Donkey alert,” someone shouts. The animal sways into view down the lane, under a canopy of chestnut trees. A bored-looking child sits astride it and another trudges alongside with the “school teachers”. We call them that because the people who choose to holiday with a rented donkey, trekking the byways of the Cévennes, tend to be humble instituteurs or nature-loving civil servants.
These devotees of a slower age, travellers who stay in spartan hamlet gîtes, are the opposite of the holidaymakers down on the Mediterranean coast, or eastwards across the Rhône in over-priced Provence. They are mainly French and they