Many are familiar with the desert churches carved out of the land itself in the Middle East but, as Phoebe Armstrong reveals, they are also to be found in France “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock” (Matthew 7: 24-25). These verses are pointedly printed on a placard on the site of an archaic subterranean church in south-west France, one of two I visited regularly as a child. In all, there are five troglodytic churches in this corner of France between the Gironde Estuary, the Dronne River and Angoulême; Aubeterre, Brantôme, Saint-Emilion, Gurat and Mortagne,