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The first part of the trip towards Paris took me up some back roads from Montpellier to Clermont-Ferrand, over the top of the Cévennes. It was a spectacular and remarkably traffic-free drive, made all the more fun by a computer glitch (I assume) at the car hire company that allocated me a BMW rather than a Peugeot.

It’s an hour or so from Montpellier to St-Jean-du-Gard, winding through the arrière-pays of northern Languedoc. October means hunting season, and the roads were dotted with huddles of parked cars. Hunters were pacing up and down in flourescent jackets, rifles draped over their arm, their dogs tensed and ready to dash into the undergrowth to retrieve whatever furry or feathery things their dayglo-orange masters had just killed.

131 years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson passed through St-Jean-du-Gard with a donkey, but today I just stopped to buy lunch before starting along the twisty high road to Florac, the départmentale route 9 known as the Corniche des Cévennes.

The Cévennes is another one of those relatively under-appreciated parts of France, formed by deep river gorges and high plateaus (called les causses) reaching up to a thousand metres and more above sea level. The region’s ruggedness and isolation meant that historically it was a refuge for French Protestants, and one of the hotbeds of resistance during the Second World War. Even today it’s a remote place: the Lozère département is the least populated in France, and has the highest average altitude of any region.

As the road climbs higher you leave coastal Languedoc behind. Vineyards and terracotta architecture give way to slate roofs, cattle farms and pine forests. When the road emerges onto the plateaux above 800 metres, the vast stretches of high country reminded me of the central North Island of New Zealand: sparse grasslands and plantation forest line the route. All that was missing was a snowy Mount Ruapehu peeking over the horizon.

Even after you leave the Corniche, the route towards Clermont-Ferrand loses little of its altitude. I passed through Marvejols (an interesting-looking town with an old centre that is probably worth a return visit) before joining the A75 autoroute that zaps north-south across the midriff of France, three quarters of a mile up in the sky.

A final detour from the A75 took me past the Viaduc de Garabit – a 120-metre tall railway bridge crossing the Truyère river. It was one of the major engineering achievments of Gustave Eiffel, who completed it in 1884 before starting work on a rather large tower in Paris. But Paris is for tomorrow. Today was about driving across the roof of France.