15th centuries. Inside you may see a darkened original effigy of the Virgin Mary, in a niche in the south wall – now a little damaged, because it was rescued from the depths of the river, where it was discovered, after having been thrown into the waters by Protestants during the Wars of Religion. In the valley, on a slightly raised mound just above the old river flood levels, is the Chapelle St. Martin, known locally as 'the English church'. Unusually for this region, it is surrounded by its cemetery (more customarily they are separate from the churches, outside the village boundary). The Chapelle was built in 1194 reputedly on the order of King Richard 1 (the Lionheart) of England, as an earthly recompense for the murder by his father, Henry II, of Archbishop Thomas A'Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170, 24 years earlier. It is difficult to substantiate this tradition. Indeed, at the time, Richard Lionheart had been held in captivity in Austria for two years, having been captured returning from the Holy Lands for the Third Crusade in 1191 – and he was only released because his mother, Queen Eléanor, raised a ransom equivalent to around 2 or 3 times the annual income of England. Richard had borne little love for his father – he actually spent his life trying to overthrow him, and take over his possessions in France, where he spent his life (he actually was unable to speak much English). The dedicatee of the chapelle, Saint Martin, has many churches named after him – he was a patron saint of France, and of soldiers, and lived in Tours, in the Loire valley. Post-revolution and into the 20th century Following the Revolution in 1789, organised road and railway building gathered pace, to the detriment of the river traffic that Limeuil depended upon. Bridges were built across the two rivers in 1891, and the ferrymen who had for thousands of years taken people, livestock, and goods across the rivers at fixed points, lost their livelihoods (the cobbled slope of the ferry landing stage across the Dordogne at Limeuil can be seen just before the road turns sharp right at the end of the Mairie wall). Flooding was contained by the construction of a series of dams. The tradesmen, artisans, craftsmen, and shopkeepers who had serviced the river trade were no longer required. The village steadily