Sully-sur-Loire: The Minister's Castle and Its 14th-Century Roof

Required Activities

• Go up under the roof of the donjon to the 14th-century charpente and follow the line of it end to end: it was framed as a berceau brisé, a pointed barrel, not a flat ceiling

• Walk the full circuit of the moat, still in water, and out into the park to the canals Béthune cut round it to keep the Loire's floods off the site — then find the inlet that proves the moat is fed by the little Sange, not by the Loire

• On the first floor of the donjon find the iron door that opens into Sully's own cabinet, and on the chimneypiece of the great hall the painting of his other house, the château de Rosny-sur-Seine, among 17th-century wooden doors

• Compare the two halves of the late-14th-century donjon: the show rooms built entirely for display, and beside them the private lodging on the same internal plan but far more intimate — the public and private sides of a princely household, one against the other

• Drive the 7 km downstream to the abbey church at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire and stand under its tour-porche — a room 16 m square, open on three sides by triple arcades, its capitals the reason the tower matters in Romanesque sculpture — then go into the sanctuary where Philippe I was buried in 1108

• Cross into the bare basse-cour on the east side and work out what is missing: Philippe Auguste's keep of around 1219 stood here, and so did the collegiate church of Saint-Ythier until Béthune moved it inside the town