On second glance, this looks like it may have had a roof structure at some point, though if that structure was wooden, then it would be long gone.

Hi,
I believe those are indeed benches, although perhaps not the original ones. The only photo I could find of a lavoir in use shows baskets of laundry lined up on benches near the pool. As for the little house, without seeing inside it’s difficult to tell what it was used for, but I’m guessing it had something to do with sheltering the washer women during « averses » or rain showers, or at least offering shade.
Most of the lavoirs around here do have raised basins or at least raised rims, but we are in a wine region, and have always enjoyed a bit of prosperity not found everywhere. The old lavoir here in Gevrey was rather grand, being fully enclosed and was later converted first to a public bath house and now to a community meeting room. But in Nuits St. Georges, the lavoirs were along the banks of the Meuzin, and open to the elements, one with a raised basin, one with simple scrubbing stones lining the river’s edge. Different communes, different budgets.
Cheers

Are those benches along the sides? And in the first picture what was the little building for?

Thanks for the information, Keith! Very interesting. So it's a lavoir after all. I had only seen them with raised basins I think. So here it seems the washing people (women) were kneeling at the edge of the basin? Hard work and hard on the knees.

Hi,
It is/was a lavoir, or village wash house for laundry. The sloping stones around the periphery of the pond are a give-away. They are where the women of the village would scrub their laundry. The previous pond also has these stones, and is also a lavoir. They were all constructed during the second empire when the government was putting in water systems in rural France, and the basins could be built from standardized parts with each village embellishing their lavoir or not according to local tastes and budgets. People still use them, but not very often. I’ve seen women (always women. Make the appropriate social observation /comment here) cleaning large items like rugs and horse blankets in them. There’s a myth about the origin of the law supporting their construction that posits that Napoleon 3 rd overheard Queen Victoria exclaiming about how the French smelled bad, and he was determined to do something about it. Not true, but it makes a good story.
Cheers,
Keith

Nice to see a clean bike with no barnacles again.

The whole shebang!

:(

WHEN is the imperative word…

Like the purple door ;)

Of course, Scott, as Janos also has HIS camera :)

No puddles! ( yet?)

Check out those pipes! :)

Globe artichokes..6 for a dollar…at home..

Witte asperges. :)