Le Château de Carrouges

Just 20 miles southwest of the Haras du Pin, where we spent an afternoon seeing that spectacular horse show I blogged about a few weeks ago, stands the 14th-century Château de Carrouges. It's a striking brick complex with a Renaissance-era entry tower (un châtelet) and a moat (des douves). I've been lucky to be able to visit Carrouges four times since 2001. It's about half an hour's drive from the big town of Alençon in lower Normandy.

This a 2006 photo of the château at Carrouges, which dates back to the 1300s but which,
like most of these old buildings, has been modified and expanded over the centuries.

An earlier castle at Carrouges was located on a nearby hilltop. That one was laid siege to by the Plantagenêts
in the 12th century and then destroyed by the English at the beginning of the 100 Years' War (1337–1453).

The château as it exists today was built in the mid-1300s by Jean IV de Carrouges on marshy land a few miles south.
The Wikipédia article about it describes it as a château de plaisance.

In the 1400s, at the end of the 100 Years' War, a whole new wing was added by a Norman official who had acquired
the château when the Carrouges family line died off because of a lack of male heirs.
Other Norman families occupied the château over the centuries.

Much later, during the Second World War, Carrouges was used as a place to store the contents of the museums of
the cities of Rouen and Beauvais, which were judged to be in danger of being destroyed or stolen.

The first time I went to Carrouges was with CHM in June 2001, on a day when we saw eight or ten other châteaux.
That's when I took the photos above (except the first one). We were driving from Rouen down to Vouvray,
where Walt and I had rented a gîte for a two-week stay. It was because we enjoyed that vacation
(and an earlier one) in Vouvray so much that we ended up relocating to the Loire Valley in 2003.