THEY do say that life imitates art, and that certainly seems to be true of many of the towns that are grouped in our corner of south-western France.

Many are the times that one of our happy tourist visitors has declared that the medieval town with the half-timbered buildings and the winding alleyways they are visiting is just like a film set.

No town typifies this so much as St Antonin-Noble-Val, which nestles alongside the Aveyron river with a stunning backdrop of steep limestone cliffs. It can truly lay claim to the title of "film set" as it was actually used for the film Charlotte Grey, but its real beauty lies among the back alleys that don't appear to have changed very much in the last 800 years.

As you wander past the stone arches, hidden courtyards and overhanging upper floors that sag towards their neighbours you expect to hear the sound of a couple of members of the Monty Python team arguing with each other over a potato, or emptying a chamber pot on to the poor unfortunates below.

It is really quite amazing that so little seems to have changed over the years, and this seems to be due to a quirky turn of fate that has visited prosperity, decline and poverty, and then once again prosperity on the town. Judging from the quality of the stonework the large church and the splendid public buildings, in its heyday as a centre of wine making, tanning and weaving it must have been wealthy indeed.

Successive waves of industrial decline, phyloxia killing off the vines and the Great War thinning out the population even further, dealt a death blow to the town and it was of so little value to anybody that it wasn't even worth the effort of pulling down any of the old buildings, and there certainly wasn't enough money to build any new ones.

This meant that by the time that tourists started to venture into the town they discovered a perfectly preserved example of medieval architecture. With tourists comes their money, and some of this has been filtering into the buildings and breathing new life into once-derelict properties.

The greatest tourist legacy has to be the huge Sunday market that snakes through the old High Street and cascades into the main square, where you can buy anything from a pig's trotter to a handbag and anything in between. It is a market enjoyed by all nationalities, but the Brits are far and away the dominant customers. In fact, if it wasn't for the voices of the French stallholders you could well be in Portobello Road.

If all the retail therapy gets a bit too much for you, you can always hire a kayak and take a leisurely paddle down the river. Fortunately the kayaks are extremely buoyant and even a complete idiot can paddle one; I can vouch for this fact. The only drawback to the whole paddling experience of passing between the steeply forested cliffs is that it does remind you somewhat of a film set, which would be a good thing if the film wasn't Deliverance and your imagination didn't see seven-toed banjoists around every corner, with the words "Squeal, piggy, squeal!" ringing in your ears. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow.