Field Notes from France: Into the Caves
I’ve wanted to see Lascaux since Art History 101 in my first year at Guelph University… it was some time ago.
So when we were mapping out where to go next between our Bordeaux stays, I went to Google Maps and started looking around. That’s when I saw it: Lascaux. About a two to three hour drive. It was a must. One of those places that had been sitting in the back of my mind for years.
From there, it became a question of where to stay. The Dordogne region is full of incredible villages, and after a bit of a Google Maps spiral, Rocamadour stood out immediately. A multi level village built into a cliff, it looked like something out of a fairytale. The more I read about it, the more it felt right as our home base for three nights. And it was only about an hour from Lascaux, our first stop.
Lascaux IV
Lascaux is known for some of the earliest cave paintings, images of animals painted around 20,000 years ago. There are theories, but no one knows for certain why they were made, and I like that. It leaves space to imagine.
I like to think of them as some of the first artists, painting what artists have always painted: their life, what was around them, what mattered.
When I first learned about Lascaux in university, I was drawn to the lines and the colours — the way something so simple could feel so alive.
It stayed with me, enough that years ago I made a small abstract series inspired by it. Not paintings of animals, but my own way of thinking through those marks and that space.It wasn’t about copying Lascaux. It was about imagining what it might have felt like to be there, making those marks.
(This painting is from my abstract Lascaux series. Texture and ochre colours echo the cave walls. There’s no blue there, but in my world, there’s sky. Even when I was painting abstractly, I was painting my life—more so my inner life.)
The original cave has been closed for decades to protect the paintings, so what you see at Lascaux IV is a full-scale recreation. There have been several replicas over time: Lascaux II, created in 1983; Lascaux III in 2012; and the most recent, Lascaux IV, in 2016. I’d like to go back and see the other two one day.
Even knowing that it’s a recreation, it still felt like stepping into a cave. The scale, the surfaces, the way the forms moved across the walls—it was hard not to get pulled into it.
Cave Day
Our first full day staying in Rocamadour was what we called “cave day.” I knew this region was full of caves, which is exactly why I chose it. Wherever I travel, I try to see caves like this.
The first stop was the Gouffre de Padirac.
You arrive and there’s just this giant hole in the ground. It doesn’t feel real at first, just open earth dropping down into something you can’t fully see. It reminded me of being a kid and visiting the Devil’s Punch Bowl in Stoney Creek. That same mix of curiosity and something a little eerie. I’ve always liked that feeling.
We made our way down from the surface, taking the stairs (there’s also an elevator), seeing it from different levels as it opened into a completely different world. At the bottom, there was so much greenery and a lone sculpture of a figure. “Tout simplement” by Isabelle Thilgès, representing the feeling of smallness a human feels in that space. I definitely felt that. It was serene standing there and looking up.
And then it kept going further than I expected. The first part of the cave is impressive. You walk along until you reach the underground river, where you wait for a boat. The route continues through a series of rivers and lakes. They divide the boats by language, and as we moved through the water, the guide shared the history and stories. At the same time, we were looking all around us. The scale of it, the colours, the shapes, it didn’t feel like something you rush through. It made you slow down.
After the boat, we climbed further through the caves. I thought the first part was impressive, but it was nothing in comparison to what came next. We stopped at a lit turquoise pond and paused. Looking up, it felt like the cave stretched as high as a skyscraper. Moving along the path, we climbed more stairs, and at one point I stopped and looked back at where we had come from. That turquoise pond looked so small. The people below looked tiny. It made you feel small in the best way.
We walked back through it all once more. This time we chose the elevator to go back up. It’s a lot of steps. I picked up a beautiful book from the gift shop afterward to read more about the history, and learned that there was once a restaurant somewhere along the way down.
By the time we made our way back up, I felt completely in awe. It felt like we had just visited another world. Nature has a way of doing that, surprising you with something you didn’t expect. Our guide mentioned that it’s usually packed, but we had timed it well, and for most of it, it felt like we had the space to ourselves.
Grottes de Lacave
The last cave of the day was the Grottes de Lacave. It’s much closer to Rocamadour, set into the side of a mountain, and you take a small train to get up to the entrance. It’s a different kind of experience. Still impressive and still beautiful, but after Padirac, the scale was smaller.
What stood out most was that this one was guided. After moving through Padirac mostly on our own, this felt more structured. The tour was entirely in French, which I don’t speak, so at a certain point I stopped trying to follow along on the map – it got really tough to read and just looked. I focused on what caught my attention, the shapes, the colours, the way the cave opened and closed around us.
It made me realize something I’ve noticed in other places too. I don’t enjoy being guided through something as much as discovering it on my own. Even so, caves always leave an impression. No matter where they are in the world, stepping into that kind of underground space feels like entering something separate from everything above.
That’s what stays with me most. Not just what I saw, but how it felt to be there, inside something so much bigger than us.
It’s also how I think about my work. I’m not trying to document a place exactly as it is. I’m paying attention to what lingers, and finding a way to return to that later.
The world is fascinating. There’s so much we still haven’t seen, so much that stays hidden beneath the surface, like these caves. And then there’s the human effort involved in bringing places like this to light, making them possible to experience without destroying them.
Nature really is incredible.
This was just the beginning. Next: Rocamadour.
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