Charlieu: The Romanesque Tympana of the Abbey and the Cordeliers' Convent

Required Activities

• Start at the west doorway, one of the oldest Romanesque tympana anywhere to be carved right across, cut around 1100: find the Christ in his almond-shaped mandorla carried by two angels whose feet seem to touch the ground, then read along the lintel below and check all twelve apostles are doing the same thing — a book on the right knee, the left hand raised in acclamation

• On the great north doorway, find the two founders carved on the jambs of the church they paid for: Boson, king of Burgundy and Provence, holding a model of the abbey on the left beside King David, and Bishop Ratbert on the right beside John the Baptist in his animal skin. Then look up the archivolt at the elders of the Apocalypse dancing and playing the vielle, and count the twenty-four rosettes that give their exact number, with the Lamb crowning the whole thing

• At the small north doorway find the wedding at Cana and the three large empty haloes where the heads of Christ, the Virgin and a disciple were struck off at the Revolution; then name the six figures of the Transfiguration round the archivolt in order from the right — Peter, Elijah, Moses, Christ with his IHS, John and James — a scene nobody had put on a church front before the 1140s. Finally look low on the left jamb for Lust: a woman wrapped in a serpent with a toad eating her breast

• Walk the Cordeliers cloister, which only exists because it was listed in 1910 while two of its galleries were already dismantled, crated and loaded onto wagons, sold to an American woman who wanted it round a tennis court in California. Find the one gargoyle still in place, at the south-west corner, and work along the north gallery capitals until you have found the monkey, the serpent, the parrot and the old man

• In the convent church, find the 15th-century wall paintings uncovered and restored from 1989 onwards, and in them the two things worth the walk: a painted picture of this same church with its bell tower, and a Virgin and Child being handed the Franciscan Tau by an angel