Old photos of Saint-Aignan's château

I'm still going through my archives — disk by disk, folder by folder, photo by photo — in an effort to delete duplicates and generally organize everything. Here are three old photos of the Château de Saint-Aignan that I found yesterday. It's the château you see in my blog banner, above, and it's about 2.5 kilometers from our house. As usual, you can click on the photos to enlarge the view.

This first photo is one that I took in March 2004 with a Kodak DC4800 digital camera that I was using back then. Comparing it to the 1998 Paris and Normandy photos that I've posted recently, I can see that digital cameras improved greatly in those few years. I took this before before I started blogging in 2005, so I've probably never posted it before. I was standing on the island in the Cher River across from town, only about 200 meters from the château.

Above and below are two photos that I took in June 2008 with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ3 digital camera that I had back then. That camera had a long zoom lens, and I was standing two kilometers (1.25 miles)  north of the château over in Noyers-sur-Cher.

This second 2008 photo shows not only the Château de Saint-Aignan, but also the town's church. The oldest part of the château — the ruined towers on the right — is probably more than a thousand years old. The "newer" part of the château, the fancier Renaissance building, is only 500 years old. Parts of the church are also about a thousand years old. Saint-Aignan is located 40 kilometers south of the old royal city of Blois and one of its biggest attractions these days is the parc zoologique de Beauval.