? Was he being paid to say black masses for important people? Did he discover documents proving a marriage between Christ and Mary Magdalene that the Church of Rome paid a fortune to cover up? 

The experts have debunked all these theories, including the one put forward by the authors of  The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, but nothing will stop visitors from looking for clues to Saunière’s wealth in every ornate painting and inscription. Its appeal for devotees and novelists alike lies in the unsolved mystery.

Cathar Country

This part of France holds another fascination for history lovers – the Cathars. A breakaway Christian sect of bons hommes (‘good men’), living mainly in the South-West of France, the Cathars were branded heretics by the Church and viciously stamped out in the 13th century by France’s northern king and the Pope, aided and abetted by the hated crusader Simon de Montfort. During 20 years of war plus 50 of Inquisition, the massacres spread horror. Because of modern-day interest in the Cathars, Languedoc’s Aude department has adopted Pays Cathare (‘Cathar Country’) as its slogan.  There is even a Sentier Cathare (Cathar Trail), which extends from Port-la-Nouvelle on the Mediterranean to Montségur in the Ariège, taking in the dizzying mountaintop strongholds of Aguilar, Puilaurens, Puivert, Peyrepertuse and Quéribus on the way. 

The vertiginous Montségur looks across to the snow-capped Pyrenees and, like so many places where historic atrocities took place, is particularly haunting in its beauty.

In 1244, the last of the Cathars – some 200 men, women and children – were besieged here, captured and burnt alive.

Of course, you don’t have to scale the peaks to appreciate the drama of this landscape: there are well-signposted walks for all levels of ability that take you through pretty villages, the Corbières vineyards and up into densely forested hillsides. From the village of Bugarach, in the shadow of its namesake mountain, it is possible to do a gentle, two-hour circular walk that takes you across a Roman bridge, rebuilt in 1992 after a violent flood destroyed it and wreaked havoc in Rennes-les-Bains further downstream.

Finally, although it deserves an article on its own, a visit to this region has to include another UNESCO World Heritage wonder – the Canal du Midi. Two hundred and forty kilometres long, with 91 locks, this incredible feat of 17thcentury engineering bisects Carcassonne on its way from the Mediterranean to Toulouse, thereby linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic coast. Flanked by 300-yearold trees, the canal that was once an industrial ‘highway’ provides an unforgettable boating holiday through the towns and countryside of southern France.

Literary tourism

Labyrinth, Kate Mosse’s fi rst novel centred on the Aude department of the Languedoc, took the Holy Grail, the siege of Carcassonne and the bloody extermination of the peaceful Cathars as its theme. Her second book, Sepulchre, is also set in the Aude, in and around Rennes-les- Bains, and its success has nudged this little backwater on to the literary tourism map.

Sepulchre is a supernatural mystery adventure set in 1891 and the present day. We follow the characters from Paris and its dangerous underworld to Rennes-les-Bains where they encounter another, even more dangerous world inhabited by demons.

Both books are written with an extensive knowledge and love of the area that goes back many years to when the author and her family bought a house under the walls of the Cité of Carcassonne. She has recently become an unoffi cial ambassador for the Aude department, which is still benefi ting from the interest her books have created worldwide.

Labyrinth and Sepulchre are published by Orion in paperback, £7.99. Kate’s new book The Winter Ghosts: An illustrated novella was published by Orion last October. 

The fairytale citadel of Carcassonne

You either love Viollet-le-Duc’s medieval reconstruction of the Cité of Carcassonne with its fairytale turrets visible across miles of lush vineyards, or you wish he’d left it alone. But if this citadel had remained a ruin, its lineage back to pre-Roman times might also have stayed buried. Today the Cité, whose restoration was begun in the middle of the 19th century and finished in 1910, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, receiving two million visitors a year.

The Cité of Carcassonne has long since passed its bimillennium: archaeologists have ascertained that there has been a human settlement on this site – an oppidum – since the 6th century BC. Interesting Roman and Visigoth artefacts can be seen in the Cité’s museum, but if you are keen on history it’s well worth the money to join a guided walking tour in English that points out the Cité’s different metamorphoses and takes you round the ramparts, allowing you to orientate yourself and identify the buildings.

The city played an important role in the South of France in the 12th century when the Cathar religion had become very influential, but during the fi rst of the Albigensian (Cathar) crusades, Carcassonne was besieged and surrendered.

Within the vast ramparts of this ancient place are a beautiful basilica, a couple of hotels, many restaurants and bars, some private homes – although very few people actually live within the Cité itself – and of course scores of souvenir shops.

In the summer, visitors are treated to costumed medieval events such as jousting, and many French visitors in particular come for the 14 July fireworks, which are said to be the best in France. However to avoid the crowds it is best to see this extraordinary attraction out of season.

Further information

• For Languedoc-Roussillon tourist information, visit www.sunfrance.com and for the Aude department visit www.audetourisme.com
• To find out more about Rennes-le-Château, visit www.renneslechateau.com or www.rennes-le-chateau.fr
• The Carcassonne tourist office website is www.carcassonne-tourisme.com Cathar Country