Moustier was famous at the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century for its faience, with elegant designs and good colouring. Specimens are now extremely scarce. Two vases of this ware may be seen on the altar of the chapel. The principal potters there were Pierre Fournier, Joseph Olery, Paul Rouse, and Féraud. They usually signed their work with their initials. Maximus was just a century later than Martin; the fever for imitating the lives of the Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt was then in full heat. His master, Honoratus, had been wont to escape from his island monastery and hide in a cave in the glowing red porphyry rocks of the Esterelle. I can understand his retiring thither, above a sea blue as the neck of a peacock, among glowing red rocks, and masses of pines, and heather, and arbutus, and every kind of fragrant herb, and where, when only snowdrops are appearing in England, the spires of white asphodel are basking in the sun. [Illustration: CAVES OF LIGUGÉ The primitive rock monastery of S. Martin. It was abandoned later when the monks moved to the further side of the river; but Felix, a disciple of S. Martin, remained and died in the cave, now inaccessible, below the cross.] Near Nottingham are the "Popish Holes," close to the river Lene. They are thus described by Stukeley. "One may easily guess Nottingham to have been an ancient town of the Britons; as soon as they had proper tools they fell to work upon the rocks, which everywhere offer themselves so commodiously to make houses in, and I doubt not first was a considerable collection of this sort. What is visible at present is not so old a date as their time, yet I see no reason to doubt but it is formed upon theirs. There is a ledge of perpendicular rock hewn out into a church, houses, chambers, dove-houses, &c. The church is like those in the rocks of Bethlehem and other places in the Holy Land; the altar is natural rock, and there has been painting upon the wall, a steeple, I suppose, where a bell hung, and regular pillars. The river winding about makes a fortification to it, for it comes at both ends of the cliff, leaving a plain in the middle. The way into it was by a gate cut out of the rock, and with an oblique entrance for more safety. Without is a plain with three niches, which I fancy their place of judicature, or the like. Between this and the castle is a hermitage of like workmanship." These remains pertain to a cell called S. Mary le Rock, a quarter of a mile west of the Castle, and belonged to Lenton priory. It was abandoned after the time of Edward IV., and is supposed to have come down in a perfect form to the time of the Civil War, when it was much injured by the Puritans as Papists' holes. A good many illustrations exist of it after the Civil Wars, as a large folding plate in Throsby's and Thoroton's "History of Nottinghamshire," 1797, but there is none to show what it was before.