Beauvais

Beauvais is a small town a bit north of Paris. I always known it as the place Ryanair flies to because it's too damn cheap for CDG, and also, more charitably, as the place that has a cathedral with a famous clock. We figured that we would visit it on our way to Amiens.



On arrival we noticed in rural France, unlike in Paris, pretty much everything is closed on Sundays, and beheld the strangest structure.

It was quite lovely, and decorated as a proper Gothic cathedral should be, but it was the weirdest shape of all the cathedrals I have ever seen, and I have seen a few. It didn't have a nave. At all. Nor a spire.

Inside, it was the tallest church I'd ever seen (the tallest in existence, claims Wikipedia) - my photos don't quite do it justice - and had weird wooden things clearly keeping the walls from caving in.

 

The clocks was there too, with more faces than could fit into any picture, showing interesting things like the age of the world.



The flying buttresses outside looked very airy indeed, but clearly failed to buttress anything, and had to be propped up with huge iron beams.

Later I read up on the cathedral and learned that they never got around to building the nave in the first place, that they did in fact build a tower but it fell off about 500 years ago, that the choir caved in a bit and that it's quite a job to keep the damn thing standing. But damn, this marvel of medieval French architecture was beautiful and I wanna see it again.

More pictures here.