A chateau and some French dogs

About 15 minutes drive from here is the town of Clermont L'Herault. Clermont has a cinema, a hypermarket, a McDonalds, a wool shop and various other necessities, so we go there quite often. Every time we go, we see a pretty cool castle looming over the town, but until now we've never taken the time out from our shopping schedule to take a look. Well, today we felt like a bit of an outing so we drove around, trying to find our way up to the castle. No luck. No signs, nothing. So we thought we'd try on foot, calling in at the Information Centre on the way. Aha! They had a booklet with the walk to the castle highlighted, and we found it with no (well, not many) problems. Considering that it was built in around 1130 by the first known member of the Guilhem family, it is in very good shape. You could clearly see the bases of the several towers around the outside and the donjon (high tower) still stands about 10m high. There are passageways under the ground and lots of old walls and gateways and you can walk around what is left of the battlements. The picture above shows part of the town from the castle, and below is the base of one of the towers.



Here's the donjon



On a weekday morning, the place was deserted except for us and a guy with four dogs. They were pretty interested in us, and not in a good way, at first, with lots of barking and defensive behaviour. We tried to ignore them, and their owner was not really bothered to control them. No-one wants to get bitten by a dog, but worse - they have rabies here, so we are very careful when we are around strange dogs. Eventually the older black one ambled over and gave me a sniff, and that seemed to reassure the others a bit. However the shaggy mottled coloured one, on the right in the pic, was still really worried and came over and gave us a long talking-to. Eventually we realised that she had a pup - the little dude in the middle, and that was probably what all the noise was about. After his mum and his aunties had all had their say, he romped over and indicated that he was ready for a game. (Owner still talking on his cellphone at other end of field).



Actually he (the puppy!)was pretty cute.