All About Torigni-sur-Vire & Archie (the Collie) - Exploring France

Torigni-sur-Vire, (pronounced to us English as Tour-i-nee) is a beautiful little town located in the Manche department of Normandy France.  This spectacular town is steeped with lots of history dating back hundreds of years so we were eager to have a look around. 

The name of this town is misleading. Its not actually along the river Vire, but running through the town is a tributary of it feeding these beautiful lakes.  The river itself is about a 10 minute drive away and has footpaths all along it from the town of Vire, all the way to the sea at Isigny-sur-Mer (about 80 miles).

There is plenty of parking in this town, although I had done my research in advance, we ended up parking along the roadside opposite this beautiful lake and fountain. You can't see it, but just over the road is a play park.  If you saw our video about La Chapelle Sur Vire, you'll see that we love a play park. We are definatly big kids at heart and Matt is even planning on building us a swing in our garden!  Following our trip to Torigni, I decided it needs to have a big base, big enough for me to sit cross legged with one of the dogs and gently sway off the tree. 

We walked across the lake and over to a big wall.  This wall is the final part of the castle that was destroyed.  It is known as the Grimaldi Wall.  The habitants of this castle was Jacques IV Prince of Monaco and his wife Louise-Hippolyte de Grimaldi. This wall is 300 metres long, 12 metres high and 3 metres thick at the bottom.  It is a site to see and in 2018, there were lots of worrying cracks discovered along the wall.  Behind it, there are private houses and the wall was originally leaning towards them.  A scheme from the local government at the cost of over €400,000 saw extra supports added to the wall and now, it is leaning towards the lake, meaning the houses were safe from the fall of 3 century old bricks. 

From the impressive wall, we went for a walk through the town, eyeing up all the patisseries on the way (we usually grab one on the way home after a busy day exploring the towns). There were quite a few here and as usual they looked delicious!  The town here is like any usual town, a few shops, hairdressers and estate agents.  We were heading towards a church I'd seen online. This was the Notre-Dame-du-Grand-Vivier.  The building was reconstructed during the second half of the 19th century, three original romanesque reliefs are preserved on the outside.  These include a victorious horseman, Christ in majestic and a Virgin and Child that is on the south wall of the nave. When we got to this church, there were quite a few police men in the shop opposite and their cars were everywhere. As we approached the church, we could see that no one had been inside for quite a while. Unusually it was shut up and lots of leaves and rubbish stood in the doorway.  Of all the towns we have visited in France during our travels, not one of them had a church that was closed. Although, we didn't actually try the door.  We were intimidated by the hoards of police, so we walked around the outside and it is an impressive building but we were distracted by the police. We didn't even get a photo of the church, let alone any videos to put into our YouTube video. But... by the power of the internet, I have found a photo so you can at least see what it looks like!

This church was a little out of town, so we walked back and toward the building that is now the Hotel du Ville.  This impressive building used to be the home of Jacque I of Monaco.  This is the Château des Matignon.  A castle from the 16th century located in the town centre. During the 12th century, on this site stood a castle with fortified towers and very robust ramparts. It was surrounded by ditches which were cut in the stone of the hill, and an almost continuous belt of water made the fortress inaccessible. You can still see the lay of the land and the Chateau is on a mound with ditches all around it. The castle that stands today was completed in 1630 and it is only a small part of the original castle. Most of the buildings were destroyed in 1805.  It was auctioned and sold to a property dealer in the same year for the sum of £1,600,000 and it was decided to be broken up. During 1944, a fire ravaged the castle, causing the loss of several rooms and paintings including 16th century tapestries.  There is also a museum housed in the building but we don't tend to go into museums. Although I would have liked to have had a nosey around the building!

Just next to the Château is a small public garden. It is over a drawbridge which would have one day been over the moat. These gardens were used as vegetable gardens for local monks from the abbey which was completely destroyed and burned down during the French Revolution. Not one part of this building remains and we couldn't find where it used to be either. These gardens today are beautifully simple. Lawned areas with a small fruit and vegetable patch tended to by local volunteers from the town. 

At this point, it was lunch time! So we popped into the local bakers and grabbed a sarnie to have by the river before nipping back home to collect Archie (the Collie) and going for a walk along the Vire.

A few weeks ago, when we did our walk at Roches de Ham, we came across a beautiful walk along the river Vire. We didn't walk too much of it as we knew we wanted to take one of our 5 dogs with us another day. This was Archies lucky day! It is a busy towpath along the edge of the river meandering around fields of cows and sheep.  This bridge is called Pont de Roques and has a little car park (although access is very hairy!) 

This is the view from the bridge

All along this stretch of river you'll find bronze art installations. We have come across a couple before but thought nothing of it as they were just one off statues, but as we approached a man with dragonfly wings on a 8 foot tall plinth, we thought we would have a look.  There's a total of 12 installations along the river all designed by sculptors from around the world, they are all quite far apart, so we only saw one along this stretch. 

Dragonfly man sculpture

We shortly came to a canoe club which had lots of activities and things to do as well as an old lock and lock house. It was quite beautiful but the lock gates, no longer being in use, were very leaky. We had a lovely walk, Archie had a great run and it was brilliant to see different things and explore different parts of the town.  We didn't actually manage to get any pictures of Archie on this walk, but here he is! And yes... he LOVES a stick!

If you want to see more of Torigni-Sur-Vire
check out our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCafklL7k4CrfWgiA9H3RawQ

W3W
For parking in the town, we just pulled into a space on the main road but it was here: ///outdoing.temperature.periscopes

Walk with Archie (this is listed as a camping area but it is a very tight bend into the car park. It is manageable though, there was a camper van there when we parked): ///impasses.brushes.pens

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