| Secrets of the park | 2008-02-27 14:43 13 comments |
 by Flemming Funch Next to the house we live in on Les Hauts de Ramonville is this huge walled-off area called Domaine Latécoère, which used to be the home of Pierre-George Latécoère, the airplane manufacturer. One can see his Chateau through one of the gates, but nobody seems to live there, other than some caretakers. Otherwise it supposedly is just a nature preserve. We can see the many kinds of trees in the forest from our kitchen window. Sometimes people are hunting there. But it is a private and closed area and the walls are tall. Would be no easy way of sneaking in there. But I'm terribly curious. Particularly since I concluded that this particular hill must have been the location, 1000 years ago, of Raymond IV's castle Bellevue, from which he took off on the infamous first crusade against Jerusalem with a thousand of his best knights, and lots of hangers-on. So, I looked in Google Earth, of course, to see what else was in there, apart from what I can see from the outside, like huge sets of stairs leading to the top. But at the time Google only had pretty low resolution pictures, so pretty much all one could see is that there's a little network of roads criss-crossing the area, and that most of them meet in one or two points, one of them seeming to be the top of the hill. ..But now, since recently, they have much better pictures. Nothing very surprising, other than this, on the picture, which seems to be what is found at the top of the hill, behind the chateau. A little round lake, with a bridge out to a little island, with a tower or pavillion. How exciting. There will of course be a hidden trap door at the bottom, leading down to the hidden treasure chamber. OK, I'm dreaming, I don't know if there's supposed to be a hidden treasure there, except for that the gold of Jerusalem sort of disappeared. |