100 Churches in Paris and elsewhere

 In the very town which was ravaged by the army of Edward the Third of England during the Hundred Years War, where I was, later, on holiday, stands this fine stone church. The town claims to have been the first liberated after the Normandy landings, and is just down the road from Utah beach, where there is a fine Normandy Landings museum. Much of the church dates back to the eleventh century, the renaissance tower is from the fifteenth century, and the nineteenth century added its pennyworth.

  Closed since the 2019 fire, Notre Dame opened again a couple of weeks back. Every day I visited the website a number of times, and finally managed to get a (free) ticket to get in. I was not disappointed. To go back to the fire, a lot of people have forgotten how horrifically close we were to having the actual towers collapse. Huge bells weighing tons were in the towers, held in place by solid wooden structures. If the wood had burned, the bells falling would have demolished the towers – and the rebuilding of the cathedral would have been ten times more difficult. It has been said that we were only half an hour from such a scenario – this may be an exaggeration, but let’s say  we were lucky. And so to today – this is the only chance you are going to get to see a spotlessly clean medieval cathedral, which is pretty cool. The cathedral has been rebuilt as it was before 2019, including nineteenth century additions like the rather odd spire. The only new additions are (I thi...