Where is it?
The city of Besancon, aka “France’s hidden gem”.
Why do you go there?
It all stems from Besancon being twinned with Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, where I grew up. I've been there for a school French exchange, a week of sixth form work experience, my year abroad while studying French at university, and after I met my husband during that year abroad, my honeymoon. My husband isn’t from Besancon, though. He's from Huddersfield.
How often do you go?
Every few years a UK newspaper describes it as “France's hidden gem” and that reminds me to go back.
How did you discover it?
In a French lesson, with a hypnotic video that had a lot of aerial shots of forests and a lengthy description of the Franche-Comte dairy farmer’s year.
Fast forward six months and I’m there with a bunch of spotty, anxious teenagers, being the spottiest and most anxious of the lot, cycling and swimming and visiting citadels. And I fell in love with the place.
What’s your favourite memory?
My first date with my now-husband. We walked round the whole loop of the Doubs river that encircles the city, past the old Vauban fortifications, the elegant wharves and the Burgundian palaces, and ended at a little restaurant called La Petite Adresse. There we went to town on the local cheeses and have never looked back.
Who do you take?
The old ball and chain and I do a fair bit of old haunt revisiting. However, my main joy is to take unsuspecting friends there, then watch their faces as they give the local cheeses a go. You tend to have to eat them with a spoon out of a hot wooden crate. It's carnage.
What do you take?
A big empty suitcase to fill with local produce. Sadly, the cheese tends not to keep at room temperature, so you have to fill it up with Jura wine instead. The reds are watery, the whites are sickly sweet. I can’t get enough.
What do you leave behind?
France. Until it was conquered by Louis XIV, Besancon and Franche-Comte were one of those weird offcuts of Europe that were Germany for a bit, Austria for a bit, weirdly Spain for a bit. They’ve even got a Comtois independence movement.
So, there’s none of that Parisian brusqueness here, just a warm rural welcome and a glass of someone's uncle’s farm-made moonshine from up in the mountains.
Sum it up in five words.
Truly, France’s most hidden gem.
What other travel spot is on your wish list?
For the three years that I've lived in Glasgow I've kept promising that I will cycle from my house to my in-laws’ place in St Andrews, and I keep not managing it. If I can do that in 2024, I will count my travels complete. Oh, but then there are the Faroe Islands.
Kieran Hodgson: Big In Scotland comedy tour comes to the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, tomorrow; Shetland Arts, Lerwick, on March 21; Corn Exchange, Melrose, on March 23; Eden Court, Inverness, on March 28; and SEALL, Skye, on March 29. Visit berksnest.com
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