We visited un underground cavern here in Caen recently.
It was carved out of the limestone around 150 yeas ago. No one is certain of the actual purpose ….of course its underground center core contained ice to keep the surrounding two levels cool, but after that they can only speculate as to what exactly was kept cold. Back in the day glacières were used to keep food, medicine, even corpses "fresh".
They think this one was used for beer believe it or not. (The landowner on the deed had many breweries in the city.)
Here's a diagram of the setup underground. (12 meters below ground)
La glace is the ice and the people in the pic are where the food or whatever
would be kept cool on the two levels. Apparently the ice could be conserved this way for up to a year.
Apparently Sebastain has been here before
seeing as his name was written on the wall.
Each floor is octagonal and has 327m sq of usable space.
This is a shot of the doorway leading out of the center core.
This shot (below) is from the inner core (5.85m diameter, 8m high) bottom level where the ice would be, looking up. The "window" is where the blocks of ice would have been lowered down onto a layer of straw which would allow any melting water an evacuation without touching the remaining solid ice block.
The metal on the left side of the shot below is the top of a well.
During the war around a hundred civilians
found shelter here from the Germans
and the American bombings in June and July 1944.
And voila! Your history lesson of the day!
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