Rambouillet: The Château Where François I Died, the Queen's Dairy and the Bergerie

Required Activities

• In the château, find the 16th-century salle des Marbres — the old guardroom, its walls and floor patterned in white Pyrenean, bleu turquin and red Languedoc marble — then go on into the crenellated tour François Ier, where tradition puts the king's death on 31 March 1547 and where the bedroom for visiting heads of state was later installed

• Walk out to the Laiterie de la Reine, a small neoclassical temple: stand in the rotunda lit only from the dome overhead, then go through to the gallery and find the grotto at the end of it, with Pierre Julien's 1787 statue of the nymph Amalthea and her goat

• Go inside the Chaumière aux Coquillages — thatched like a cottage outside, lined with marble, shells and mother-of-pearl inside — and find the small second room hidden behind the two concealed doors either side of the chimneypiece, which once held the 18th-century automata that were stolen

• Follow the visitor circuit at the Bergerie nationale and stand at the pens of the Rambouillet merino, the only flock of the breed left in France, descended from the 334 ewes, 42 rams and 7 leading wethers that Spanish shepherds walked here from near Segovia in 1786