Saint Leonard himself was a very special person. He was the godson of Clovis, first Christian King of the Franks – his nobility gave the village its name of Noblat. When his prayers saved the Queen from dying in childbirth, he chose as his reward a hermitage in the nearby forest where his miracles were of special benefit to barren women and, incongruously, horses. After his death Saint Leonard went on working miracles, of which the most famous took place in the 16th century. Martel de Bacqueville, taken prisoner by the Turks, prayed to Saint Leonard from his cell and awoke the next morning to find himself still in chains, back home in his French forest. In memory of this, Leonard became the patron saint of captives and is always represented with locks and chains. Every November on his feast day a wooden castle representing a prison, is ceremonially destroyed by mounted knights armed with maces. Another famous native of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat was the scientist Gay-Lussac, after whom the main square is named.

As might be expected of a town with its own saint, the church at Saint-Léonard is a particularly splendid building. Its tower, whose base forms an open porch, is six storeys high, the first four square, each side an open arcade, each storey narrower than the one below. Pointed gables on the fourth storey create a transition to an octagonal upper section surmounted by a stone pyramid. Next to the tower is a round, domed baptistery, and the church itself has three domes over the crossing and the transepts. The whole thing dates from the 12th century, though it wasn’t finished until the 13th. I like it a lot.