Noyers-sur-Serein: Seventy-Eight Listed Buildings in a Bend of the River

Required Activities

• Find all three of the squares that still carry the trade that filled them — the Place du Marché-au-Blé for grain, the Place de la Petite-Étape-aux-Vins for wine and the Place du Grenier-à-Sel for salt — and work out which of the three kept the best houses round it

• Follow the ramparts round the meander through the lanes of barely altered 15th-century houses and count the towers: nineteen of the original twenty-three are still standing. Go through both surviving gates — the square Porte Peinte, also called the porte d'Avallon, and the Porte de Tonnerre with its roof of lava stone — and find the 16th-century Burgundian polychrome Virgin standing in the niche of the second

• Climb out of the village to the spur above it and stand in the ruins of the castle — the triple-walled fortress Hugues de Noyers, bishop of Auxerre, had built at the end of the 12th century, which more than eighty fiefs answered to and which held off Blanche of Navarre's besiegers in 1217

• Put a canoe or kayak on the Serein, which is navigable here, and paddle the sharp meander the whole medieval town sits inside, passing under the ramparts and their towers from the one side nobody walks

• On the façade of the old collège, founded in 1633, find the high-precision sundial of 1715 and read its Latin motto beginning « Quis melior vitae monitor » — what better guide to our life — then walk down to the arcaded 19th-century lavoir on the Serein and see whether the sundial and your watch agree