ABSTRACT
This chapter presents heritage-making, place attachment and walkability design to highlight the ways in which heritage sites in rural France endeavour to organise and design space to foster an engagement with place and with the past on the part of temporary visitors and permanent residents alike. Indeed, as walking allows place periodicity to come to light, it reveals the layers of history in that place, the 'incessant stomping' that occurred there over time, and the 'superposed fossil itineraries unconsciously reactivated by walkers or flaneurs who come after'. Ultimately, walking is 'constitutive of human beings', and a fundamental human activity and means of interacting with the environment. Through its Charte de Qualite, the Association of the Most Beautiful Villages of France takes on a pedagogical approach to landscape and encourages the development of walking pathways that give opportunities to connect emotionally and intellectually to aesthetic and architectural local heritage.
