You can get a bit blasé about castles and not think too much about them. In that case I suggest a visit here to Château de Coucy, to the north west of Reims because as castles go, this will revive your interest.
This place is huge in every dimension and as it’s been here since 920 you can spend the time looking in awe at the work that would have been involved in building, maintaining and modifying it.
Then you can feel sad as although it was in partial ruins, it was blown up as recently as 1917.
This is a castle on a massive scale. How do you even begin to move stone and cut it before assembling it into these big forms with such precision? I have enough trouble moving a big bag of sand into my garden and assembling a few concrete blocks.
The dates need to be read carefully because phases of the castle’s use and changes to it, have taken place over hundreds of years. Our house is only sixty years old and has altered several times.
920 built
1079 extended
1220 new castle built
1380 converted into a sumptuous palace
1652 ‘demolished’
1692 earthquake causes cracks in the keep
1829 now in ‘ruins’
1917 having been used as a base by the German army, as they retreat, they use 28T of explosives and destroy key features such as the Keep and four towers.
The Keep was 54m high, 31m diameter and the walls 7.5m thick. Read those numbers again and then you’ll be in awe.
Locally it was decided not to completely clear the ruins and instead leave a huge mound of rubble around the bottom of the Keep. This was so as to show the destruction caused by that German action.
It’s a great castle to walk around with plenty of surprises. Stairs lead down to tunnels and then to vast chambers below ground. Info boards show a ‘now’ photo and a clever impression superimposed, that ‘builds back’ to a former glory. You can then see the ‘real thing’ rather than just looking at broken pillars and arches.
We stayed the night at the village camping-car aire and this has to be the best so far. They have created a large but subtle area with room for 14 motorhomes, each with available electric hook up. There’s a toilet and disposal / refill point. All for €8.10 for two people and 24 hrs.
You buy the period at a payment card terminal and receive a printed receipt with a code for use at the toilet door, service point and also to enable the electricity feed at your pitch. It’s quite an investment for the town to have made but this is the same everywhere. Motorhomes / Camper vans are encouraged in most places.
There we met a nice guy from Ashbourne who’s trying to see how he feels about holidays alone, following the death of his wife two years ago. We had a nice chat about war graves and Land Rovers. Someone wants to talk about Land Rovers at every site; without fail 😀. They either had one, have one now, or know someone who has one.
We ‘overnight’ on Saturday at a municipal campsite at Tonnerre. It’s very hot but fortunately we don’t have too long to wait for the accueil to open. This is always something to be aware of in France - the afternoon closing of nearly everything. Bigger campsites tend to stay open for arrivals during the long lunch which could be between 13:00 - 15:00 but sometimes later. Most are closed and whether or not you can 'self-install' and then go and pay later, is a bit of a lottery.
Today though, we have to wait but it's only 30mins and we wander to the noisy green area next to the river, right outside the substantial campsite fence. Here we find a hundred people in groups that range from families to teenage kids. They are here for the day and spend most of the time either in the shade or in the river.
It's a huge site but with just a few dozen pitches and although they are numbered, unusually the pitches are very big. So we pitch in our own space and there's no TVs to worry about.
Later we test the water which is a bend in the river at the top of a weir. Hence the water isn't flowing and at the bank it's just waist deep. It takes us a moment or two to accept that there's plenty of plant life around your legs and in fact we wear our rock shoes which helps.
It's very refreshing though and that's what we need. We listen to a boombox and laugh at kids and parents sitting in the rushing waters of the weir. I can't imagine that happening back home.
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