Église Saint-Alban

The parish church of Saint-Alban was built in 1865 on a rise above the old town centre, and its stone tower is visible from the surrounding valleys. The interior follows a neo-Romanesque scheme with rounded arches, carved capitals, and a calm, cool atmosphere that makes it a pleasant retreat on a hot afternoon.

The stained glass by the Lobin workshop is the highlight. The Tours-based atelier was one of the most prolific in nineteenth-century France, and the Lormes windows show the same rich blues and reds you find in far grander churches. The building as a whole is a good example of the ambitious public works that small Burgundian towns undertook during the Second Empire, when rural France was being connected by railway and local mayors had something to prove.

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The church replaced a medieval predecessor that had stood on the same hill for centuries. Its architect worked in the neo-Romanesque revival style then fashionable across provincial France, and the stained glass — produced by the Tours workshop of Lobin, which also supplied windows to Notre-Dame de Paris — is finer than you'd expect from a town this size.