Lectoure: The Fontaine Diane and the Hall of the Illustrious

Required Activities

• In the Salle des Illustres in the hôtel de ville — the old bishops' palace — work along the portraits of the generals this small town sent to the Empire and find Marshal Jean Lannes among them, then go through the room given over to him and the reconstructed old pharmacy built round a Renaissance fireplace on the same floor

• Stand back from the cathedral and look at the square tower of 1488: it stops flat, because the octagonal stage and spire that once made it one of the tallest bell towers in France were taken down just before the Revolution on the last bishop's orders. The town will tell you he did it because it drew lightning into his wine cellar and smashed thousands of bottles; the story is not borne out. Inside, count the thirty-six stalls and find the white marble Assumption, and remember the floor you are on is the presumed site of a Gallo-Roman temple of Cybele

• Walk down to the Fontaine Diane below the south side of the town, a Roman spring given a screen of three 13th-century arcades, and decide what you think its Gascon name Hountélie means — it has been read as the fountain of Elijah and as hount Délios, and the connection with Diana is a guess nobody has proved

• Go down into the vaulted cellars under the hôtel de ville and stand among the twenty taurobolic altars — stones set up to mark the sacrifice of bulls to Cybele and Mithras in the 2nd and 3rd centuries — then work out where they came from: the masons rebuilding the cathedral turned them up in 1540, on the site of the temple they had replaced

• Walk the boulevards right round the town and realise you are walking the walls: the Boulevard du Midi is laid along the old wall-walk and the Boulevard du Nord runs at the foot of the rampart. Every gate and every tower has gone except one — find the 14th-century Tour du Bourreau at the north-east corner — and finish on the old east bastion, now a public promenade