But we can see that it has a grand nave, nearly of the
same style as Mortain, but loftier. There are many additions and changes
in the later styles, and the only tower is at the side and of no great
height. We would fain see more of this church on some less venerated
day. Then there is the gateway with the tower-belfry; there is the
donjon on its mound, crowning another of the peninsular heights on which
castles rose, this time a real peninsula, with the river below from
which the town takes its name. There is a glimpse to be taken of the
famous valley of Vire, and we go back to the station to betake us to
Flers. It is not altogether for the sake of its own merits that we go to
Flers, but because we have ruled that it is on the whole the best place
from whence to make the journey to Tinchebray. Flers, we imagine, is as
old as other places; but there seems to be nothing to say about it. It
has no church of any importance, it has a respectable castle of late
mediaeval lines, standing in a real moat. This has become in an odd way a
dependency of a later house, which happily has not swallowed it up.
Flers itself has of late years risen to some importance as a
manufacturing town. And we are bound to say that these French
manufacturing towns look much cleaner and tidier than their fellows in
England. But for historical and antiquarian purposes Flers counts for
very little. And it is, after all, possible that it may not be the best
starting point for Tinchebray. We cannot say till we have made the
attempt from Vire.

We had meant to go by carriage from Flers to Tinchebray, and to take on
the way La Lande-Patry the house of that William Patry who appears in
Wace as having entertained Earl Harold as a guest at the time of his
stay in Normandy. And we did get to La Lande-Patry another day. Strange
to say, while De Caumont spoke of traces of the castle in the past
tense, Joanne, so much later, spoke of them in the present. At any rate,
the thing was worth trying; one might at least muse on the spot. We
found the place a little way from Flers, a church and a few houses,
called distinctively La Lande-patry, as distinguished from a
neighbouring village called by some such name as _La Fontaine de Patry_.
The church is not quite wholly new, though it is mostly so; but there is
nothing that could have been built or looked on by any one who received
Harold. Nor do we distinctly see anything in the way of mounds or
ditches. And yet we fla