Moorish-styled building that visitors to the Parc see today was constructed from remaining stones, by Dr. Fernand Linares, who was born in Limeuil in 1850; served the Sultan of Morocco, Mulay Hassan I, as his personal physician; and purchased the chateau parc for his retirement. Some 60 years after his death, the entire Parc was purchased by the villagers for €320,142. The building is now used for exhibitions and communal meetings; and the grounds are maintained and managed by a local 'patrimoine' conservation group, the Au Fil du Temps. Wine and the rivers The hills around Limeuil are today densely wooded. But walk into these woods and you will find time-worn stone supported terraces. These used to be covered by hillside vineyards, thousands of acres of wine production, until the devastation of the Phylloxera insect infestation that destroyed most of the vineyards around 1880, with the consequential catastrophic loss of livelihood that resulted for thousands of peasant families. Wine in barrel was brought downstream to Limeuil from as far afield as the Massif Central on flat-bottomed 'gabarres', destined for the ocean-going port of Bordeaux. There were two types, known locally as courpets and courraus. The courpet was small, and could navigate from well up-river, to be dismembered on arrival, its timbers often re-used. The larger courreau was built to last 40 or 50 years, and was hauled back to Limeuil from Bordeaux by oxen and men, loaded with salt, fish, and other goods, to be offloaded into the chais buildings – there used to be a great Market Hall on the Place des Ormeaux in the upper village, now long gone. The rivers were regularly prone to extensive flooding of the valleys through the winter – but could be walked across during the dry summer months (the Gateway arched entrance from the riverside is carved with the flood levels for particular years, an amazing record). The window of opportunity for the boatmen to work was therefore limited to only a couple of months in a year; and inevitably the development of roads, and then railways, brought to an end a centuries-old trade. Churches There are two churches in the commune. At the top of the village is the original church, dedicated to Sainte Catherine, the patron Saint of boatmen. A church has stood on this site since the 1100s, but the building you now see dates from the 14th and