An old wooden cross and a stone one stand outside the church, which is not interesting.
Huge views appear at intervals as the car follows the windings of the white road, running with great smoothness on a perfect surface.[C] The peasants of the district drive to market in quaint little
No. 9. ANGOULÊME TO PÉRIGUEUX AND BERGERAC.
donkey-carts, into which three men or women pack themselves in the quaintest fashion imaginable.
After Monsec a watershed is crossed, and there are some considerable hills, in a more or less wild state, heather and juniper growing between small oaks.
BRANTÔME
is a delightfully picturesque little place on the very attractive River Dronne. The chief interest in the town is the monastery, founded by Charlemagne about the year 769. Before that time a small religious community had inhabited the grottoes in the rocky escarpments that rise above the town. These were enlarged natural cavities, and one of them continued to be venerated all through the Middle Ages. Its walls were covered during the sixteenth century with sculptures in high relief representing the Last Judgment and the Crucifixion.
The monastic buildings now include a machicolated gateway; a Romanesque church restored by Abadie, which before the thirteenth century had two cupolas on the roof; a curiously designed tower built in the eleventh century on the rock immediately above the church; and the fifteenth-century cloisters. There are two bridges over the sparkling river, and facing one of them is the fifteenth-century parish church, a picturesque fortified building now used as a market-house. There are some interesting houses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and others of the Renaissance period, including a manor-house called La Hierse.