Puilaurens: The White Lady's Tower on the Mont Ardu

Required Activities

• Climb the ramp on the south-west side and count the nine walls that line it, then notice what it is built in — a natural fault in the rock, so the approach was handed to the builders rather than cut — and at the top find the place d'armes that forms a barbican, with its wall pierced for firearms rather than bows

• In the round, rough-faced tower at the head of the chicanes, stand in the ground-floor room under its rib vault and find the speaking tube built into the thickness of the wall — the tower is named for a white lady the stories make Blanche de Bourbon, great-niece of Philip the Fair, said to have broken her journey here on the way to marry Peter the Cruel in Spain

• Walk the length of the main court, sixty metres by twenty-five, between curtain walls eight to ten metres high that still carry most of their original crenellation — and note how the two semicircular towers they run to are left open at the back, so a defender could be reinforced from inside

• Find the door at the foot of the east tower that lets you out of the fortress altogether onto a viewpoint on the rock, and from there look down the Boulzane valley and work out what the garrison was actually blocking: the gates of the Fenouillèdes, and the Aragonese route into Languedoc

• Go round the walls sorting the openings by what was meant to come out of them — the narrow archères cut for crossbows against the splayed embrasures widened later for muskets and cannon — then find the cistern and the latrines in the upper enceinte and picture it as Saurine Rigaud found it in 1240, when she came up from Fanjeaux and met twelve Cathar religious here, eight of them women