HOW MANY BRICKS DOES IT TAKE?

May 5 – Like yesterday today (Thursday) started very dull but improved enormously – the hottest yet of a very sunny and warm seven weeks so far. And Albi, after some appalling traffic management to deal with widespread roadworks was delightful as ever. We first came here about 13 years ago, renting a house via Brittany, just north of the town. It has grown massively but the ancient core is simply wonderful and what has changed has been by way of improvement. The cathedral is ridiculous of course, several million romanesque bricks built to 50 and 80 metres height in massive pillars. It is the largest brick built cathedral in the world. Actually I would doubt there was a bigger single edifice of any sort. It stands on the slight hill that delivers defensible cliffs along the Tarn, of which departement it is the chief town.

Once it was a neolithic site, then a Roman oppidium (fortified forward civic centre effectively), then a first millenium stronghold and finally a Norman period town, with a massive fortified cathedral and a similarly impregnable palace (now a museum). And that's when the building really got started. You look at about 200 years of brickwork and wonder where on earth all the bricks came from. Why isn't the entire area one huge brick field. And even then they hadn't finished – the palace, more churches, walls, granaries, mills – it is simply vast. When you see huge stone buildings you virtually fall down the quarries all around the territory. But the bricks needed clay, vast quantities of it. And kilns. Hundreds of them. So where are the brickworks? Nobody comments.

Inside this masterpiece of excess is equally incredible. It is painted from top to bottom, side to side and in amazing detail. Heaven and hell fill two vast drum pillars with a unifying host – unusually in stone - bridging the two. It is dreary on one level, dark and forbidding. But this was the priest's PowerPoint presentation to ensure his message hit home. Here is hell, there is purgatory, here is Heaven. And the amazing scenes all around you show what actions will take you to each. Read and weep sinners! And see the mighty and saved who have gone before. Hallelujah!