Château de Loches

Start with your feet. The ground here is pale limestone, worn smooth by centuries of boots, hooves and cartwheels. Above you, walls the colour of old cream rise in layers. Swifts cut across the sky in summer, and their thin cries echo off the stone. Below, the river Indre runs slowly through green meadows. This is the Château de Loches, a royal citadel in the heart of Touraine, the gentle river country south of the Loire.

What surprises most visitors is that this is not one castle. It is a whole fortified town on a rocky spur. A long ring of ramparts, close to two kilometres around, encloses houses, gardens, a church and two very different royal buildings. At the southern end stands a massive square keep. At the northern end stands an elegant royal residence. Between them lie about five hundred years of French history.

Let us begin with the keep, the oldest part. It was raised in the early eleventh century by Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou. His nickname means Fulk the Black. He was a fierce and restless warlord, and he built a chain of strongholds across the region to fight his rivals. Scientists have dated the timbers inside this keep, and the results place its construction in the first decades of the eleven hundreds' predecessor — the early eleventh century. That makes it one of the oldest and best-preserved stone keeps in Europe.

Stand at its base and look up. The walls are thick and almost blank. Long vertical buttresses run up the faces, like the ribs of a giant. There are very few windows, and the ones you see are small. This is Romanesque building, the solid round-arched style of Europe before the Gothic age. Inside, the floors have long gone. You climb through an empty stone shell, and at the top the whole valley opens below you.

The keep did not stay with the counts of Anjou forever. Their heirs became the Plantagenet kings of England, and Loches became a prize in their long struggle with the kings of France. In 1193, while Richard the Lionheart was held captive in Germany, the French king Philip Augustus took the fortress. When Richard came home, he won it back in 1194, famously fast. Philip returned years later and, after a long siege in 1205, Loches became French for good.

Near the keep, look for the Martelet, a group of towers that served as a state prison. Here the fortress showed its darker side. One famous prisoner was Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, captured by the French king Louis the Twelfth. Sforza spent his final years here and died in 1508. He was a patron of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. In his cell, painted decoration on the walls is still visible — a quiet trace of a prince far from home.

Locals also tell stories of iron cages. According to popular tradition, King Louis the Eleventh kept enemies here in hanging cages, so small that a man could not stand upright. Some of these tales are probably exaggerated over time. Still, they show how Loches was remembered: not only as a home of kings, but as a place where kings sent people they wanted to forget.

Now walk north along the enclosure. You pass the collegiate church of Saint Ours. Look at its roof. Instead of a normal sloping roof, the nave is covered by stone pyramids, hollow and pointed, rising one after another. It is a rare and strange sight, and many visitors walk past without noticing it. Inside the church, the old carved entrance porch still carries figures of animals and creatures from the medieval imagination.

At the far end of the spur stands the Logis Royal, the royal lodging. Here the mood changes completely. The heavy military stone gives way to tall windows, carved dormers and a light, almost delicate façade. This was a residence for comfort and ceremony, built in the late Middle Ages. The older part is plainer. A later wing, added in the time of Louis the Twelfth, is richer, with lace-like Flamboyant Gothic carving — the late Gothic style with flowing, flame-shaped tracery.

In 1429, a young woman came to these rooms with a clear demand. Joan of Arc had just broken the siege of Orléans. She met King Charles the Seventh at Loches and urged him to travel to Reims to be crowned. Charles hesitated, but he went. That coronation gave him the legitimacy he needed. When you stand in the great hall, you stand close to where that conversation took place.

Charles the Seventh also brings us to the most moving object in the château. Agnès Sorel was his favourite, the first royal mistress openly recognised at the French court. She was admired for her beauty and influence, and she died young in 1450. Her tomb is here. Her white alabaster figure lies with folded hands. Two angels support her head, and two small lambs rest at her feet — a play on her name, Agnès, close to the Latin word for lamb.

The tomb was moved here from the collegiate church after damage and long restoration. In 2005, scientists studied her remains and found very high levels of mercury. Mercury was used in medicine at the time, so the cause of her death is still debated. Some say it was treatment, others suspect poison. Look also for the small oratory of Queen Anne of Brittany. Its walls are carved with ermine tails, the heraldic symbol of Brittany, repeated again and again in the stone.

When you leave, walk slowly down through the old town. The streets are steep, and the houses use the same pale stone as the château. Look back at the walls from below, and notice how the keep and the royal lodging seem to face each other across the ridge. One was built for war, the other for life at court. Listen to the bells, the swifts and the river below — the same sounds that greeted every king who came this way.