Bourges: The Cathedral, the Palais Jacques-Cœur and the Marais

Required Activities

• Cycle the towpath of the Berry canal out of Bourges and stop at the first lock to measure it with your arms: the chambers are only 2.70 m wide, copied from English narrow canals, which is why the only boats that ever fitted were the berrichons and why the canal was dead by 1945 and sold off for a symbolic franc a kilometre

• From the parvis, count the five portals across the 55 m west front — one for each of the five naves, where most cathedrals have three — and find the Last Judgement over the central door; then climb the north tower, the Tour de beurre, rebuilt between 1508 and 1542 after the first one fell down on the last day of 1506 and paid for partly by rich parishioners buying the right to eat butter in Lent

• Stand in the street below the Palais Jacques-Cœur and find the two half-figures leaning out of false windows either side of the empty niche where Charles VII's equestrian statue was hammered off in 1792 — probably Jacques Cœur and his wife Macée de Léodepart, watching the street for ever. Inside, count the hearts and scallop shells of his punning arms, read his motto on the musicians' gallery in the banqueting hall, and find the three Gallo-Roman towers built into the back wall

• Take a flat-bottomed boat up the coulants into the marais du haut, the half of the 135-hectare marsh that cannot be reached any other way, and count how many of the 1,500 garden plots you pass — some the size of a room, the largest a hectare and a half — in one of the last working market marshes left in France with Amiens and Saint-Omer

• Go down into the église basse under the chevet — built between 1195 and 1206 to take up the fall of the ground — and find the full-size drawing of the west rose window scratched into the floor by the masons who worked there; back upstairs, find the astronomical clock of 1424, designed by Jean Fusoris