Hamlet lanes
Much of the Dordogne is reached by unnumbered lanes between hamlets with stone walls on both sides and no passing place for a long trailer. We survey the final approach and split to a shuttle vehicle where the artic cannot commit.
Dordogne (24) · Lot (46) · Lot-et-Garonne (47)
The Dordogne and the Lot
Thick-walled stone, deep window reveals, staircases that were never meant to take a wardrobe. The oldest British property belt in France, and the one that asks the most of a crew.
The property, and what it does to a move
The Dordogne belt is where British buyers went first and stayed longest, which means two things for a removal. The properties are old — a great many of them pre-revolutionary farmhouses, longères and pigeonniers with metre-thick walls — and the contents have had decades to accumulate. A house that has been lived in since the nineties is not a house-move; it is a clearance with a move inside it.
Stone is unforgiving. Door openings are narrow and rarely square, reveals are deep enough that a sofa which passes the doorway still will not turn into the room, and original staircases are often stone, winding, and without a handrail worth trusting. We measure the tightest point in the house, not the front door, because the tightest point is what decides whether an item goes in assembled, dismantled, or through a first-floor opening.
Barn conversions add their own problem. The mezzanine that makes the space feel enormous is usually reached by a single open flight with no turning room at the top, and the glazing that fills the old cart opening cannot be leaned against. Anything heavy going up there goes up in pieces or on a ladder hoist, and that has to be known before the day, not discovered on it.
Access
Getting a vehicle to the door in the Dordogne & Lot
The approach decides more of the day than the contents do. These are the three that recur here.
Bastide town centres
Monflanquin, Villeréal, Issigeac and Eymet all have arcaded central squares with restricted vehicle access and market days that close them entirely. Loading is planned around the market calendar and the local arrêté, not against it.
Unmade tracks
Properties reached by a chemin rural can be impassable to a loaded vehicle after rain. Where that is a live risk we plan a hard-standing transfer point at the top of the track and shuttle the load down.
Out to France
Removals from the UK to the Dordogne & Lot
Most outbound moves into this belt are permanent relocations of a property already owned — the second home that has quietly become the main house. That usually means a part-load rather than a full house, arriving into a property that already has furniture in it, which changes the sequencing entirely: what comes out has to be planned alongside what goes in.
Collecting from London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol and across the UK — removals from London to the Dordogne & Lot, and from every other postcode besides.
Moving to FranceBack to Britain
Removals from the Dordogne & Lot to the UK
The return leg from the Dordogne is one of the busiest on our book. Owners who bought in their fifties are moving back to be nearer grandchildren or nearer a hospital, and the house they are emptying has thirty years of French furniture in it — armoires, buffets, farmhouse tables bought locally because they suited the room. Those pieces are large, solid, and worth taking properly.
Delivering to a UK address, into store, or split across both while a purchase completes.
The return legElsewhere in France
The other four belts
Moving to or from the Dordogne & Lot?
Tell us the commune, the kind of building and which direction you are going. We will come back with what we need to see.