La Tour de Refous

Today, after our own, personal church service here at home, we decided to go on an outing. So, we headed to the local castle to visit the tower. I forgot to take a picture of the castle when we were down below (very impressive) but I will do so within the next few weeks. Anyway, here is the stairs leading up to the door in the middle of the wall. Originally, there was a ladder that went up to the doorway. I would not wanted to be the one climbing that ladder. The stairs creep me out every time we climb them.

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When the Prince Bishop was kicked out of Basel by the Reformers (go Reformers!), he fled to his castle in Porrentruy, and hid out there. There are three tunnels that lead out from the castle in three different directions in case of attack. I do believe the Prince Bishop used one of them once. The keep was definately built for protection, look at those thick walls!

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Here is the residence bit of the castle. Now it’s used as a prison, court of justice, and loads of other things that I can’t remember right now. Behind the tree in the bottom left-hand corner there’s a nice deep well.

There’s lots of other parts of the castle but the oldest part is the tower we went up, which dates from 1271. Hmm… if I’d known that I might not have gone up, that’s old!

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This is the farm Ambrose went and visited for a school field trip (five weeks of school and he’s already had three!), it must have been the castle garden/farm way back when.

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I stopped on the little ledge at the top of the stairs to take this picture of over the town. For me that was kind of freaky, so I’m glad that the picture turned out! There’s the church with the steeple, below it one of the busier streets of the old town, behind that (in the trees) are the two big supermarkets, and way on the right, there’s a gray modern building which is the covered pool where I went swimming for gym the past four weeks. That certainly was a trek from school! Our gym teacher gave us twenty minutes from when the bell rang from our previous class and said “Meet you there! Don’t be late!”

 

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These houses were below us. I love the roofs and crookedness of an old town like this!

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And here’s another picture of the church and that street, because I love it so much!

 

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