Le Dorat: The Granite Collegiate Church and Its Gilded Angel

Required Activities

• Walk out far enough from the church to see the whole spire, and pick out the angel at the top: 1.30 m of gilded copper from the 13th century, standing on a ball of 36 cm set into the summit stone 60 m above you — then work down the tower to the top stage, where the round-arched openings are split by thin shafts that already lean towards the Gothic

• Count the twelve steps up to the west door, one for each apostle, and look at the lobed Moorish-looking arch they lead to — then inside, find the Carolingian font of pink granite at the back of the nave, carved with two lions back to back and older than the church around it, and walk to the crossing to look up into the lantern dome 26.6 m above, with its eight-petalled oculus at the centre

• Find the gilded shrines of Saint Israël and Saint Théobald in two of the three radiating chapels behind the high altar, then follow the saints backwards: to the Chapelle des Saints in the south transept, where the two granite sarcophagi that once held them stand empty, and down the right arm of the transept into the 11th-century crypt, where three now-blocked openings let the medieval faithful look in at them from the church above

• Stand in the passage of the Porte Bergère — the only fortified gate left in the Haute-Vienne and the last of the four Le Dorat once had — and find the deep vertical grooves on each side where an iron portcullis slid from 1539, now carrying a wooden replica, then the five machicolations over your head and the arrow slits and round gun loops in the two towers, built to sweep the road at knee height

• On the place de la Collégiale, look properly at the war memorial of 1926: it is built in the form of a lantern of the dead, the old Limousin cemetery light, in dark kersantite — then walk round to the Carmel to find the tour Saint-Antoine still standing in the garden, a last piece of the ramparts the Porte Bergère belonged to