CLIFF CASTLES
entrance hall, lighted by windows, is 70 feet long and 40 feet wide. A second hall, partly hewn out of the rock, with recesses for cupboards and seats and with fireplace, is 42 feet long. The oven remains in a ruinous condition. The castle is reached by steps cut in the rock.
Below Conduché, where the Célé enters the Lot, the road runs under tremendous precipices of orange and grey limestone, in which the track has been cut; and the road would be totally blocked by a huge buttress split down the middle had not a tunnel for it been cut. As the Roman road ran this way, the original tunnel was made by the Masters of the World, but it has been widened of late years. Commanding the road and the tunnel, planted in the cleft of the rock, is a castellated structure, that also owes its origin to the captains who fortified the Célé caves.
None could pass up or down the road without being spied and arrested, and made to pay toll by the garrison of this fort.[1]
The Cahors Chronicle says of this period: "Deinde fuit in praesenti patria mala guerra. Anglicis et Gallis hinc inde reprædentibus, unde evenit victualium omnium maxima caristia. Nullus civis Caturci villam exire erat ausus, omnia enim per injustitiam regebatur." If the merchants and provision wains for Cahors were not robbed at the Défilé des Anglais, they were subjected to toll. The interior of the chasm reveals a whole labyrinth of passages and vaults dug out in the heart of the calcareous rock. The chambers had openings as windows looking out upon a river, and the rock was converted into a barrack that could accommodate a large garrison.
The last of the rock fastnesses of the routiers that I purpose describing is of a totally different character from the rest. It is at Peyrousse in the Rouergue, in the
- ↑ So early as the eleventh or twelfth century there was not a small river, as the Célé and the Aveyron, on which tolls were not levied.
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