Le château de la Ferté-Saint-AubinClick the mouse on the pictures to enlarge them
Wednesday June 4. It rained a few drops here and there as we drove south from Milly-la-Forêt after lunch in a café. We didn't stop to see much along the way because we both wanted the trip to be over as fast as possible.
But we did stop in the town called la Ferté-Saint-Aubin, just south of Orléans in the Sologne region. There's a château there that the Michelin Green Guide calls « un superbe château classique ».
This is another place I have driven by a dozen or more times but where I had never stopped before. We didn't go in; we just took some pictures from out front and from up at the main entrance.
The buildings were built in the 1600s and 1700s of stone and pale-colored brick. Some of the rooms are still furnished with their original 18th-century furniture, according to the Michelin Guide. The château's moats are fed by the Cosson river, which also flows past the imposing Château de Chambord just a few miles downstream.
Unfortunately, a big national highway runs right through the middle of La Ferté-Saint-Aubin, so traffic on the town's narrow main street can be terrible. Ferté, by the way, means "a fortified place," and there are a lot of towns in the Sologne region and up north on the edge of Normandy and the Paris area that are named that way: La Ferté-Imbault, La Ferté-Macé, La Ferté-Allais, and so on. The Michelin road atlas lists about 25 of them.
Wow! Hey, thanks for the info about what ferté means. My au pair family had a small house they were renovating in Ferté Vidame, about 30 minutes from Chartres, and it, too, had a manor house-looking château. I had wondered what the ferté part of the name meant, and had it in my head that is was something like fiefdom. I went to France in 1996 with my sister, her husband, and my mother, and my "family" invited us spend Easter weekend with them there. It was charming!
ReplyDeleteJudy
What an interesting looking gateway.
ReplyDeleteSusan