By Paul Topping

It’s easy to miss the little village of Seillians as you drive from Bargemon to Fayence along the bottom of the hill in Provence, southern France. The beauty is in the upper part of this quaint village. We park midway up the hill in a long car park of gravel amidst multiple games of boules going on. The pedestrian walkway leads us past a five‑foot metal fish sitting on a wall. It is a strange greeting to a hillside village.

On the opposite wall of this pedestrian village entrance there are three large reprints of old posters. The most notable one is of Max Earnest, a famous surrealist painter who lived in the village with his wife, Dorothea Tanning, an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer and poet. 

The lane continues to slope down to an amazing restaurant in a small 17th‑century square. On the prominent menu it says “MICHELIN” with no stars , which likely means it has been judged by the same five Michelin criteria but not awarded. The rest of the square, which happens not to be square because it has one pointed end leading to the village clinging to the hill, houses a tourist board office and a few arty shops. I noticed on my first foray into the village that the tourist board was closed two days a week and on other days “open eight hours less two for lunch.” By some chance on my second visit the place was open, so I was in there like Jack the rabbit.

The English‑speaking assistant asks, “Are you an American?” Sensing no pleasure in her question, she quickly adds, “Or perhaps Australian.” It is strange what assumptions people make about other people’s nationality. Do you link assertiveness or inquisitiveness with being American? Historically, you may have generalised Americans as loud. Is it your voice or accent that people pick up on first, or your attire? Perhaps it is my attire that prompts this assistant’s second guess, for example, Aussies who are generally scruffy dressers.

The young tourist board assistant responds to all my questions in English and laughs at my joke about the opening hours of the unit whilst finding my interest in cemeteries fascinating. I sense I may be flirting and that this lady could easily be forty years my junior. I establish that the village cemetery is at the bottom of the hill; there is no set pattern in France for locating cemeteries.

The format for Jezzabel the wife when we visit a new town is to find the shops whilst I like to delve into the history. She struggles a bit in Seillians but finds herself in an alley so narrow that you fall into a tourist shop which, along with lots of clothing, is full of live, sleeping cats.

After extracting Jezzabel from the shop after ten minutes, we walk for a few minutes to the Church of Saint Lever, with its first historical reference in 1113. Glory be, the church is open. There is a circular glass oculus in the ceiling depicting the Maltese cross. It was built as recently as 2012, as the previous ancient one disappeared in 2001 during a refurbishment. The original was linked to a local family and knights of the Order of Malta. There are, unusually, two towers in this church; one holds a bell and the other a clock.

We meet Hugh again, an Englishman who has lived in Provence since the nineteen‑seventies. As he talks, he sounds and looks like Hugh Grant with a jolly good public school education. Sadly, having just watched the latest  Bridget Jones’s Diary, the real Hugh is not holding up that well.

At La Fontaine Font d’Amont, a short climb from the church, there is a most idyllic setting with a large tree for shade and a little restaurant partly wrapped around a fountain with a stone tablet bearing a coat of arms, which serves as another reminder of the Crusaders. In its heyday, it was a fortified village, its houses forming most of the ramparts.

The restaurant is part of a 17th‑century hotel whose name translates as “Two Rocks Hotel,” denoting the two big rocks that helped form the entrance to the original village centuries earlier. All the hotel bedrooms are named after flowers; the décor is bright. The drinking water from the fountain is also used as table water for the outdoor restaurant seating area, and the wine is chilled in the fountain. It is the best meal of the two weeks on this Provence trip, and the wines kept us sitting in this lovely location for a few hours.

I get to the cemetery, beyond the supermarket at the bottom of the hill. I noticed that in this part of France, they like to lay porcelain flowers on many graves, which saves having to bring flowers every year to the grave, I suppose.

Seillians is predominantly a hilltop, traffic‑free, medieval fortified village with few shops, delightful alleyways, amazing views and a delightful place to spend an afternoon. You can never get enough of Provence. Let’s meet up at the most beautiful village in France, Seillians, this year by the fountain.