ST.ANTONIN-NOBLE-VAL. The town of St Antonin, originally known as Condate and later as Noble-Val, is situated on the western edge of the Rouerge province.
Legend has it that the abbey of Saint-Antonin was founded in the ninth century in honour of the saint who brought Christianity to the province.
The saint however later decided to go to convert Pamiers, his home town in the Pyrenees, but local disaffection with the message he preached is said to have brought about his beheading and his body being thrown into the river Ariège.
Angels then descended from Heaven, the story continues, and gathered up the pieces of his body and placed them in a boat which, miraculously, floated downstream into the Garonne and on to where the Tarn flows into it.
The body travelled up the Tarn to its confluence with the Aveyron and then through the Vallis Nobilis of the Aveyron Gorges to the confluence of the little Bonnette river at a point where the ancient lands and bishroprics of Rouergue, the Albigeois, and Quercy meet. There the corpse was retrieved by Festus, the Count of Noble-Val, who placed the relics into a reliquary-shrine.
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