After a few steps in the curved corridor, you come to the original door of the tower. This room in which you have just arrived is 4.25m in diameter and about 6m high. It was probably tiled.

This room might have been storage for food supplies. Wine barrels, barley beer, a salt tub, sacs of legumes or grains… could have been kept here. Nevertheless, there was a larger and more convenient place to store foodstuff: the underground cellar beneath the Old-Hall was used to store the large quantity of supplies necessary to the seignior and his family’s service.

As for the yields from the estate, they were kept in the Lower Bailey, in purposely-built granaries and barns.

This room was probably divided by a wooden wall to prevent unwanted access to the cistern.  The indentation in the circular wall seems to be evidence of this. The privy was at the end of the corridor.

Drinking water from the well supplied the 7 by 5,5m cistern. The latter was connected to the well dug in the Old-Bailey by a pipe, securing permanent access to drinking water in the castle. The cistern facing bears a XIII^th c. style.

Look at the unfortunately damaged magnificent set of six consoles, or culs-de-lampe, representing a bestiary, except for a human face displaying a mysterious smile, the latter being identified by either a monk or a peasant woman. Whichever you go for, your choice fits in the symbolic language of the consoles: the cow and the calf are for adulthood and childhood, the billy goat and the lion symbolise strength and weakness (the predator and its prey), and the peasant woman is for life, when the chimera would then mean death, or the monk symbolising religion, would oppose to temptation, the devil.

Note the three arrow slits in the room, besides a fourth one in the corridor which defended a postern (a back door) in the curtain wall.

The ceiling, as for all the rooms in the towers bar one, is a six-ribbed vault. Note the ogival wall-arches (arches located at the intersection of the wall and the segments of the vault, divided by the ribs), and traces of the formwork used to build the jack arches; the keystone is made of limestone from Apremont, « showing five leaves folded in a crown » (Xavier Barbier de Montault, 1876). The ribbed vault was added in the late XIV^th c. work campaign.

One needed to climb seven steps to reach the window, the only light well in this room.

The door-lintel sits on a corbel on each side of the frame, a recurrent feature in the castle.

Take the stairs and go up 19 steps to the first floor. If you look up in the staircase, you will notice the uninterrupted corbel supporting the steps in the staircase.

 © March 2023