The Château on the north side of the town was military, and not feudal. Its remains are of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, with two round towers. At the lofty southern corner of the town, now occupied by the Parc de Blossac, there are remains of the ramparts. The remains of the Roman amphitheatre were demolished in 1857, but fragments of a Roman aqueduct, called Les Arcs de Parigné, still stand a little to the south of the town. [Illustration: No. 8. POITIERS TO ANGOULÊME.] THE ROAD TO ANGOULÊME Leaving Poitiers by the Route de Bordeaux, one soon reaches Vivonne, a village on the Clain, where the road goes twice to the right and then to the left, across the little River Vonne. The church passed on the left belongs to the twelfth century, and has a fine Gothic west door, with much weather-worn carving. A change comes over the country south of Poitiers, for hedges begin to appear, and the trees are less closely trimmed. The curious sight of oxen drawing a plough with a donkey leading is sometimes to be seen. Couhé-Vérac is a large roadside village with an uninteresting church, and no picturesqueness in its long street except the seventeenth-century market-hall, with an open wooden roof, supported by a row of stone pillars. The road goes southwards in a straight line to Chaunay, where it bends, but on leaving the village at once resumes its straightness. The twelfth-century church at Chaunay has fine sculpture. It is interesting to watch the way in which the houses assume a different character as one goes southwards. The roofs become very flat, and one begins to notice vines trained above doors and windows in a thoroughly Italian fashion. The country is undulating and without distant prospects, plantations and the scattered fruit-trees closing up the views. On passing from the department of Vienne into Charente, the direction-boards change from blue to green. RUFFEC is a town on a tributary of the Charente, with little charm in the street which runs straight through it; but by turning to the left along the _Rue de Valence_, one finds in the _Rue des Petits Bancs_ a church with a Romanesque west front of a most ornate character. The three members of the arch of the doorway are richly sculptured; in the beautiful arcade above there remain seven statues in the twelve niches. They are time-worn and battered, and most of them have lost their heads; but they and the figure above of Christ in a vesica, with worshipping angels on either side, still show the skill of the early sculptor. Ruffec retains some specimens of its overhanging timber-framed houses, one of them dated 1582, and the town is famed for its patties made of truffles and partridges.