Château Gaillard: Richard the Lionheart's Fortress above the Seine

Required Activities

• At the keep, find the corner cut into a tower that is otherwise round for three quarters of its circuit, and the buttresses shaped like upside-down pyramids that once met in pointed arches carrying machicolations — a system almost unique for its date. Richard is said to have looked at it and called it his beautiful one-year-old daughter, and another time simply « Quel château gaillard », which is how the place got its name

• Go into Saint-Sauveur in the Petit Andely, the 13th-century church of the settlement that grew up under the castle, then walk up to the Grand Andely for the collégiale Notre-Dame and work out its four building centuries — 13th, 14th, 16th and 17th — from the outside before going in

• From the Seine bank at the Petit Andely, look up at the spur and work out where Philip's double ring of siege ditches and fourteen belfries had to run, then find the island in the river that he took first in August 1203, breaking the stockade that had closed the Seine — and stand where the 1,200 townspeople of La Couture were turned out of the castle in December to save its food

• Find the well cut into the limestone of the lower court and the cisterns in the upper court, then work out what happened on 9 December 1419, when the garrison surrendered to the English after sixteen months because the last rope for drawing water had broken — this was the final Norman stronghold still holding out against Henry V. The same walls held Marguerite de Bourgogne, wife of the heir to the French throne, after the tour de Nesle affair in 1314