Chateau de Castelnaud
— the gold the stone keeps after the sun is gone.
Not only on a wall.
“A medieval fortress above the Dordogne valley, in the Périgord Noir. The keep looks across to Château de Beynac on the opposite ridge — the two castles spent the Hundred Years' War watching each other, the river between them changing hands. The stone is honey-coloured at noon and almost amber at the last hour of the day. Trebuchets and mangonels stand in the bailey, full-scale and rope-tensioned, and the museum inside holds two hundred medieval weapons. The Dordogne bends below; the village of La Roque-Gageac sits a few miles upriver.
Chateau de Castelnaud, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Château de Castelnaud stands on a limestone outcrop above the confluence of the Dordogne and Céou rivers, in the commune of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle in the Dordogne department of southwest France. The fortress is part of the Périgord Noir, a region of oak woodland and river valleys about ten kilometres southwest of Sarlat-la-Canéda. From its terrace the visitor sees Château de Beynac on the opposite ridge, just over two kilometres across the valley as the crow flies, and the village of La Roque-Gageac upriver. The castle is reached by a short, steep walk up from the river road through the village.
The oldest parts of the castle date to the early thirteenth century, with first documentation in 1214, when Simon de Montfort took the fortress during the Albigensian Crusade. The keep, the curtain walls, and the artillery tower all use the local cream-coloured Périgord limestone, which weathers to a soft honey-gold in afternoon light. The site was held alternately by French and English garrisons through the Hundred Years' War, when Castelnaud sat on the English side of the Dordogne and Beynac on the French. By the seventeenth century it was abandoned. The Rossillon family bought the ruins in 1966 and have restored the site progressively since.
The castle houses the Musée de la Guerre au Moyen Âge, the medieval-warfare museum that opened on site in 1985 and now holds roughly two hundred original weapons and armour pieces alongside life-size reconstructions of trebuchets, mangonels, and a couillard in the lower bailey. The museum is open every day except Christmas, with hours that lengthen through high summer and contract in winter; an adult ticket runs around fourteen euros. The walk up from the village car park is short but steep, on cobbled lanes; sturdy shoes are advisable. The castle is one of the most-visited sites in the Dordogne, drawing more than two hundred thousand visitors a year.