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At 09:00 there is a knock on the door. It's the parking officer and she says she doesn't know the rule about it being free in aires for blue badge holders and would we please buy a ticket for last night. At €5.50 it is not worth getting into a discussion, after all, free parking is a concessin, not a right.
A few hundred yards along the river we enter the town through St Catherine's Gate. It all really is ancient here; timber doors studded and patched and repaired over centuries, some with shutters on the top section as if they may have been opened up for trading through; stone towers and turrets and simple columns and archways; cantilevered timber balconies; a flight of steps once worn into 'U' shapes with all the treads turned over to serve another few centuries' wear.
Everything is neat and tidy and decorated with flowers and creeping vines or wisteria.
The central church as a wide, relatively low arched doorway decorated with very smple carvings, and simply furnished inside, nothing like the fancy stonework and bling of the ones we saw in Spain earlier this year.
The chap in the TI is very helpful and picks out pamphlets on accessible attractions in the area, but we forgot to ask the significance of strawberries here. They are on sale in a few shops and some of the pavements are painted with strawberry footprints.
We find a shady terrace in the main square where we have salads for lunch. They are quite large and the dressing is local nut oil which is quite sweet.
On the way back we wander through the park beside the river the get ready to move on. It's 31C and the flies and mozzies have snuck in a few irritating bites, but we soon cool down and are glad the aircon was fixed.
It's a beautiful 17 mile drive to Martel through flat farmland with mountains in the distance. From St Denis we see the typical Dordogne escarpments and follow a hairpin ladder up to Martel. As we turn hairpin after hairpin we look down on cars that a few seconds ago were in the mirror.
At Martel we find the aire has been closed and is now just a service point, but there is a new aire less than a mile away. We soon find it and it is very pleasant; a large, gravelled spce with views up to the town and out across pretty countryside.
Martel is 'the town of seven towers' and at least four of them have bells, but their clocks are slightly out of synch' so each hour the chimes overlap, mingle and make it hard to tell what time they are ringing.
It stays warm all evening so we don't cook, just have a glass of beer and watch the setting sun paint patterns on the clouds.
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