Old street

I took this picture a decade ago in Cardaillac, a mediaval village in the French southwest, when LEDs had not yet made their entrance (the old French countryside remained refractory to the new light technology until quite recently). Here we see the 13th-century Tour Ronde (Round Tower), now privately owned, but illuminated by three 400 W HPS luminaires (Thorn Jaguar) that are part of the village's public lighting system. Electricity must have been really cheap when those lights were installed in the early 1990s. A remnant of that era and of earlier times (but certainly not going as far back as the middle ages), a lonely coach light fitted with an 80 W high-pressure mercury fluorescent lamp (affectionately called "ballon fluorescent" -fluorescent balloon- in France) lies at the end of the street.