THERE is an almost endless number of different ways to use stone. You can carve gargoyles out of it, build an Alpine rockery home for your garden gnomes, or even use it as a missile to throw at people who really annoy you. Roman armies, for instance, or giants called Goliath.

All of these have been done with varying levels of success, but none come close to the results of those egocentric nobles who issued instructions to their minions to build them a castle, and a bloody big one at that.

One such example is the castle that dominates the town of Najac in the Aveyron valley, not 10 minutes away from our house. Approaching the town from a distance you catch glimpses of the fairytale castle rising up above the steep wooded valleys and you begin to get in the castle-spotting mood. You arrive in the town and wander down past the medieval half-timbered houses with their overhanging first floors and steep slate roofs and you start to get that cutesy chocolate box feeling. But nothing prepares you for that jaw-dropping moment when you walk down the hill and that castle hoves into sight, blocking the whole of your view.

That would be the point when as a would-be besieger I would probably have declared a long tea break while we sat back and had a long hard think about our objectives. And the huge stone edifice, built way back in 1253 over 10 years by 2,000 masons and labourers, did prove to be impregnable to all but the weakest of forces - the humble peasant.

After the revolution, the new French state in its infinite wisdom passed the ownership of the castle to a local dodgy builder. In these less enlightened times the enthusiasms of builders extended to more than installing huge plasma TV screens and guitar-shaped swimming pools; they were more interested in trying to exploit the castle in any way they could. One exploitable resource the castle did have, by the donkey cartload to the power of several thousand. That was stone. The new owner set about turning a spectacular thing of beauty shaped by the hand of man back into its component parts.

In a cruel twist of fate, when a group of labourers were taking down one of the mighty walls it collapsed and killed several of them. A salutary lesson. It would have been better to wait for Nobel to perfect his dynamite. This put a stop to further demolition and left us with a castle that we can enjoy to this day.

Of course, if you don't like boring old castles you can always venture down to the river for a bit of frantic canoeing through the slalom courses, but a word of warning - take your own wetsuit, because the one that I hired had been worn by a person whose last meal had been hot garlic on toast with a side order of garlic before he sweated his way down the river.

There is another use for stone - take one stinky old wetsuit, put a large rock in the middle of it and drop it in the middle of the river.

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