After spending a couple of weeks in the Loire Valley checking out the chateux (castles) and letting Pedr’s arm recover, we then went down to the south of France to meet up with Pedr’s parents and family friend Bob. We kept it fairly low key checking out the old castles in the area, and Pedr’s arm was happy for the continued rest.
The castles in this part of France are a lot older and more ruined than the ones in the Loire Valley. So instead of seeing huge, elaborate country estates you get the more early medieval, crumbling, uneven fortresses. But this isn’t a bad thing; they’re great places to climb around in and explore and feel a bit like Indiana Jones.
Some of the castles, like the one in Quillan, are small and only have the outer walls still standing so the local council decided to put it to better use as a potable water reservoir. It makes sense, engineers always want to put water reservoirs at a high point and usually the castles were built on the highest point of the town. I wonder if the local council here has to follow as many rules as Sydney Water does to maintain their heritage pump stations. (For those of you that don’t know, Sydney Water has to spend quite a lot of money on maintaining “old” buildings from 80 years ago. Which I think is a bit of a waste and has big consequences when you need to upgrade facilities later on.)
But there is one castle which has been restored to glory and is one of the biggest attractions in southern France, and that’s the old fortified town of Carcasonne.
This town has an old medieval castle which is then surrounded by a double layer of walls. Sitting on top of a hill, lit up at night, it’s a very impressive sight. Luckily you can go inside the castle and climb all over most of the walls. There are danger signs up around the walls but plenty of people ignored them.
The town has some interesting legends, my favourite being the one where an invading army was besieging the town to try and starve the people into surrendering. The queen of the starving town then force fed a pig until it was fat, then threw it over the walls towards the invaders. When they saw this the invaders said “If they have so much food available that they can afford to waste a pig like this, then we can’t starve them out.” And so the invaders packed up and left. Historians say that this didn’t really happen but it’s still a good story.
So after spending some time catching up with Pedr’s parents and Bob we eventually had to say goodbye; they went back home to Australia and we went back to London. But it won’t be too much longer before we get to see them (and everyone else back home) again, only a couple of months. Until then we’ve got the blog!
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