The Abbey of Fontfroide: A Cistercian Abbey in the Corbières

Required Activities

• Stand in the five bays of the nave, under a broken-barrel vault twenty metres up that the monks built first, against all Cistercian practice, as soon as the house joined Cîteaux — then look at the windows and notice what should not be there: the rule allowed only grisaille glass, and every window you see came out of the Fayets' own glassworks in 1913, with the five in the north aisle telling the life of Saint Francis of Assisi

• In the cloister, find the join between the two building campaigns: the lower courses are Romanesque, a double row of little paired columns with foliage capitals carrying small round arches, and the work above them is later. Then go to the chapter-house doorway, where the central round arch rests on two groups of four marble columns set round a fifth, and look at the flared capitals inside — two rows of flat leaves standing for the cistel, the Burgundian pond reed that gave Cîteaux its name

• Take the waymarked circuit that starts inside the abbey grounds behind the shop — 3.6 km, about an hour and a quarter, 128 m of climb — round the piton and up to the Croix at 213 m, and from the top name the three things in the view: the Minervois plain running to the foothills of the Montagne Noire, the Corbières massif, and the abbey itself laid out below with its courtyard, church and eight hectares of gardens

• Find the Chapelle des Morts on the south side of the choir, the rib-vaulted chapel that Olivier de Termes paid for in the middle of the 13th century to make amends to the Church for what he had done against it, and which began life dedicated to Saint Benedict; then look across to the gospel side for the badly broken tomb remains thought to be those of the viscounts of Narbonne