Side of the house at La Harillais - the sun ruined my photo of the front of the building.

Apart from the wide ledge on which the building was placed, the site consisted of a steep hillside, sprinkled with broadleaf trees (mostly leafless, stark in the October afternoon). There was a pleasant view out over the valley. The property for sale consisted of three fields around a stone house (one field had a long track, now overgrown, leading down to the road by another way). To one side of the front field was a big wooden barn in a state of picturesque decrepitude. I asked what a shallow concrete structure was, and Simone struggled to express herself, eventually conveying in a mixture of sign language and franglais that it was a trough for feeding cows.

After a brief survey of the site, curtailed because of the mud, we turned our attention to the house. This was a typical stone-built Breton farmhouse, not lived in for many years (I suspected cows had been kept in it recently). Inside there was little to see, the windows having been filled in with bales of straw (these windows were very impressive, having immense stone lintels worthy of Stonehenge).

Simone pointed out the stone floor saying it was a considerable asset, as many rural houses in France just had tiles laid over compacted earth. We couldn't get to the upper story (more bales of straw in the way) but from the outside I could see that the walls were solid and that the roof was in a good state. The cost of the property was 20,000 Euros, which I worked out at £11,000 – not bad for a stone building and about five acres.

As Simone talked of the practicalities (how easy restoration would be, the electricity that was already connected, the water that was only a short distance away) I became charmed by the romance of the place. The hillside was very sylvan and pretty, the stone house authentic and unspoilt, the view into the valley, even in October, very attractive. I climbed the hillside a little way behind the house, ignoring the effects of the wet grass and mud on my shoes. It was at that moment that I fell in love with the place. Ownership of the property would completely fulfil every romantic notion I had of living in France. The cost of restoration would be considerable, but I reasoned I had the rest of my life to spend on the project.

In all I spent about forty minutes on the site before we set off once again.

An hour's drive to the town of Rostrennon, then out into the countryside. This area was more artfully prettier than the area round La Harillais, and more densely populated. The French manage their countryside with pollarded trees, wayside shrines, ornamental touches to public buildings – very unlike the English countryside.

We arrived in a little lane that seemed to be a river of mud. Getting out of the car, one had to take extreme care to avoid sinking into the muddy verges. The house was undeniably attractive, built of huge blocks of stone. We went inside the building. The vast kitchen had an enormous stone fireplace which I could step into and look upwards at the sky. However, the whole property was teetering on the brink of dereliction, with dangerous wooden stairs (in a wide spiral going up three storeys) and rotten floors that would require complete replacement. Risking our lives, we climbed more rotten stairs in pitch darkness to emerge into a spacious attic, running the whole length of the house, with a beamed roof that was breathtaking.

Outside there was mud, cows and the smell of manure. There seemed no end to the property, and several fields came with the house (“You can have that field” said Simone, her long boots striding through the mud, “you can have that one... you can have that one as well”... I trailed after her, making an effort to keep up).

She showed me a long cowshed (made of asbestos), a wooden barn that was literally falling to pieces, two stone barns with arched doorways (highly prized features of Breton architecture). Stepping into one of these stone barns, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I found myself face-to-face with a cow, reclining on a bed of straw - I felt like apologising for intruding into her bedroom.

“That's the orchard” said Simone, pointing to a small field enclosed by stone walls where the brambles had massed themselves almost six feet high, and the fruit trees looked so gnarled and ancient that the whole area would probably have to be burned down and replanted. In the area at the front of the house, where a flight of stone steps led up to the main door, there was a big stone well that looked extremely dangerous.

In England I had been so set upon buying the house (when I had looked at photographs of the property) that I had almost put in an offer sight-unseen. Now that I was confronted by the building, in all its terrible derelict beauty, I was appalled at how unmanageable it would be. I suspected that an attempt to restore the property would consume enormous amounts of time and energy - possibly the effort might even kill me! But the place did look wonderful…