This is a small town on the Poitiers to Limoges road and almost on the Vienne river. We have driven through or past it several times and in fact did visit many years ago. My wife with a good memory thought it was the place where I went fishing along with our son on a lake with the remains of a bridge across it. As it turns out she was right and here is the bridge – or what is left of it – and the lake.

If you just drive through Lussac it does not make much of an impression. The only feature of note is a large  hotel and restaurant, L’Orangerie which looks interesting and we intend to try a meal there soon.

If you turn off the main road  you enter a fairly smart shopping and restaurant area where the Mairie and the Eglise Sainte Madeleine are also located. There are a number of restaurants and cafes which all seemed to be doing a good trade on a pleasant sunny day.  There was also a cat taking a stroll who seemed to think he  owned the place as he sat down in the middle of the road in front of a car and it took some degree of patience on the part of the driver and some degree of cajoling from me to get him to move on.

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If you follow this blog regularly you will know that  I have little favourites which I like to photograph in each town – plants growing out of walls, street names, window shutters, lavoirs and the like. In Lussac I could not resist this street name – Monsieur Rat was evidently a Gramerian. What is that? There were some plants growing out of walls but nothing that special so I stuck with street names.

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The back streets were fairly unimpressive and one had a large number of empty shops. We wondered if with the smartening up of the central area all the business had moved there or whether it was a product of the recession – possibly a bit of both.

At this stage we were beginning to question whether my wife had remembered correctly but when we saw the sign for an Etang we decided to have a look and there we found the spot with the lake the bridge and the natural history museum.

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Evidently the lake was man-made back in 1492 and was intended as a pond for fish. At that time there was a castle which stood on the ground between the lake and the town but it was sacked in 1569 by Admiral de Coligny and then dismantled. The stone was  used by the locals to build their houses so the castle is still there but  in lots of pieces and distributed throughout the town! 

When we visited there were a large number of fishermen, serious fishermen with bivvys, optonics, tables and barbecues. I later found out it was a competition called Enduro Carpiste which took place from 6th to 9th June.

There are steep limestone cliffs with numerous caves around the lake. These have been investigated many times and masses of artefacts have been found dating back to the Magdalenian period which was about 15,000B.C – that’s quite a long time ago.

We took a walk round the lake, past the old bridge with just the towers remaining and along a small mill stream which had lots of fish in it, mostly roach and dace but also some nice sized trout. There were also a lot of beautiful damselflies of the Banded Agrion species. These flit about quite a lot so I took several photos and here are some of the better ones. There was a lavoir so I took pictures of that but the museum was closed and looked as if it may have been closed for some time.

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To view posts on other towns and villages in Poitou-Charentes click https://poitoucharentesinphotos.wordpress.com/villages-and-towns/