One of my favourite books is Ken Follet's 'Pillars of the Earth' As you probably know, most of Ken Follet's books are spy thrillers, but this one was about building cathedrals during the middle ages. That doesn't sound too thrilling, and in fact before he wrote the book everyone including his publisher advised him against writing it. However, it's fantastic and became one his best selling books. Certainly everyone I've lent it to or recommended it has also found it a great book too.

The book mentions at one point a cathedral in Saint Denis. The story is all about the stone masons who are pushing cathedral building to it's limits, so that they're taller and bigger than anything gone before it, and the hero of the story ends up in Saint Denis to learn how the french are doing it (who at the time were better than anyone else).

Saint Denis is now swallowed up as part of the suburbs around Paris (not really Paris, but what's called the banlieu - Paris is really only the city within the motorway which surrounds it, called the peripherique). Recently I went there with a friend to see the cathedral, inspired to go pretty much just from the Pillars of the Earth book (eat your heart out Dan Brown).

The architecture didn't quite live up to expectations, but that's only because I was probably expecting too much. After you've seen Notre Dame or St Eustache, everything else seems fairly small, and so I shouldn't have got my hopes up about a vaulted roof from a church that was a forerunner of the others. However, what was fantastic was that this cathedral is the final resting place of most of France's kings and queens!

This was completely unexpected - I had no idea that they would be there. Most of the statues or monuments to them are really grand. One even has the king and queen rolling around, naked in bed. Make sure you also go down into the crypts, since there you'll find a crystal urn containing the preserved heart of King Louis XVII, who died as a boy during the revolution (apparently DNA tests have confirmed it was his).

It's well worth the visit. It's very easy to get to by RER, although don't expect to do much else there. It's fairly grey and drab, like many of the other areas of the banlieu I've been too (I used to have to go to Nanterre for my carte du sejour, since I lived just outside the peripherique near La Defense, and somehow it always rained there - even if it was beautiful skies before getting on the RER to go there!). Don't take me too much at face value there though, as I haven't seen a great deal of the banlieu. One area that is supposed to be gorgeous is Sceaux, but I haven't quite made it that far yet.