Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Cats and Conkers, Churches and Chapels...

I think I'll start with the cats!
The village where we visited the science festival on Saturday is about 20 minutes' drive from our own small town. It seems to have a thriving population of picturesque cats.
I only caught these two on the camera, but there were others!
Two donkeys were also present as part of the science event - they were doing a guided tour around the stands at one point, although we never caught up with them!
The village itself is a lovely example of the architecture to the west of Toulouse - this is the church wall, on the left, and it's built in typical style of field pebbles in a herring-bone pattern between layers of thin, Toulousain brick (see yesterday's post for a close-up). And isn't the half-timbered house at the end fantastic?
The church has a brick bell-tower and is surrounded by this ring of houses (the last photo was from inside the ring). This is quite traditional in our area, and I assume was done for defensive purposes in the Middle Ages - the houses are basically built-up into a solid wall surrounding the centre of the village.
Now that defences are no longer needed, the covered market hall and the plane-lined boulodrome have become the focus...
This door belongs to a chapel just behind the church.
Its curved wall is very Roman in style - architecture didn't really change much here with the fall of the Roman Empire. We still had the material and the skills to make bricks, and even modern houses look a little bit like Roman villas.
And finally, the conkers! Surprisingly, there were as many horse chestnut trees as plane trees around the church. One side was particularly fertile, producing enormous conkers like the one in Son 1's right hand... it can't have been the graveyard, can it???

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow, massive conkers!

Amazing architecture around where you live. I loved the close up of the walls in your previous post. I wanted to reach out and touch it.

Jane and Chris said...

Cats,churches ,donkeys,walls,squares,doors and conkers..that was an eclectic post!
Jane x

Elderberry-Rob said...

Lovely post, the donkey is so sweet. We have seen very few conkers this year or chestnuts and all the berries arrived early - I had pick early and freeze my sloe berries as they were disappearing fast!

VintageVicki said...

A very pretty village :)

The conker season here has been awful - they've been too small to play with :( A local conker event was appealing for any large conkers or else it was going to be cancelled :(

Maria said...

Had to comment Floss,as the conkers here are a rare find this year! soo much rain...
Sweet kitties and a donkey, how lovely!
Such a sweet village too.
Maria x

Deborah said...

Wow, such a gorgeous village and wonderful conkers!

Bee happy x

Vintage Jane said...

No conkers here at all, so I'll have the spiders trooping in ... !

Lola Nova said...

Thank you so much for sharing your photo tour with us. I love to see the architecture and style of the village.

We only have a few Horse Chestnut trees in the neighborhood, and we haven't yet been on a conker hunt, perhaps after school today!

In reply to your comment on my post yesterday: I completely agree with you about the "hen therapy" it really does wonders around here too!

Reading Tea Leaves said...

Thank you Floss for your thoughtful comment at my recent post. In the way of things your comment has somehow chimed back with me and I find myself reflecting and gaining much courage. Thank you dear friend.

I come over often to grab a slice of lovely southern French life but you may not always see a comment from me so it was lovely to see your nam pop up at mine.

I send my best wishes to you at your time of reflection.

Jeanne
x

Reading Tea Leaves said...

Apologies for the typos!

Pomona said...

I rather like the donkey!

Pomona x