To be clear: I don’t believe in ghosts, I don’t care much for ghost stories, and I’ve never written about one for this blog. Still, if any of the places I’ve visited in the deep heart of France ever had a legitimate claim to harboring a ghost, it must surely be the lovely Chateau du Puymartin in the Périgord Noir, only 6 km (3.6 miles) from Sarlat-la-Canéda. Karen and I spent a pleasant morning there in June, and even though the site exploits the incredible story of “the White Lady” to the max, the castle is an interesting and rewarding place to visit for plenty of other reasons. As with so many of the fortified châteaux in this part of […]
Tag: chateau
The Manoir de Veygoux: Humble beginnings for one of Napoleon’s greatest generals
If you’ve followed this blog, you know I have a longstanding fascination with people who come from difficult beginnings in remote parts of the country and somehow forge a national reputation and a lasting place in history. It’s not that I follow the “great man” school of historic thought – I don’t! – but many of these people just have personal stories that are so compelling they are worth knowing about. Joan of Arc is certainly a prominent example in French history; in this space, I’ve written about Lafayette (hero of both the American and French Revolutions), about Pope Clement VI (a monk from the remote abbey at La Chaise-Dieu), and about the Count of Montmorin (Louix XVI’s “right-hand man”), […]
Reflections on the Ruined Castle at Montmorin
Somehow my visit to the crumbling castle ruins at Montmorin feels more important to me than the site itself really warrants. From the peak of this ancient little volcano, you can see forever – or at least that’s how it seems to me on a particular August afternoon in the deep heart of France. The entire Chaine des Puys, that iconic 25-mile-long range of extinct volcanoes that dominates the country’s center, is visible along the horizon to the west. As it happens so often in my travels through this region, I feel like the only person left on earth after some global cataclysm. I’ve come to visit the Chateau de Montmorin, a jumble of ruins at the end of a […]
Délicieux – a good story about good food set in the deep heart of France
OK, it’s not actually a true story – but the 2021 film Délicieux is a good story (“93% fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes), and for the purposes of this blog it’s a perfect story because it unfolds in the Cantal, one of the most beautiful regions in the deep heart of France. Directed by Eric Besnard, the comedy is available now to stream on Amazon Prime and YouTube Movies. In the movie, Grégory Gadebois plays Manceron, an extraordinary, if sometimes temperamental, chef who gets dismissed from his position cooking for a French duke. What did he do wrong? For a banquet with the duke’s distinguished guests, he made a dish (one of 40!) that includes potatoes at a time when the […]
Visit Commarque – an incredible ruined castle with prehistoric roots
Since 2016, I’ve written more than 160 posts exploring the exceptional places I’ve seen in the deep heart of France, so I don’t say this lightly: the Château de Commarque is unique among the most moving experiences I’ve had traveling in this region. I’ve taken hundreds of detours down country roads and visited dozens of other old castles over the last 25 years; by my count, I’ve written about 34 of them just for this blog. But after a while, many of them start to look similar – they are piles of rocks where the outlines of a castle remain, perhaps, or slightly shopworn old family manors. Don’t misunderstand — just about every château is interesting in some way. But […]
Hérisson is high on the list of “Villages Preferred by the French”
To be fair, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I came to Hérisson last summer. For a few months I had seen clips in the French press ranking the town on the list of “villages préférés des Français.” But France is among the best in the world at creating labels to promote tourism in towns of every size in every region of the country. There’s the official list of “Most Beautiful Villages,” for example, but there’s also a designation for “Small Cities of Character”, “Cities of Flowers,” and so on. So what might I find in Hérisson? Would it be a place ready to receive thousands of tourists, like so many towns in France where the medieval charm is […]
Building a new “medieval” castle at Guédelon
Before I went to Guédelon, I’d never really heard much about “experimental archeology.” For me, archeology seemed more a discipline based on pre-existing evidence – concrete objects, things you find in the ground or at the bottom of the sea. The interpretation of those objects is often open to conjecture (is this pottery shard part of a wine jar or was it a piece of the sculpture of some deity?), but in most cases you couldn’t really devise an experiment to prove the theory one way or the other. As on so many subjects, though, I was wrong. There’s a whole formal branch of archeology devoted to testing our conjectures about how people lived and how they made things by […]
At Parentignat – a chateau that feels like a comfortable family home
I’ve had the good luck to visit more than 100 castles and châteaux in our travels around France over the past 24 years (and I’ve written about more than 20 for this blog). Most of them fall into one of four categories: The famous castles that line the Loire River’s valley and the great royal châteaux like the ones at Versailles and Fontainbleau. (There’s a slightly smaller one of these palaces at Hautefort in the deep heart of France, the region I cover here. They’re called châteaux, but many of these really seem more like palaces.) Serious military fortresses like Castelnaud, Beynac, and (my favorite chateau in the Auvergne) Murol. These are closest to the popular image of “medieval […]
Top 8 Castles to see in the Deep Heart of France
Now that le déconfinement is underway, tourist bureaus across France are encouraging people to plan vacations closer to home rather than taking trips to more exotic places. The Wall Street Journal today has an article claiming “[t]he French are venturing into unknown territory: France.” Coronavirus border closures mean the French have the Eiffel Tower and the Chateau de Versailles to themselves. They’ve decided to see what all the fuss is about. (Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2020) The risk, of course, is that the well-known “greatest hits” of French travel — the incredible chateaux in the Loire Valley, for example, or a day trip to Giverny — might still be overwhelmed or frustratingly inaccessible if crowds surpass the new capacity […]
Lafayette – an American Legend from the Deep Heart of France
In any other year this would be the time when patriotic celebrations, grilling in the backyard, and summer vacations would top the American agenda. And in more ordinary times, this would be the perfect opportunity for those of us with an affinity for France and the French to remind ourselves that we likely would not have won our independence without the massive support of France in those earliest days of our Republic. This year, though, Americans can’t even (safely) get out of their backyards or to the beach, much less fly to France for a visit — so we’ll have to make do with a more “virtual” remembrance of the occasion. And while we’re at it, I’d argue that it’s […]
Visit the Chateau de Chazeron in the Deep Heart of France
This post has been too long in coming – but we’re finally settled in our new place and I’m happy to be back online. In the intervening weeks I’ve had some time to reflect on the places that resonate most vividly in my memories of living and traveling in the deep heart of France. It’s only natural, then, that this post takes me back to the Auvergne for a first-time visit to just such a place – the fine little Chateau de Chazeron, near the great church at Orcines in the Puy-de-Dome département. In fact, the castle at Chazeron matches all the criteria that make a place memorable for me: Although there’s some speculation that this was a holy site […]
Visit the medieval castle at Tournoel in the deep heart of France
I don’t know why I have waited so long to write about the Chateau de Tournoël since the 800-year-old castle figures in several of our most enduring memories of France. It was a ramshackle pile of rubble when we first moved to the Auvergne in 1997. But the castle ruins dominated the horizon from several vantage points as we drove back and forth from our house in Sayat, north of the Auvergnat capital of Clermont-Ferrand, and we wanted to know more. Tournoël was one of the first places we visited en famille — and it truly was a ruin in those days, uninhabited, unrestored, and a little dangerous. I have vivid memories (and some old videotape) of us climbing up […]
