We stopped for a walk around the lovely French town of Domfront while there on holiday in August. The town just happened to be on the way to the next place we were staying at, and we were early so stopped there for an hour to kill some time.
We were pleasantly surprised at how pretty the town was. We had never heard of it before and hadnt planned to visit it, so it was nice how it all worked out ! We'd parked up on the main road through the town, and then just headed for the town centre.
It turned out that it had this old medieval centre, with the remains of some of the old city walls.
Heading from the modern part of town into the old town centre soon took us up these very quaint medieval streets. And it turned out that the town is famous for it, and had held a medieval festival the week before - we'd just missed it by a few days.
Walking up the street was passed the interesting mural above. Must have been a pretty cool band to have a skeleton on the bagpipes !
And just along from the mural was this toy shop with lots of creepy dolls ! Our daughter finds them quite scary, so I was happy to point them out to her, just to see her reaction ! Full points to me for great parenting !
The little streets were really quite nice to wander around - and it was lovely to see all these tudor style buildings (thats what they we call them in the UK).
There was also a mix of other building styles like this lovely Greek Temple for the Palace of Justice (courthouse I guess).
There was also the stunning church you see above in the centre of town (Saint Julians Church). Its fairly modern at only 100 years old and is built of reinforced concrete. We stopped inside to look around on the way past. It was stunning inside and out, and I have already posted about it (here).
I was even impressed by the lovely man hole covers we found on our walk through the town - they looked pretty cool to me !
Working our way through the town, we kept passing these lovely old buildings and you could still see some of the props and flags that had been put up for the festival.
The building above, Le Bistro St Julien, looked pretty impressive - and was busy-ish, noting that it was quiet elsewhere - so it must be the place to go.
We kept working our way up through the old town centre and passed the town hall (above), which also looked quite nice.
The town hall had a lovely fountain outside the main entrance.
Just a little further along the road at the top of the town centre, we came to the ruins of Domfront Castle. It commands the high ground (as you would expect) although is very much a ruin. We had a quick scoot around there, and then started to work our way back to the car.
From the castle, our circular route started to take us back down the hill towards where we parked.
I have to say that it was a very pretty wee town, and I'm so glad we stopped - as otherwise we would probably not have gotten the chance to have seen it.
I love it when you get unexpected surprises like this. The main pity was that we never got the change to go back and see it again - but we know where it is now, and maybe there will be another time. What a great wee town for a lovely walk !
