The Lozère département is the only place in France where I’ve been charged by a bison. It’s also where my mother-in-law lives. A wild spot, in short, that needs handling with care.

But it’s also one of the more heart-stopping stretches of Europe, a “here I am, here I stand” mountain land of big skies and tough living.

Let us consider a few facts. This is the county with the highest mean altitude in France. The Alps and Pyrenees rise higher, but they go up and down. At the Mediterranean end of the Massif Central, Lozère is all up — about 3,400 feet, on average.

And there’s hardly anybody there. The 75,000 population (the smallest in any French county) is scattered 36 to the square mile, and just eight or nine in some parts. England crams 1,000 citizens into each square mile. Lozère is, then, roomy — and undeveloped. The county has but two sets of traffic lights and was the last in France to welcome McDonald’s, in its bite-sized capital, Mende.

I’m hoping this has got you interested already, but it gets better. Much better. We have vast limestone plateaux and gorges that could swallow Coventry, moorland, forest and jagged mountain edges around which soar imperial eagles and griffon vultures. We pass pastures, rivers and lakes, plantlife to bewitch any botanist and wildlife in abundance.

The bison, you’ll be glad to learn, are in a reserve. But you get right among them in a horse-drawn buggy, and they can be tetchy, notably the nursing mums. Elsewhere, isolated stone villages grow organically from the landscape, home to men and women who are surprised to see anyone, let alone tourists. (My mother-in-law can cite virtually everyone who’s passed through her farming hamlet over the past 25 years.) Their lives have been unbelievably rugged — still are in winter, which is merciless. Right now, though, the summer sun shines, the air is untouched and the big country is yours. This trip is designed for people flying into Rodez. Coming by car, jump off the A75 at Sévérac-le-Château (or not; see below).

DAY 1

Onto the N88 (direction Sévérac) and, fresh from Blighty, you’ll be struck by the wanton promiscuity of space. Uplands roll endlessly to crests and rocky outcrops, but it’s all fruitful, divided into fields and pastures. Climb to Sévérac’s medieval centre, a castle-topped warren with bracing news from the Middle Ages (“Here they boiled money counterfeiters in oil”), before decision time.

You’re heading for the Gorges du Tarn. You may cut across the plateau to St Rome-de-Dolan, a hamlet perched insanely on the edge of a 1,200ft drop to the gorge. One push and it would plunge. The country road straight over the cliff edge requires not so much that you drive as abseil wearing a car. This may exhaust your stocks of adrenaline.

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