Saturday 7th May 2022

 Today we visited Sylvanes Abbey. It costs 3 euros to visit.

It is no longer used as an abbey - there are no monks here anymore

 This is the interior of the abbey church.

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Another view inside the church

This is inside the cloisters.

This is the chapter house where managerial monks would have met up to try to balance the books!

This is the writing room where monks would have copied religious texts before there were printing presses.

We reckoned we'd done the abbey by then and decided to move on.

We headed for the ancient fortified village of Couvertoirade but on the way stopped to look at the amazing limestone landscape.

The ground here is too rocky to cultivate. The vegetation is low and bushy.

The fortified village of Couvertoirade is much bigger than St Jean D'Arclas.

We went in through this arch in the village walls.

Inside there are narrow cobbled streets.

Here's the main square.

The church is up at the highest point in the village. Nearer to God?

There's some nice stained glass in the church - here St Christopher and St John the Baptist - the latter giving his characteristic one finger gesture!

We moved on to the Cirque of Navacelles - a massive limestone feature of enormous depth. We descended to the bottom down a very exciting narrow twisty road.

It was quite difficult to turn round at the bottom but we eventually managed.   

This is a really sensational place. We drove up another steep and hair pined road to get out the other side of the cirque.

 The last section of the climb had particularly acute hair pins!

We stopped for the day at the town of Anduze. The aire de camping car had been billed as " a very nice aire" in our aires guide so when we got there we were a bit disappointed as we thought it a bit of a tip next to the railway lines. 

Today we travelled far too far - 121 miles (195 kilometres). We are at: N44.0502 E3.9843

Anduze   Street View