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???