Heading back to Lyon on the A7 after our trip to Marseilles, our Skoda Yeti starting flashing all kinds of scary lights on the dashboard. Not wanting to have a breakdown on the highway, we slided out at the next exit and decided to make the rest of the way by the small roads. The bad thing about small roads is that it takes you three times as much time to get where you are going. The good thing is that they are a lot more fun, and you get to see things you would have missed otherwise.
For instance, just outside the city of Valance, I saw this little Medieval tower peeping from behind a chalk cliff, with a sleepy little village nestled in the foothills:
Following the policy of never letting an interesting sight go unexamined, we turned in to investigate. It turned out to be the 8th century medieval village of Mornas, and its 12th century fortress on the cliff. We skirted the village and headed up the hill to the fortress. We never got there. Because on the way, we hit on this jewel of a church, the 12th century church of Val Romigier, being painstakingly restored by the inhabitants of Mornas. We spent so much time looking over this church, we had no time to see the other delights of this village, which includes troglodyte caves, two other historic churches, the fortress, of course, and a dike.
Check it out...
