The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone ValleyHome, Gordon
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The Motor Routes of France: To the Châteaux of Touraine, Biarritz, the Pyrenees, the Riviera, & the Rhone Valley
Home, Gordon
Automobile travel -- France -- Guidebooks; France -- Description and travel
The monastic buildings now include a machicolated gateway; a Romanesque
church restored by Abadie, which before the thirteenth century had two
cupolas on the roof; a curiously designed tower built in the eleventh
century on the rock immediately above the church; and the
fifteenth-century cloisters. There are two bridges over the sparkling
river, and facing one of them is the fifteenth-century parish church, a
picturesque fortified building now used as a market-house. There are
some interesting houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and
others of the Renaissance period, including a manor-house called La
Hierse.
Quaint stone well-heads are frequently to be seen in front of the
houses; the vine becomes more and more frequent, and the umbrella pine
begins to appear here and there as one journeys southwards. Between
Brantôme and Château-l’Évêque a light railway crosses the road half a
dozen times, and keeps by the road all the way to Périgueux.
At Château-l’Évêque the very picturesque fifteenth-century castle of the
Bishops of Périgueux stands out in a most attractive fashion to the
right of the road just behind the village. The steep red roof rises
above the square and round towers that give great dignity to the pile.
The road drops down the valley of the Beauvronne, a small tributary of
the Isle, passing the village of Chancelade, where there are very
extensive underground quarries. A recent collapse was the cause of
several deaths.
The greater part of the abbey church, founded in 1120, dates from a
restoration in 1625, but the Romanesque front remains, with the doorway
half concealed by a modern porch of plaster and wood. There is also a
twelfth-century chapel at the west end.
PÉRIGUEUX
The first view of the city, through an opening between steep slopes near
Chancelade, is full of promise to those in search of romance. If it
should happen to be a fine evening, a beautiful light gilds the great
Byzantine campanile and clustered domes of the cathedral, as well as all
the faces of the buildings turned towards the west, so that the
river-encircled city assumes mellowed tones of creamy gold contrasted
with the wooded hills overlooking it on all sides.
_History._--The original prehistoric Périgueux stood on the south side
of the River Isle, and it afterwards became the Gaulish city of
_Vesuna_, the capital of the Petrocorians, whose name survives in
Périgueux. When the Romans had occupied the country a new city was built
on the site of the present one, and in the period of its prosperity,
before the barbarian invasions swept away the Gallo-Roman civilization,
the arena, the temple of Vesuna, and other surviving remains, were
built.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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