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An exploration of the quaint streets of Vire will reveal two or three ancient gateways, many gabled houses, some of which are timber-framed visually, and most of them are the same beneath their skins of plaster. The houses in one of the streets are connected with the road by a series of wooden bridges across the river, which there forms one of the many pictures to be found in Vire.
In the middle of the day the inhabitants seem to entirely disappear from the sunny street, and everything has a placid and reposeful appearance as though the place revelled in its quaintness. Backed by the dense masses of forest there is a sloping green where an avenue of great chestnuts tower above the long, low roof of the timber-framed cattle shelter.
There were, doubtless, pueblos of timber-framed houses with thatched roofs here and there in Yucatan, Chiapas, and Honduras, as there were further south toward the Isthmus; but the prevailing material used was stone, as the number of small pueblos in ruins still attest.
It is, however, rich in carved fronts and timber-framed houses, and probably is the nearest rival to Lisieux in these features. The visitor is inclined to imagine that he will find the tapestry for which he makes a point of including Bayeux in his tour, at the cathedral or some building adjoining it, but this is not the case.
Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.
It is a village in a delightful situation and delightful in itself, though of late years the architecture of the "general stores" has replaced some of the old timber-framed houses on the main street. But the George and Dragon, even if it shows no timbers on its long front, wears an old-fashioned air of prosperity that belongs to the coaching past.
He gave us orders to his secretario, who represented him during his absence, and bade us god-speed. We left at one o'clock, in a great canoe, a heavy, timber-framed boat, propelled by long poles, by oars in quiet and deep water, and by a clumsy sail. A framework of poles, covered with matting, roofed over the middle of the boat, and a piece of matting was spread upon the floor.
The pueblo, externally, would present continuous ramparts of earth ten feet high, around an inclosed area, surmounted with timber-framed houses with walls sloping like the embankments, and coated with earth mixed with clay and gravel, rising ten or twelve feet above their summits; the two forming a sloping wall of earth twenty feet high.
From Houlgate all the way to Trouville the country is wooded and hilly, and in the hollows, where the timber-framed farms with their thatched roofs are picturesquely arranged, there is much to attract the visitor who, wearying of the gaiety of Trouville and its imitators along the coast, wishes to find solitudes and natural surroundings.
Against the western wall stands a supplementary timber-framed structure, all the woodwork exposed to the weather being fledged with slates, so that the walls are checkered with bluish lines.
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