Mennetou-sur-Cher: The Walled Town on the Road from Bourges to Tours

Required Activities

• Walk in and out through all three square gates, and on the Porte d'En-Bas find the plaque recording that Joan of Arc is said to have slept in the top storey of the Benedictine priory tower on the night of 3 to 4 March 1429, on her way across the Sologne to meet Charles VII at Chinon

• Walk the outside of the curtain wall to find all three round towers and the stretches between them, rebuilt by volunteers between 2011 and 2019, then from inside work out where the nuns' sixteen small cells backed onto that wall — every one of them looking inwards, with no window on the world outside

• Find the rue d'Enfer and the rue de Paradis and work out which way round the village put them, then the rue des Trois-Rois, the listed maison François-Ier among the 15th- and 16th-century houses, and the 13th-century tithe barn in Angevin Gothic

• Walk the canal de Berry towpath, open since 1839, and find the flat rectangular washing stones still set into the bank, some with steps down to the water, then the lifting bridge opposite the Porte d'en Bas, now fixed in place; back in the Vieux Bourg, look up in the houses for roofs framed by boatbuilders — upturned hulls, or three-panel frames shaped like a boat's bow

• Find the charcutier working beside one of the fortified gates and buy an andouillette tirée à la ficelle — pulled by the string, the method that earned him the diploma of the Association amicale des amateurs d'andouillette authentique — and taste it against a Troyes andouillette if you know one