For today’s post we’re heading back to Angers, briefly. We visited the city for the first time this summer, and as with any city exploration we went on foot without too much of a route planned. We’d started the day in the Jardin des Plantes on the other side of town and meandered our way towards the river, and the castle which frankly is too big a landmark to miss!
I like the meandering as your wish takes you approach to seeing a city, as much like exploring a garden, sometimes there’s things that just pull you that way and sometimes you don’t know why, but often you end up seeing things you never knew existed, and wouldn’t perhaps have known about if you’d stayed on the more usual routes.
But anyway, we found ourselves down by the river and ahead of us we were intrigued by what we could see, it looked like a tunnel of plants which looked intriguing.
When we got closer that’s exactly what it was - we were too late to see the wisteria in flower (sadly).
But the scent of jasmine and roses filled the space, which also did a great job of screening the traffic from the busy road running alongside the river - beauty and function working well together!
The only thing is that we knew we’d need to climb the hill, as for good reasons castles generally aren’t built at low level are they?
It was understandably quite a way up, and a great lookout spot. But if we hadn’t meandered this way we’d have missed walking through the scent filled ‘tunnel’ and missed seeing this magnolia with it’s rickety fence.
I wasn’t expecting to see such formal gardens in the former moat of the castle, it was just what we needed to spur us on - as not only did we have to walk up, we also needed to walk around the boundary of the castle. The more usual route would have been far less steps, but I’m glad we didn’t opt for that.
We didn’t find a way to get down into this part of the castle gardens, and it may not have been possible - but having seen them as we approached the castle we didn’t mind so much.
And before I finish, let’s take a moment to admire the slate edged wall - that’s equally as impressive. We made our way to the castle entrance and enjoyed more gardens inside the castle’s walls, I’ll share some of those photos in the next post I share from our French trip, but until then I’m off to figuratively get my breath back.