Bordeaux on the barge Rosa day three-Lagruère

A change of plan this morning, it was a wet day with a poor forecast, we were supposed to go for a boat ride on the river, not a bundle of fun in the rain followed, by a trip to a goat farm. So after bit of a conflab between Nicole and us four guests we plumped for a trip to Château de Duras.
We had a bit of time after breakfast before we were due to set off so Diana and I crossed the canal and went up hundreds of steps to the viewing point overlooking the canal and the river.You can see the river and canal running off into the distance, the river on the left and the canal to the right. On our way back we had a good view of Rosa on the moorings in the port .

Off in the motor in wet, drizzly, low cloud weather until we reached Château de Duras some 30 Kilometres away. You can see how wet it is from the first photo. 

The Château originally had two towers at the entrance as can be seen in the model, these were actually removed by the owners prior to the revolution in the hope the Château wouldn’t be destroyed. It has now been re furnished with items from the date it would have been originally occupied.  

As well as furniture some rooms are set out to include historical items like the loom, kitchens and wine making equipment.

	The photo on  the right shows a tobacco drying hut. Tobacco is still grown in one or two places along the canal and you can still spot the old, disused huts dotted around.

    The Château was unusual in that it had water in lots of the rooms, this was thanks to a 100 Foot deep well, it was then moved to the upper floors by lowering buckets down through holes in the floors and walls.  

At the very top of the building is a large room with a fantastic wooden roof,

While we were at a high level we went out on one of the towers, imagine the view from here on a nice sunny day.

There were a few information boards about the Château and hopefully if you are interested, clicking them will make them large enough to read.

I think we all enjoyed this visit more than we would have a visit to a goat farm and a trip on a river boat, so well done Nicole. With that it was in the car and back to the boat for lunch.
By the time we got back the weather had improved a lot, not good enough for lunch outside, but the afternoon looked promising.


We set off up the canal passed the remains of this old bridge, you may well say why photograph that, well for some time this was the limit of navigation due to this bridge collapsing and it has only recently been cleared allowing access to the end of the canal where we started from.

There are lots of places along this canal where grain was once loaded onto barges, when the trade ended the equipment was just left to rot.

  The VNF were carrying out a bit of maintenance work above the lock just before the aqueduct dredging the bed. Like in the UK they use flats to transport the mud but their pusher tugs are interesting with an inboard/outboard drive unit.  

Some of the bridges are quite low, like this new red one and some of the others like this bridge that crosses both the canal and the river are quite splendid.

Some of the less waterway but interesting things along the canals was this farm that looked as if it had a store of maize in an elongated sectioned cage with an inverted  V shaped floor. Also we passed this rather pretty rustic building on the bank, I was expecting to see Tom Sawyer sitting out front.

As in the UK, France has it share of the less well maintained boat who’s owners don’t go out of their way to moor them securely.

Not all our moorings were at old wharfs and basins, this online one was somewhat rustic and rather shallow at the edge requiring the gang plank to be in place before we could alight. Nicole had moved the car down so was waiting on the bank for us.

Over the bank from the moorings was the river flood plain which was also a communal party area making it a little noisy in the evening but not excessivelyso.You can see by the indicator board that the river does flood and cover the flood plain and I understand the latest, highest one has not yet been marked up.