We happened upon a thing called the Fosse Dionne on our wanderings today. It wasn't one of those accidental happenings upon though, as there are signs on pretty much every street corner with little arrows pointing to it, and others declaring it to be a monument of some significance.
Fosse (I'm sure it won't be offended if I call it that) is is a truly amazingly beautiful and apparently bottomless spring in the heart of Tonnerre which was used by the Romans as a source of water in their settlement here. Much later, but still a good few decades before Europe discovered Australia, it was turned into a feature at the centre of a public laundry.
Above it looms a church built some time in the twelfth or was it thirteenth century, it doesn't matter too much exactly when it was built, it was designed to loom and loom it has done for almost a millennia. Perhaps strangely for all it's looming impression or perhaps oppression, it was the small grouping of bullet holes around the tiny window in its clock tower that impacted most on our demeanour.
For all the swords and paintings and tales of death by grisly contraption that we have seen, those half dozen scars on the clock tower graphically told the tale of a human being on a mission from which he would not return.
And the Fosse, having seen it all and heard even more, just keeps bubbling away.
No comments
Post a Comment