O'er the Ramparts We Walked

Our family has been playing the board game Carcassonne for years. So, naturally, we want to go see the real place that inspired it. I know I once referred to the castles in la Dordogne as the castliest castles, but perhaps the title should go instead to the castle and fortress of Carcassonne.

 

 

  

If you ever make it to the middle of nowhere, France, where Carcassonne is inconveniently located, we highly, highly recommend arriving one afternoon and sleeping here. Most of the visitors are day trippers, so it's quite peaceful inside fortress walls after hours. Peaceful, magical, and just a little bit spooky, too. It's off season to boot, so we have the place almost to ourselves. Just us and our shadows.  

 

The morning is tranquil, too, before the next horde of tourists descends. It's nice that Carcassonne has the UNESCO World Heritage site classification, which allows them to illuminate it beautifully at night, but it does make it that much more difficult to find the quiet moments here.

 

 

At a chateau fort like this, it's all about the defenses, of course: arrow slits, for example. And my perennial favorite -- the murderholes, down which one could pour boiling sap (not oil, because that was too valuable to waste), or -- just for fun -- very large stone balls. I don't know why, but now whenever I visit a castle, I like to cry out "Murderhole!" in a sort of haunted ghost voice. Try it, sometime, if you want to cheer yourself up. I also learn about hoarders, which are not (in this case) people who keep old Chinese take-out menus for decades but rather the name for wooden walkways attached to the outside of the crenelated ramparts. They allow guards to look down and ensure that nobody undermines the castle. When the guide explains this to us, I get so excited I actually exclaim out loud that this explains the origins of the word "undermine"! My level of excitement is shared by exactly nobody, and Anthony shakes his head sadly, wondering how he could have married such a dork.

  

 

If a big stone ball dropped on your head doesn't do you in, perhaps you can simply arrange to fall off the completely guardrail-free walkways along the ramparts. If you do fall off, however, don't bother suing the French. It's your own stupidity, and your own responsibility; I guess liability was not a big issue when the castle was built about a thousand years ago -- on top of the already thousand-year old Gallo-Roman foundations (if you're counting, that means some of the walls we see were built around the year 300).