Stephen McGinty: Beautiful and moving works of art are not only found in galleries

BEAUTY is in the eye of the beholder and last week I was fortunate to experience two rather different examples of beauty, separated by 11 miles and 26,000 years.

The Lot valley, in the Midi-Pyrenees, is an enchanted land of high cliffs and oak forests and a river runs through it. About 100km from Toulouse where work had blown me it seemed a sin to miss out on France's greatest works of art for the sake of a two-hour drive and a few tussles with the motorway tollbooths. (Yes, who knew there were pay lanes exclusively for card payment - well after the assistance of a queue of irate French drivers, I now do. Thank you, Jacques -I'll post you the €3!)

Forget the Louvre and its smirking madame, art and its transcendent power to manipulate the emotions reaches its apotheosis in the caramel stone of Saint-Cirq Lapopie (described as "France's most beautiful village"), as well as deep in the caves of Pech Merle, "an art gallery in a palace of nature".

The first glimpse of St Cirq - pronounced "Sang Seer" - is through the trees and across the River Lot as a molten trail of red roof tiles, the ruins of a miniature castle and an impressive fortress-like church hang, as if levitating, half-way up a cliff face. The village appears oddly angled, as if supported not by the laws of geometry and physics but by a witch's spell. It's no wonder that in the late half of the 20th century the Surrealists made it their home town. Poet Andre Breton arrived at nightfall in 1950, having been rowed across the river, to find the village illuminated by blue flames: "Saint-Cirq, set aglow by Bengal lights, appeared to me like an impossible rose in the night."

Although I arrived by car, click-clacking over a single-lane wooden bridge then winding up a narrow roads, I agree that its bloom is viewed best in the stillness of a mid-summer evening, after the bulk of tourists have departed, leaving the cobbled streets, and clutter of old houses and cottages with their balconies filled with geraniums eerily silent. In the past St Cirq was a stronghold, providing an eagle's-eye view of the river and the traffic flowing below. In 1199 Richard the Lion-heart tried but failed to capture it.

I've found that there are certain places and times in one's life when the membrane that separates this world from eternity grows thin and opaque and you can't help but catch sight, like a shadow behind a silk screen, of something larger. This happened to me in the church, which that evening had its large oak doors wide open, the interior empty but for hundreds of lit candles and the silence of the night broken by religious chanting, taped, but in this atmosphere as if sung by ghosts.The following morning I stood in silence before the work of a possibly female, artist who, 24,600 years ago used a mixture of ground minerals for paint to capture the likeness of two horses, whose manes she coated black and whose flanks she dotted with spots.

Deep in the caves of Pech Merle, more than a mile from the surface, there are seven chambers decorated by ancient man and woman with lifelike images of a woolly mammoth, horses and reindeer. During the Ice Age, the caves were used by prehistoric peoples to escape a climate more akin to that of the Arctic. Some time in the distant past, the entrance was sealed by sliding earth and it wasn't until two teenage boys discovered an entrance and alerted their local priest that the greatest gallery in the world re-opened.

The picture of the two horses was signed by two female hand prints, and on the journey back to Edinburgh I couldn't help but brood on her identity, life and the extraordinary gift she left behind -for generations 25 millennium hence - and if in 25,000 years St Cirq will still be so appreciated. I do hope so.