Tour Pey Berland

This guide to Tour Pey Berland in Bordeaux starts with a structural gamble: in fourteen forty, Archbishop Pey Berland's masons chose to build a bell tower a few steps away from the cathedral itself, rather than risk swinging tons of bronze inside walls set on soft, waterlogged ground. It follows the tower through four centuries without a single bell, standing empty through the Hundred Years' War, then pressed into service as a Revolution-era musket-shot workshop after a storm tore off its spire. You'll hear what finally arrived at the summit in the eighteen sixties, and how heavy it turned out to be. Climb the two hundred and thirty steps and listen for the bells that stayed silent so long.