La Sagerie sits inside a landscape most Parisians have never properly seen — rolling hills, half-timbered villages, and a quiet horse-breeding tradition that stretches back centuries.
Le Haut Perche sits in the Orne, in southern Normandy — a quieter, wooded corner of the region, far from the coast most people already know. It has never been a tourist landscape in the way the coast or the châteaux valleys are, which is exactly why it still feels undiscovered: bocage farmland, half-timbered manor houses, and villages that have changed very little in a century.
Le Haut Perche is bocage country — small fields stitched together by hedgerows, orchards and sunken lanes. It's gentler and greener than most people's idea of "near Paris," and it changes character completely with the seasons: apple blossom in spring, deep shade in summer, mist and colour in autumn.
The Forêt de Bellême, a few minutes away, is one of the most remarkable oak forests in France — nearly 2,400 hectares, a royal forest since the 13th century, its oaks prized for their fine, pink-tinged grain. The Chêne de l'École, over 350 years old, still stands near La Perrière; autumn brings mushroom foragers and, on the first weekend of October, an international mycology gathering.
Further east, the Forêt du Perche et de la Trappe stretches over 3,000 hectares around the Abbaye Notre-Dame de la Trappe — a 12th-century monastery ringed by ponds the monks dug themselves. It gave the word "Trappist" to the world after a 17th-century reform of monastic life here; the community still brews a Trappist beer on site today.
Countryside walks start from the front door; nothing here needs a car.
This isn't a one-village landscape — it's a scatter of small, distinct market towns, each with its own reason to visit. Mortagne-au-Perche, a classified Petite Cité de Caractère, is the best-known: it's been France's black-pudding capital since the 1950s, its Foire au Boudin drawing over twenty thousand visitors and charcutiers from across the world every March for an international competition centuries in the making.
La Perrière, another Petite Cité de Caractère on the edge of the Forêt de Bellême, has the kind of small, considered restaurant and producer scene usually reserved for places three times its size — bakers, cheesemakers and a Saturday market that supplies a good share of La Fournée's table.
Cider, cheese and cream are the traditional backbone of this part of Normandy-adjacent France — expect them on the table more than any imported alternative.
The Perche has bred horses since before the Middle Ages, and gave its name to the Percheron — the powerful grey and black draft horse that once pulled carriages, ploughs and, later, artillery across two world wars. The breed was refined here over centuries, reportedly with Arabian bloodlines introduced as early as the 8th century.
The Haras National du Pin — nicknamed the "Versailles of the horse" — is the grandest evidence of that tradition: a royal stud built between 1715 and 1730 by Robert de Cotte, the architect behind Versailles' own stables, its horseshoe-shaped courtyard set inside 1,100 hectares of parkland. It still breeds Percherons, French Trotters and Thoroughbreds today, and opens its stables, carriage collection and summer exhibitions to visitors.
Closer to home, Mortagne-au-Perche hosts the departmental Percheron conformation competition each September — stud farms, auction houses and open pasture are scattered across the wider region between the two.
The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Sées is the region's grandest landmark — a genuine Norman Gothic building, its nave raised between 1220 and 1240, its twin 70-metre spires visible across the countryside for miles before the town itself comes into view.
The Abbaye Notre-Dame de la Trappe, inside its own forest, is quieter but arguably more consequential — a 12th-century monastery whose 17th-century reform of monastic life gave the word "Trappist" to the world. The community still brews on site today.