Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
If we take a walk by the beautiful banks of the Rille on a summer's evening, or in the fields where the peasants are at work, we shall find the aspect curiously English, and in the intonation of the voices the resemblance is sometimes startling; we seem hardly amongst foreigners both in features and in voice there is a strong family likeness.
Seen from below, from the bridge across the Rille at no great distance, there is something wonderfully striking in this single side of the church, an inside seen from outside, with its sheltered windows and vaulting-shafts, standing against the side of the castle-hill. How was it when both abbey and castle were perfect? As it is, the abbey is the more prominent of the two.
The town and church of Beaumont, from some points the abbey close below, the wide vale of the Rille and the hills beyond, make up a cheerful landscape. But if by the "bellus mons" we were to understand a fair natural hill, we should be led astray. The actual site of Roger's keep is neither a natural hill nor an artificial mound.
The whole region of Fougeres, its suburbs, its churches, and the hills of Saint-Sulpice are surrounded by the heights of Rille, which form part of a general range of mountains enclosing the broad valley of Couesnon.
The significance of the word rille in German, a groove or furrow, describes with considerable accuracy the usual appearance of the objects to which it is applied, consisting as they do of long narrow channels, with sides more or less steep, and sometimes vertical.
It has its history of wars in the time of the Norman dukes, but its aspect is now quiet and peaceful, and its people appear happy and contented; the little river Rille winds about it, and spreads its streamlets like branches through the streets, and sparkles in the evening light.
When you have decided to leave Beaumont-le-Roger and have passed across the old bridge and out into the well-watered plain, the position of the little town suggests that of the village of Pulborough in Sussex, where a road goes downhill to a bridge and then crosses the rich meadowland where the river Arun winds among the pastures in just the same fashion as the Rille.
And, as the famous one at Brionne, which so long defied the arms of Duke William, is defined as "aula lapidea," it seems implied that a "domus defensabilis" might be only "lignea." To be sure the stone house at Brionne had in the river Rille a ready-made moat in every way better than the ditch that we have stumbled on at Hauteville.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking