Murol and Lac Chambon: The Castle on the Basalt and the Lake Dammed by a Volcano

Required Activities

• From the ramparts at nearly a thousand metres, work out why anyone built here: the castle sits on the stump of a basalt flow, a mesa, right where three old Roman roads crossed — towards the Limagne, towards Le Mont-Dore and towards Clermont-Ferrand — and you can still pick out all three valleys from the top

• Inside, find both chapels below the great round keep — the larger one of the 11th century, and the Romanesque one Guillaume de Murol built at the end of the 14th to be buried in — then climb the spiral stair through the vaulted rooms of the tour de Chautignat and stand in the kitchen with its oven and kneading trough: about twenty people lived in this upper court, defended by a garrison of three, a captain and two gatekeepers

• Walk the outer wall François I d'Estaing threw round the foot of the basalt and find the almond-shaped towers he pierced for light firearms, then the Renaissance palace and hanging garden he started on the east side — and look for where the work simply stops, because he never finished any of it

• Walk the 3.5 km path right round the lake, about an hour, taking the boardwalks out over the marshy ground on the way, and find the end where the Tartaret's lava came down and plugged the valley of the Couze Chambon — the whole 60-hectare lake is only about four metres deep because of it

• Swim and then get on the water — paddleboard, pedalo or dinghy — from one of the lake's two laid-out beaches, on the east shore or the north-west, the only two stretches of bank straight enough to use: everywhere else the shoreline is too broken up