Pont du Vert

Named Pont du Vert or Pont d'Albert, it spans the Petit Lembous stream which demarcates the communes of Molières and Puycornet. The bridge is still visible today, between the hamlets of Saint-Amans and Sainte-Arthémie (commune of Molières).

Oral tradition also calls it “the Roman bridge”. Even if human occupation is attested during Antiquity in Sainte-Arthémie, no reliable information allows us to attribute the construction of this bridge to the Romans.
Rather than Roman, this bridge is actually Roman! Indeed, in the center, the oldest arch was built between 1160 and 1220. Only the remains remain partly underwater, because the low water level of the Petit Lembous was, in the 12th century, two to three meters lower.

The presence of this brick-built bridge almost a hundred years before the founding of the bastide of Molières (created by Alphonse de Poitiers in the middle of the 13th century) already shows the importance of this road and the wealth of this part of Bas-Quercy. . The road located here was an important traffic route since it was the old royal road from Paris to Toulouse which coming from Cahors, passed through Castelnau-Montratier, Molières and Montauban.

The bridge was probably rebuilt in the 17th century on top of the previous one and has 5 arches and 4 piers with a deck more than 7 m wide.

The Pont du Vert lost its importance in the middle of the 18th century, when the new royal road built on the route of the current departmental road no. 820 took most of the traffic through Caussade. The bridge also suffered from the violent floods of the Petit Lembous. Thus, in the middle of the 19th century, its width was reduced to less than 5 m. This passage was definitively abandoned in 1879 when the route of departmental road no. 959 from Montauban to Molières was modified and a new bridge was built 400 m upstream...

Information from the PETR Inventory Service

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