In 965 the church of Geoffrey Grise-Gonelle, Count of Anjou, was consecrated, and the first bay of the nave forms the interior vestibule of the existing church; above rises a tower, whose upper part is octagonal, with a stone spire, and is not earlier than the twelfth century. The porch, also added in the twelfth century, contains a pagan altar, now in use for holy water.
The interesting crypt has early mural paintings, and the treasury contains the (or a) girdle of the Virgin.
The Château Royal, or Logis du Roi (now the Sous Préfecture), is at the north end of the castle enclosure. It was inhabited by Charles VII., Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII., and dates in its present condition from the first to the last of these princes.
The old chestnut-tree was planted, it is said, by François I. The guide shows the oratory of Anne de Bretagne, and also the tomb of Agnes Sorel, the beautiful mistress of Charles VII. The white marble figure rests on a black monument, with two kneeling angels at her head and two lambs at her feet. She died near Jumièges in 1450, and her tomb was erected in the choir of St. Ours. Louis XVI. gave the canons permission to remove it from the church.
From Loches to the main road near Dangé the road winds through a hilly country, and after Ligueil the surface is inclined to be rough. On leaving Loches one goes along the outside of the town wall in a south-westerly direction, and at the first fork one takes the turning going down to the right, with the village of Ciran given on the direction board. The kilometre stones on the left are marked Ligueil.
The road is often lined with closely trimmed poplars, and here and there are wooden crosses by the wayside turnings, and the cottages are of stone, with brown tiled roofs. The Château de St. Senoch, among trees on the left near Ciran, has a very Scottish appearance.
In Ligueil one turns to the left and takes the second turning to the right, marked Cussay. There are several houses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the little town, and the Church of St. Martin, with a modern tower, dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and has a beautiful seventeenth-century altar-screen of gilded wood.
The road goes on through the village of Cussay, past woods with large birches near the road, up and down hill to the small town of La Haye-Descartes, where there is a restored Romanesque church of the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the right. A bronze statue to Descartes, the famous philosopher and mathematician, who was born in the town in 1596, in a house still standing, is passed on the left. Remains of the town wall can be seen, and the streets are full of half-timber and stone houses.
After crossing a railway and the River Creuse, there is a fork, where one goes to the left through a wooded up-and-down country, where the road gets to its worst phase before joining the national road within sight of Dangé.
A smooth run southwards on a broad, straight road above the Vienne soon brings the busy manufacturing town of