Patrimoine Weekend

You may not realise but this is European Patrimoine Weekend, loosely translated as Heritage Weekend. We had never heard of it when we lived in the UK but things may have changed in seven years. It is a really big thing here in France where lots of obscure buildings etc. are open to the public which are normally closed. We believe that if you receive any sort of grant from the Government towards your renovation project etc. you have to open to the public, I suppose on the principle that the public has paid towards it.

Having scoured the paper to see what appealed to us, we decided on visiting two art exhibitions in the extreme North East of the Lot. It is a very pretty rural area that we have not visited for some years. Thanks to the GPS we found the first one in Sousceyrac, truely "the back of beyond". Well it wasn't quite what we expected!! More a display of local peoples' diverse hobbies, from paleontology to making furniture out of cardboard. However we had indepth discussions about local fossils (we can now speak authoritively - in French - about ammonites) with three really charming people.

We then went to St. Cere. It is a well known tourist centre which we have never explored and rather dismissed in the past. It turned out to be an attractive medieval town although much of it it was masked by the "fair" which was in town for the Fete weekend.

 The second art exhibition was housed in a beautifully restored medieval building and the artwork was definitely our style. John came away with lots of ideas but seemingly not a lot of time to try them out.

John took photos of the paintings for inspiration and I took photos of the municipal flowers for next years "floral displays"!!