More photos from Le Grand-Pressigny

Here are a few more pictures that I took in Le Grand-Pressigny in late August. It's a beautiful village — town, really — that is worth the visit, especially on a fine day when you can walk through the little narrow streets, the local parks, and some of the surrounding countryside. But be forewarned — some of the streets are pretty steep.

Walt, Lulu, Nick, and Callie approching a one-lane bridge over the Claise River in Le Grand-Pressigny

We have British friends who bought a little vacation house in Le Grand-Pressigny six or seven years ago. When they are here, we often drive down to visit them, and we often spend the night so that we can have dinner with them and not have to drive home in the dark. We usually go on long walks with the dogs while we're down there.

The sign on the old train station — train service to the town was ended many years ago.

Le Grand-Pressigny is an hour's drive south of the city of Tours, in the southern part of the old Touraine province. Where we live is on the far eastern edge of Touraine, and Le Grand-Pressigny is a little more than an hour's drive southwest of Saint-Aignan. It's a pretty drive, so it's better to do it in the daytime.

A house reflected in a street mirror that lets drivers see if any cars are coming around a blind corner in town

The village, which now has a population of about one thousand, used to be home to twice as many people, back in the 1850s. Now a lot of the houses — and there are many beautiful ones — are used as vacation homes, by French as well as British people. By way of comparison, Saint-Aignan, which doesn't seem to be much bigger than Le Grand-Pressigny when you walk around the town, has a population of nearly four thousand.

Looking back at the same house, across the street from the mirror

Two rivers, the Claise and the Aigronne, come together in Le Grand-Pressigny. Walt recently posted a picture of Callie standing in front of the changing booths on what used to be a swimming beach on the Claise, across the road from the old train station. The village must have been a resort town at some point in its history — maybe it still is.

A water strider on the smooth waters of the Aigronne River in Le Grand-Pressigny

Tim, an Englishman who with his spouse Pauline lives near Le Grand-Pressigny, reported in a comment on my post yesterday that he had measured more than 50 mm — 2 inches — of rainfall yesterday. Walt just checked our rain gauge and it showed we got a total of 38 mm of rain yesterday, or about an inch and half. We needed it.

By the way, I did a series of posts about Le Grand-Pressigny back in January 2007, after our first visit there. You can find them in my blog archives, organized by date, or by searching for Grand-Pressigny using the blog's search feature. Or click this link and scroll down through the posts.