That the Romans had fortified this height there is the strongest evidence in the fact that the substructure of the rampart that once surrounded the castle is of cubic stones laid together according to the method so much practised by the Romans, and known as opus reticulatum.  Moreover, the coins, pottery, and arms found here seem to afford conclusive proof that this remarkable hill was one of the fortified positions of the Romans in Gaul.

The spot has its Christian legend, which is briefly this:  In the castle that crowned the height in the time of the Visigoth kings was born St. Esperie, daughter of a Duke of Aquitaine.  Being pressed to marry, notwithstanding the vow she had made to consecrate her life to God, she hid herself in a neighbouring forest for three months.  She was at length discovered by her enraged brother and lover, who cut off her head.  Like St. Denis, St. Esperie picked up her head, to the unspeakable astonishment and dismay of her persecutors.  They fled from her, but she followed them as far as a little stream that flows into the Bave at St. Cere.  Esperie is a saint much venerated in the Haut-Quercy.  The church of St. Cere is dedicated to her, and the name given to the town is supposed to be a corruption of Esperie.

From St. Cere I took the road to Castelnau-de-Bretenoux, returning for some distance by the way I came.  Inns being now very scarce in the district, I decided to take my chance of lunch in a small village called St. Jean-Lespinasse.  Another saint!  The map of France is still covered with the names of saints, in spite of all the efforts of revolutionists and pagan reformers to make the people abandon their ‘Christian superstitions.’  Those who in the ‘ages of faith’ built up this association of saints and places could have had no conception of the power that these names would have in binding Christianity to the soil in the faithless or doubting ages to come.  The only inn at St. Jean-Lespinasse was kept by a blacksmith, and the room where I had my meal was over the forge.  Bread and cheese and eggs were, as I expected, the utmost that such a hostelry could offer in the way of food for a wayfarer’s entertainment.  Before leaving the village I found the church—­a curious old structure of the Transition period, with a large open porch covered with mossy tiles, held up by rough pillars.  There were stone benches inside, on which generations of villagers had sat and gossiped in their turn.  In the interior were columns engaged in the wall of the nave, with the capitals elaborately and heavily foliated with pendent bunches of flowers and fruit, much more in accordance with English than French taste.

I crossed the Bave, and followed a road bordered with hedgerows of quince that presently skirted sunny slopes covered with lately-planted vines.  Thunder was moaning and growling in the distance when I reached the much-embowered village of Castelnau, upon a height immediately under the reddish walls and towers of the immense feudal stronghold, the fame of which went far and wide in the Middle Ages.  Its name in the Southern dialect means ‘new castle,’ but it dates from the eleventh or twelfth century.  Extensive additions were made in subsequent ages, notably a wing in the Renaissance style, which was inhabited until the middle of the present century, when all but the walls was destroyed by fire.