Well, That Didn't Go As Expected!

Many of you will know, as regular readers of this blog, that I watch an HGTV show called "House Hunters International". I watch this show for several reasons: (1) It's interesting, and I can learn a lot about different places in the world; (2) sometimes I will see someplace that I have visited, and it brings back all kinds of good memories; and (3) occasionally I will see a coat of arms.

In a very recent episode, the show was in Bram, France.

As you can see from the inset map above, Bram is in Occitania, a place where I think I came closest to was when I attended a conference in Besançon, about 700 kilometers away, so not that close! But Bram is a very old town with an unusual city plan.

As you can see from the image above, the oldest part of the town is built in a set of expanding circles, the buildings facing circular streets, all centered on the church in the middle. And frankly, I don't think I've ever seen a city laid out in quite this fashion. (I have seen cities laid out within the loop of a river, like Besançon, France, but that's not quite the same as Bram here.)

Anyway, at one point during the show they showed the cover of a book entitled Decouvrir Bram: La ville circulaire, or in English, "Discover Bram: The circular city".

And the book cover had a coat of arms on it complete with supporters and surmounted by a civic or municipal coronet:

 So I thought, well, that should be easy enough to track down and get the colors and do a quick blog post.

Wrong!

I don't know whose coat of arms that is on the cover (and you can click on the image above to go to the full-size photo to see for yourself), but it is certainly not that of the ville de Bram, whose coat of arms is this one:

Nor is it the arms of the département to which Bram belongs, Aude, which is this:

And finally, it is not the (probably unofficial) arms of the region of Occitania, here:

So I don't know. Is it the arms of Bram (Or a cross gules) with possibly local buildings added to the first and fourth quarters and roundels? some kind of fruit? arranged three two and one in the second and third quarters?

Certainly the shield is topped with a turreted mural coronet, and it has two supporters of lions rampant reguardant.

So it's a bit of a conundrum. And what I thought would surely be a quick and easy identification has become something of a mystery.

Still, it's clearly a coat of arms, and one which I, once again, ran across sitting on my very own couch in my very own living room. And that is one of the main reasons I keep watching new episodes of this show!