endlessrarities | The Bishop's Palace, Narbonne

Look! We have pretty pictures again!! After days of being uncooperative, Photobucket is behaving again, and after a brief spell of weirdness earlier on this afternoon, LJ is back to normality, too.

IT works in mysterious ways, I suppose...

I am about to disappear for a couple of days and in this time I will no doubt find myself immersed in matters prehistoric. This is going to feel very strange, because I've been immersed in a medieval mindset for the past couple of months. So as a way of taking my leave (temporarily, of course) from the medieval world, here's some nice pictures of some kick-ass medieval architecture from Narbonne.

It all forms part of the larger Cathedral complex, with a pretty intact Bishop's Palace which is now in use as a civic building. Some of the old town defences may also have been incorporated into the structure - like this u-sectioned tower which is reminiscent of the defences at Carcassone:-

The actual Bishop's Palace is a big square tower which is unmistakably defensive:-

It's been incorporated into a much larger structure which has some later elements inserted. I suspect that the square tower itself has been heavily restored at some point - note the contrasting styles of masonry about 18-20 courses up:-

The walls themselves have used stone robbed out of the much earlier Roman works which proliferated here. I featured several close-up photos of Roman sculptures in an earlier post (remember the cow and the flower?) - here's how they look in their wider context. In fact, you should just be able to make out the cow's head here:-