Château du Plessis

From Mont St Michel we travelled south to the outskirts of Tours and the Loire Valley. When planning our journey, we'd decided to try and find somewhere self-catering as we reckoned my sister and niece might be getting a bit fed up with hotels by this point. I also find them a lot more comfortable when you're staying in one spot.

I found a cottage in the grounds of a chateau in very quiet the countryside on the northern outskirts of Tour and we made this our base for the rest of our holiday.

Above you can see the entrance to the Château du Plessis - although you're missing the very fancy ironwork on the gates! Our cottage lodge (right) is just behind the tree in the above photograph.

This is a view of The Cottage - to the left of the Château du Plessis. The open windows are my bedroom.

The accommodation was great in terms of space.

However we didn't have a key to the back door (somebody had walked off with it)and the front door was impossible to open and close easily. So the whole time we were there the doors were unlocked!

This was the view from my bedroom in "The Lodge"

On the whole, if travelling in France, I'd definitely recommend looking for B&B or self-catering facilities at Châteaux as you're bound to have a much more memorable stay than you would if you stayed in yet another anonymous hotel. It can also cost about the same or even be cheaper depending how many are in your party!

Below are my sketches that I did while at the Château.

This first sketch was done while having lunch on the Sunday - we had beautiful blue skies all day but the weather forecast looked ominous.........of which more in the next post!

Château du Plessis: The Lodge from the Cottage
8.5" x 11.5", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in sketchbook

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

We devoted most of Sunday morning to getting laundry sorted after a week in Paris and Normandy! This delayed our visit with Ronell (African Tapestry /My French Kitchen/Coin Perdu) whose home is in Montlouis-sur-Loire to the east of Tours. However it was great to meet up with Ronell and to be shown around Ronell's home for troglodytes! :) Of course I forgot to take photos! Ronell was most generous with guide books and advice about which chateaux were good to visit.

On the right is a less successful sketch (in composition terms) that I did of the front of the chateau and the lawn in front.

I'd been on my way out to sketch and it started to rain so I needed to draw what I could see from my bedroom- and didn't want to repeat the sketch I'd already done!

Château du Plessis: Front lawn

10" x 7.5", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in sketchbook

copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I soon found out that trying to capture neutral tones of the wall and the gravel was much more difficult than it looked! the cylindrical cones of the fir trees were not that easy either.

Below is a sketch of the stretch of road between the and the tunnel under the railway bridge which carries the fast trains to Paris. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to change colour.

It was great to have countryside to sketch on the doorstep - and this was a rather nice way of having some time out after a long day.

Château du Plessis: The road to the Bridge

8" x 10", pencil and coloured pencils in Mileskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Links:

• Travels with a sketchbook in France - includes links to all the other posts about my trip to Paris, Normandy and the Loire
  
• Château du Plessis

Petit déjeuner at the Château de Boucéel

Petit déjeuner at the Château de Boucéel
8" x 10", pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils in Moleskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Actually staying in a Château on our French holiday was a treat! The Châteaux are all so very different and Château de Boucéel, the one we stayed in near Mont St Michel, looked like a very grand house. You can see some photos of it below and there are more online on Flickr.

Château de Boucéel - exterior and hall and stairs

It turns out that Château de Boucéel has been reincarnated a few times. There has been a castle on the land since the twelth century. It's moved a few metres too in that time

The Boucéel estate dates back to the beginning of the 12th century. It was awarded by Richard III duke of Normandy to the Pigace family. The present château is a Listed Building built in 1763. It is the third one on the estate. The second was a large square castle with four towers, typical of the Knight Templars, and a stopping place for the Mont Saint Michel pilgrims in the Middle Ages.

This one is a large “ Malouinière” ( typical Saint Malo architecture at the time of King Louis XIV) with a curve forwarded front on on the North side, with primes on the South side and two lower wings on each side that give it a wide spread.

The story of the history of the estate also recounts what happened in various wars and battles

My sketch (at the top of the post) is of breakfast on the Saturday morning and the breakfast table (linen, silver etc!) in their very grand and very lovely dining room which was panelled in wood painted a very pale pistachio colour. A curious colour but it worked really well.

It was fascinating to learn from the Comte Régis de Roquefeuil that his father had always drawn his life - in comic book style - and that this was now recorded in a book. He showed me his father's record of his honeymoon in Venice.

Arnaud de Roquefeuil, my father, has told his life in comics between 1923 and 1955. The drawings that you can visualize here come from his album which is in Boucéel.

Chronique illustrée de la Manche en guerre
by Arnaud de Roquefeuil

On this page, the website displays the cartoons his father drew during the war about his experiences between 1939 and 1945. These are published in a book called Chronique illustrée de la Manche en guerre by Arnaud de Roquefeuil. They are absolutely fascinating as contemporaneous accounts of what the war actually looked like in that part of the world. It includes one of planes in the skies overhead on D day.

I can highly recommend Château de Boucéel if you ever want to stay in the area. We were made very welcome and I had a wonderful night's sleep in a very comfortable bed followed by and a splendid Petit déjeuner. We stayed in La chambre de Charlotte which is one of the bedrooms which has three beds. I was in a separate bedroom on the other side of the bathroom - which you can se on the link. My sister and I speculated about whether we were going to go home and start creating padded walls. We'd discovered that the walls upstairs were all covered in fabric which when touched had a firm padding underneath. I just kept wondering how they were kept clean!

From here we went back to Mont St Michel and managed to get there before the hordes arrived - so the next post on this blog is all about our visit to Mont St Michel!

Links:

• Comte & Comtesse Régis de Roquefeuil-Cahuzac, Château de Boucéel, Vergoncey, 50240 France