A medieval walled town in France; Parthenay

Parthenay

I spent an afternoon here with my sister. At times it terrified me; she has mobility problems and as such can’t park the car and then walk for miles, she needs to park close to where we want to be. Also her car is quite a big car, it needs to be because she would have problems getting in and out of a smaller car. Parthenay is a very beautiful, medieval, walled town.

The original part of the town has tiny winding streets that curl and twist up the hill to the top of this old walled town. My sister still drives a right hand drive car even though she lives in France and they drive on the right, which leaves me in the passenger seat, on the left, in the middle of the road. You can see my problem, large right hand drive car, driving around unimaginably tiny winding streets on the right. OHHHH yep that was a bit scary, especially if someone else was driving the opposite way down the same street. But apart from the scary driving bit, I loved it there. 

We visited the little local museum. They had an exhibition of comic book drawings on the ground floor and apparently, comic book drawings are very popular in France, there are all sorts of competitions and exhibitions for this type of art. Upstairs there were the permanent displays of local history and art work.

 It was fascinating, I loved it, I even found a new painter, a chap by the mane of Ernest Pidoux 1865- 1936 who specialized in painting local scenes from Parthenay. Several of which hung in the museum. This is one of his paintngs of Parthenay as it used to be.  This is the FB page for the museum, which if you are like me and completely unilingual, its not a lot of use because its all in French, but there are plenty of pictures there.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mus%C3%A9e-de-Parthenay/108650685842859

This is the official museum video of its permanent collection
 


a video ( not mine) of the town
 


a link to good old Wiki which gives you more info about Parthenay that I will ever know. The info begins 

‘’ Parthenay is an ancient fortified town and commune in the Deux-Sèvres department of the Poitou-Charentes region in western France. It is sited on a rocky spur that is surrounded on two sides by the River Thouet. The name of Parthenay first appears in written records at the beginning of the 11th century. The castle, situated on an easily defended site at the tip of the rocky promontory surrounded by the loop of the river, was built in the 13th century’’
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenay

 
And here are more views of the town.