Carcassonne has two faces. Down by the river Aude sits the ordinary lower town, a grid of streets laid out in the thirteenth century around a market square, and on the hill above rises the Cité, a double ring of walls and fifty-odd towers that looks like the illustration to a children's book about knights. The Cité was inscribed by UNESCO in 1997, and it is one of the most visited monuments in France, with the nearest sizeable roads and everything a rider needs just a kilometre away in the modern town.
The hill had a fortified settlement since Roman times, and the inner wall still has Roman and Visigothic stonework at its base. In the Middle Ages the viscounts of Trencavel held it, and in August 1209 the army of the Albigensian Crusade besieged it, cut off the water supply in a hot summer, and took the town. The young viscount, Raymond-Roger, died in his own dungeon a few months later. Later the French crown strengthened the walls into a frontier fortress facing Aragon, and when that border moved south the whole place decayed. In the 1850s the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was sent to rescue it. He added steep slate roofs to the towers, which historians have argued about ever since, since local building traditions call for tile, but without him the Cité might well have been quarried away.
There is a story of Dame Carcas, a lady who held the town against Charlemagne and, when food ran low, threw the last pig over the walls, so that the besiegers gave up and a trumpeter cried that Carcas was calling them. It is not history, and every guide tells it anyway. Eat the real thing at lunch: cassoulet, a slow-cooked casserole of white beans, sausage and duck confit, which the whole district argues over.
For a rider, Carcassonne is a gate to the south. The old Midi canal, dug by Pierre-Paul Riquet in the seventeenth century, runs through the lower town. The Corbières hills begin a short way to the south and offer twisting roads towards Cathar castles such as Peyrepertuse and Quéribus, and the Pyrenees are a couple of hours away. Walk the Cité on foot, since vehicles are restricted, and park outside the gates. July, with its great fireworks on the fourteenth, is crowded and hot, and spring and autumn are far more pleasant. The Cers wind can be fierce.