Lost in La Couronne
Feb. 5th, 2006 05:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThe drive south went smoothly enough for several hundred miles, and then we hit a snag on the very last stage: finding the right road out of Angoulême. This really ought to have been easy; we had done it many times last year; which is probably why we found ourselves driving into the suburb of La Couronne.
La Couronne is dominated by the LaFarge cement works; if there was any disagreement about whether we were on the right road (and there was), the cement works removed all ambiguity. We skidded into the first available parking space, and realised that we were looking at the ruins of a twelfth century abbey. And, in case we didn't find this sufficiently incongruous, there was also a concrete camel (with little glass hidey-holes in it, containing such treasures as a tiny wooden boat).
There may in fact be some explanation for the camel: it appears on the arms of the town of La Couronne, in reference to a small bas-relief found on a wall in the abbey ruins, identified as some member of the camel family and carrying a load of building stone on its back. There is, it seems, a tradition that the materials for the construction of the abbey were transported through the surrounding marshes by camel.
La Couronne is dominated by the LaFarge cement works; if there was any disagreement about whether we were on the right road (and there was), the cement works removed all ambiguity. We skidded into the first available parking space, and realised that we were looking at the ruins of a twelfth century abbey. And, in case we didn't find this sufficiently incongruous, there was also a concrete camel (with little glass hidey-holes in it, containing such treasures as a tiny wooden boat).
There may in fact be some explanation for the camel: it appears on the arms of the town of La Couronne, in reference to a small bas-relief found on a wall in the abbey ruins, identified as some member of the camel family and carrying a load of building stone on its back. There is, it seems, a tradition that the materials for the construction of the abbey were transported through the surrounding marshes by camel.
