Saumur and Fontevraud: Plantagenet Tombs, Tanks and Tuffeau Cellars

Required Activities

• Find all four effigies in the abbey church, set two by two from the crossing: Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine behind, Richard the Lionheart in front — and beside him the plain polychrome wooden one, labelled Isabella of Angoulême for centuries but argued since 2024 to be Richard's sister Joan. Eleanor commissioned three of them, including her own, while she was still alive

• In the Romanesque kitchen of about 1160-70 at the south-west corner of the cloister, stand under the central chimney and work out how it is built: a square below, turned into an octagon by squinches, with five of its original eight apsidal hearths still standing. Then take a side: Viollet-le-Duc read every apse as a fireplace, the art historian Michel Melot thinks the whole building was a smokehouse

• At the Musée des Blindés, find the Tiger II, the only one still in running order, and the Schneider CA1 of 1916, the oldest tank in running condition

• Book a Matinale in the Grand Manège, the hour-long demonstration at 10h30 in which the écuyers work the young horses, and watch for the movements that make the French tradition its own — the school jumps performed in hand and the horse kept, in General L'Hotte's phrase, calm, forward and straight

• Go down into the tuffeau cellars at Bouvet-Ladubay, working since 1851, and find the two things that only exist because the rock was quarried out to build the châteaux above: twelve hundred oak barrels held at a constant cellar temperature, and the Cathédrale Engloutie carved into the gallery walls; then taste the Saumur brut against a still Saumur and decide what the second fermentation actually changed

• Walk up to the Château de Saumur, the one René of Anjou called his château d'amour and which appears in the September page of the Très Riches Heures above the grape harvest, and find on the ground what the painter put in the picture: the kitchen chimney behind the curtain wall on the left, the kitchens deliberately built clear of the palace so a fire could not take the whole thing