“The stone cottage had re- appeared online and I was able to schedule a viewing”
with two bedrooms, a kitchen, lounge and shower room, and seemed habitable – a case of rafraîchissement rather than redevelopment. There was an attached garage
Clockwise from main: Charles’ house is located in the village of Youx in Puy-de-Dôme; it came with this field next to the house; one of the bedrooms; a reception room; the basic kitchen is ready for some TLC
and a small outbuilding as well as a garden and it came with an adjacent one-acre field. The whole thing was on the market for €55,000 which would equate to around £50,000. There would in addition be about €5,000 of notary fees to be paid, but in principle, it was potentially a house for £50,000. Disregarding all the advice I would usually give to a prospective purchaser, I was showing the photos to my friends and imagining myself living there! And then it disappeared offline…
time it came to winter 2022/23 I was ready to revisit France.
A MOUNTAIN TO CLIMB There was, however, one more requirement I that hoped I could satisfy, which had been a motivation for the Vosges trip. I am a bit of a scenery snob. I think this comes down to growing up in a very scenic place where nobody came to visit: the north of County Louth and the south of counties Armagh and Down along the Irish border. This area is home to the
Cooley and Mourne Mountains, the Ring of Gullion, Carlingford Lough and Dundalk Bay, and so has the benefit of both mountains and the sea. It is the backdrop to the most legendary tale of Celtic mythology, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, and the inspiration for C S Lewis’ Narnia. But in the 1980s when I was growing up there, nobody was visiting because of The Troubles. It didn’t have the tourists and facilities I saw when I visited Kerry or Galway along Ireland’s Atlantic coast and so I underestimated the rarity of its beauty. Now, thankfully since the Good Friday Agreement in
1998, tourism is thriving there, but I am consequently quite hard to impress when it comes to landscapes. The lack of exceptional scenery was a missing factor in my attraction towards the Montluçon area. While I liked the town, and
the River Cher is wide and has carved a beautiful valley with some dramatic gorges, the lack of mountains and the distance from the sea concerned me. The latter I would have to accept: France is four times the size of England or Ireland, and in the centre I would be at least a four- hour drive from the coast. But could I find some mountains? I was by now reminding
myself of one of those unrealistic purchasers I have met through my work, with a long wish list and without the long line of zeros in the budget to match. This didn’t deter me, however, and in early February 2023 I was booked to revisit the Montluçon area and was looking for properties to view. One advert caught my
attention. There was snow on the ground in the front exterior picture, and it had a beautiful stone facade. If I were listing it in the UK, I would have called it a stone cottage. It was detached
VOLCANIC VIEWS I carried on with my trip, reserving a self-catering apartment with photos that showed a magnificent outlook over a lake. This scenery looked much more dramatic than the vicinity of Montluçon even though it was only 30 minutes further south than I had travelled in 2019. The lake in question was the stunning Lac des Fades Besserve at Confolant on the River Sioule, which has carved dramatic gorges into the rocks along its course. By heading further south into the Puy-de-Dôme, I had arrived at the beginnings of the uplands of the Massif Central. Here I discovered a stunning area of mountains, forests, river gorges and lakes, and the then snow- capped Auvergne volcanoes began to come into view. The most striking of the
volcanic peaks is the Puy-de- Dôme itself, from which the department takes its name. It is the centrepiece of the Unesco World Heritage Site and the summit is accessible by a railway opened in 2012. The peak is illustrated on the labels of Volvic spring water, which is bottled in the eponymous village 20km to the north. The city of Clermont-Ferrand
sits to the east and is the administrative capital of the department. Further west is the Puy de Sancy, the highest point in the Massif Central and home to several ski resorts and the source of the Dordogne river. I had indeed found my mountains and the landscape shared another characteristic with my native Ireland – it was green, even in early February. Making the trip all the more
rewarding, the stone cottage had re-appeared online and I was able to schedule a viewing. There is an old estate agents’ joke that it takes people two hours to buy a TV but only two minutes to buy a house. And there is a truth behind it; although the process will take months and the preparation may take years of hard work and saving, in the moment, people usually either feel they could live in a property or they don’t. If that feeling overlaps with a property that is in budget and suitably located then the decision in the buyer’s own mind can be almost immediate.
THE REAL THING The photos and virtual tours agents supply purchasers with in advance of a viewing can help to narrow down their list of prospective homes but these are no substitute for walking through the door, looking out the windows or standing in the garden. Or in the case of the stone cottage, standing in the adjacent field overlooking the beautiful green valley. I felt that I could live there
right away and got the sales process going immediately. I received the keys on 31 May: my house for £50,000. I sensed that there would
be further challenges and adventures ahead, but as I headed into June, I had at least reached the end of the first chapter. ■
Charles is happy to discuss his experiences of buying in Auvergne. You can reach him at
charles@louisandco.co.uk
FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: May/June 2024 77
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