The Chateau de Bonnemare and its hamlet are situated in the forest of Radepont on the borders of the Vexin region of Normandy between the Valley of Andelley and the Valley of the Seine. Before 1555, a medieval manor preceded the chateau. Raoul de Bonnemare lived in this manor; the hero of the lay (short narrative poem) by Marie de France entitled   “The Two Lovers”.  The story takes place 12 kilometers from here above the valley of the Seine d’Andelle.
One local tale recounts that Charles VII, Agnès Sorel, and Charles IX were occasional guests at Bonnemare. Charles IX loved to hunt in the region. He planned to build a monumental chateau in the commune of Charleval, but never finished due to this ill- timed death.
In 1555, Nicholas Leconte, the marquis of Draqueville, constructed the chateau, the chapel, a farmhouse with the first cider house, and a châtelet at the entrance that corresponded with current tastes. Leconte was later named president of the Parliament of Normandy. He constructed a chateau flanked with 2 turrets and 2 wings. It was decorated with a châtelet at the entrance, a new chapel, and various farm buildings.
Around 1637, Etienne de Fieux purchased the chateau and its compound. His family partially refurbished the Chambre de Parade, and modified the farm by adding a larger cider press in 1668.
In the 18th century, two families consecutively owned the Chateau de Bonnemare, the Crimelins of Villette, and then Charles the Blond and his son.  They installed a wing in the north region of the chateau in 1779, which contained multiple apartments, and a salon. During the French Revolution, the proprietor of the castle destroyed parts of the castle that referenced the ancient regime. In other words, he destroyed all symbols of previous owners nobility.  
In the 21st century, various families inhabited the chateau: Louis Alexandre, a banker in Rouen, Louis Cavelan, a businessman, and finally in 1888 Gustave Gatine, a notary in Paris and grandfather of the current owner, purchased the chateau.
He decorated the park with statues from the 18th century, which he acquired from the Chateau de Bagatelle (they were sold following the death of Richard Wallace, the last owner of “La Folie” du Comte d’Artois).
http://www.bonnemare.com

Château de Bonnemare

Account

by category

Login

Name

by region

Title

Name in English

Le château de Radepont est situé sur la commune de Radepont, dans le département de l'Eure.
Historique
Le château actuel est situé près de l'emplacement d'une fortification médiévale érigée en 1194 à l'époque de Richard Cœur de Lion, duc de Normandie et roi d'Angleterre. Ce château fort a été détruit en 1218 par les Français à la suite de la conquête de la Normandie par Philippe Auguste. On en observe encore quelques vestiges dans le parc de l'actuelle construction.
De même, du château antérieur de style néo-classique, il ne subsiste qu'une chapelle du xviiie siècle dédiée à saint Bernard. Aimé-Louis du Bosc vend le domaine en 1844 au baron Levavasseur, un capitaine d'industrie qui fit bâtir la grande filature en style néo-gothique aujourd'hui ruinée et qui acquit l'abbaye gothique de Fontaine-Guérard, toutes deux situées dans la même commune.
L'ensemble de l'édifice ayant été entièrement reconstruit à partir de la fin du xixe siècle jusqu'au début du xxe siècle en style néo-Louis XIII. L'architecte parisien Duchesne, puis l'architecte rouennais Lacire furent les maîtres d'œuvre du nouveau château. La construction s'est poursuivie essentiellement après la mort de ce dernier, lorsque son fils lui a succédé. Plusieurs acquéreurs se succèdent jusqu’en 1937, date à laquelle le dernier propriétaire Fernand Colombel, sans héritier, lègue son domaine à l’Armée du salut.
En 1952, l’Armée du salut crée un centre de relèvement et d’assistance par le travail qui présente la particularité d'héberger plusieurs centaines de relégués en liberté conditionnelle, et ceci jusqu’à la suppression de la peine complémentaire de la relégation en 1970. En 2013, l'Armée du salut vend son domaine à un propriétaire privé russe.

Château de Radepont

Château-Gaillard (Les Andelys)

Château de Vascoeuil is a beautiful 15th century castle with a museum and sculpture park in the gardens. A noble house built after the Hundred Years War, the château hosts the museum of Jules Michelet, dedicated to the famous French historian, in one of its outbuildings. Wander around the grounds of the estate, through the typically French gardens, to uncover the sculptures that have been placed amongst the beautiful trees and plants. It is a great place to spend the day with the family.
https://www.spottinghistory.com/view/2972/chateau-de-vascoeuil/

Château de Vascœuil

Martainville Castle, locally known as Château de Martainville, lies in the village of Martainville-Épreville, in the Seine-Maritime department in France.
Martainville Castle was built between 1495 and 1505 by Jacques Le Pelletier, a shipowner and merchant from a rich upper-middle class family from Rouen. The castle never served a defensive purpose but was intended and used as a manor house.
Shortly after completion Le Pelletier died without issue and the castle went to a cousin. This cousin started to squander his new-gotten fortune until he died in 1545. His son Richard on the other hand again pushed his family higher on the social ladder and became chamberlain to Henry III of France.
During the 17th century Louis Le Pelletier de Martainville was Lord of Martainville. He lived at the court at Versailles but recieved a considerable revenue from farming activities on his lands around the castle.
In 1757 the last of the Martainvilles died without issue and the castle started to be handed through several families through inheritance. During the Franco-Prussian War from 1870 the castle was damaged.
In 1905 the dilapidated Martainville Castle was sold, for the first time in its history. Its new owner was a cattle merchant. He started to cut down all the trees on the property, sold the interior of the castle and planned to demolish the castle as well. At the last moment the castle was bought by the State in 1906. Later the castle was restored and now houses a museum of Norman arts and traditions.
At present Martainville Castle can be visited for a fee. Sadly enough they were just closing when I came by. A very nice castle.
http://www.castles.nl/martainville-castle

Château de Martainville

Château Saint-Hilaire is a castle located south of Louviers, in the Eure department of Normandy.Located south of Louviers Acquigny on the road, in the department of Eure, the area is bordered by the Eure.The dwelling is constituted originally one building to the massive and mundane neoclassical architecture, built in 1880.In the early twentieth century, the area is part of the stronghold of the Hawk, owned by Roger Maldéré. It will be confiscated by Henry V of England at the expense of Philippe Baude during the Hundred years. After which the estate was bought by Jean Le Roux, a bourgeois rouennais, which transmits it to Robert Le Roux - lord of the Épervier. His niece Catherine will inherit the Garden in 1582, before marrying Charles Romé. Pierre Romé - lord of Thuit and Treasurer of France in Rouen office under Louis XIII - will inherit his TOUR. In 1681, Nicolas Romé meets its strongholds Hawk, Maupertuis, and Folleville Bouteiller as the Folleville until 1692, when Marie Romé married Pierre-Jacques Viconte, Sieur de Saint-Hilaire. In the eighteenth century, Marie-Angélique Joseph inherits the Viscount of Saint-Hilaire and married the Marquis de Marguerit. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Count Odoard Hazey of selling the domain to Mr Sée, former prefect, who built a large neo-classical building in 1880. The main building is in stone on three levels with attic mansard , with a front-body canted brick, surrounded by a terrace lined with mâchicoulis. In 1901, Jules Audresset buys the building, then passes it to its girls. She married Pierre Reveilhac that in 1907 the architect Henri Jacquelin mandate to transform the building into château3 whose architecture recalls the late Middle Ages with timbered houses from the old Évreux. The house was sold in 1925 to the US Major Walter V. Cotchett, occupied during the 2nd World War and then abandoned. Videlec the company bought the estate in 1989 and conducts its restoration.The castle is listed as historical monuments in 2002.
http://www.frenchchateau.net/chateaux-of-haute-normandie/chateau-saint-hilaire.html

Château de Saint-Hilaire (Louviers)

The Château de Gaillon is a renaissance castle located in Gaillon, Normandy region of France.
History
The somewhat battered and denuded Château de Gaillon, begun in 1502 on ancient foundations was the summer archiepiscopal residence of Georges d'Amboise, Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen; he made of the old château-fort a palatial Early Renaissance structure of unparalleled luxury and magnificence, the most ambitious and significant French building project of its time. Isabella d'Este Gonzaga was kept abreast of its development from the Mantuan ambassador in France.
When in 1498 his patron, the duc d'Orléans, acceded to the throne as Louis XII, d'Amboise, who had spent much time in northern Italy on diplomatic missions and had been viceroy in Milan in 1500, where he had met Leonardo da Vinci and other artists and humanists, was suddenly raised to the high position of cardinal and prime minister. He had access to the architect-engineer Fra Giocondo, who had been invited to France by the king, and to the Italian garden designer Pacello da Mercogliano. By 1508 Gaillon's splendid new ranges and gardens, one of the first Renaissance structures in France, were fit to receive Louis XII and his queen, Anne de Bretagne.
The Gothic range that formed an irregular outer court is entered through a massive gatehouse, remodeled in 1509, with octagonal corner towers and steep-pitched slate roofs. The decorative elements of its shallow-relief carvings in panels and pilasters are drawn from the Classical repertory. Behind the first, irregular court Cardinal d'Amboise constructed a range, the Galerie des Cerfs with the central triumphal gateway, the Porte de Genes (the "Genoa Gate"), which set apart a trapezoidal cour d'honneur surrounded with two-storey ranges, two facing one another with arcaded lower storeys. High pitched slate roofs were rhythmically pierced with dormers. A helical staircase tower stood in one corner.
The north range was the new Grand'Maison, begun in 1502, which contained the suite of apartments of Cardinal d'Amboise. Between the chapel and the Tour de la Sirène at the northeast corner of the château, runs the vaulted gallery open to the view over the valley of the Seine. It is the first French loggia with an outward-looking aspect.
At the center of the court once stood the finest fountain in France, which received its own plate in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France. The fountain was commissioned 14 September 1506 from the Genoese sculptors Agostino Solari, Antonio della Porta and Pace Gazini, as a gift from the Republic of Venice to Cardinal d'Amboise, for having evicted the Sforza from Milan.
It was twenty-two feet high, surmounted by a sculpture of John the Baptist, whose presence was a reminder of such fountains' origins in baptismal fonts, above stacked vase-forms with lactating Graces and urinating boys by Bertrand de Meynal and Jérôme Pacherot. Masks spat water from two superposed basins above an octagonal tank with heraldic and emblemmatic bas-reliefs. At the time it was built the fountain at Gaillon perhaps had no equal in Italy, unless it was inspired by a feature in the gardens of Poggio Reale, laid out for Alfonso II of Naples. The lower octagonal Carrara marble basin was removed from Gaillon when the fountain was disassembled by the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld in 1754 and set up in the gardens at Liancourt (Oise). In 1911 it was removed to the Château de la Rochefoucauld, where it may be seen today on the upper terrace.
From the main court a second turreted gatehouse in one corner opened onto a bridge across the moat that provided access to a large courtyard, on the far side of which a range of new buildings with a central towered gateway opened into the splendid enclosed parterre designed by Pacello da Mercogliano. Its wide central gravelled walk led through a central pavilion open in four directions to a two-story pavilion set into the far wall. The high ground to the left was planted with trees. On the right a long gallery enclosing the parterre separated it from the patterned beds of vegetables and fruit-trees on a lower level, beneath a massively buttressed retaining wall. A number of conservative features stand out in this project at the dawn of the French formal garden, notably the enclosure of the main parterre and the lack of cohesive linking the various features. "At Gaillon the possibilities of the terraced site are ignored as also had been the case at Blois, and the use of ramps or stairs to achieve an architectural unity did not seem as yet a possibility" (Adams 1969 p 18).
At Gaillon Charles Cardinal de Bourbon succeeded Cardinal d'Amboise. For him an avenue was cut through the woods of the uppermost garden level; it led to a terrace cut into the wooded slope with the Maison Blanche, a two-story white marble pavilion with an arcaded lower story that was set on an artificial island at the end of a short canal; at the other end was a "hermitage" of rockwork rising from the center of a square water tank. Both the pavilion and the rockwork Parnasse de Gaillon contained grottos, the one natural, the other architectural. In 1566, when the Cardinal entertained Catherine de' Medici during the siege of Rouen at the height of the Wars of Religion, the Maison Blanche was the setting for a pastoral masque. The features were engraved by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, whom William Howard Adams has suggested may have designed the ensemble (Adams 1969 p. 25-26, figs 17-18).
Gaillon received a long succession of royal guests: Henri III and Henri IV, Louis XIV, and chancellor Séguier.
Jacques-Nicolas Colbert, the son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Archbishop of Rouen, further embellished the château and its grounds with the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre.
Gaillon was burned out in a violent fire in 1764, but reconstructed: here the Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld received Benjamin Franklin and Louis XVI as a Carthusian monastery until the Revolution. Vandalized and emptied in 1790, it was sold as a national property and partly dismantled, then served as a penitentiary 1812-1827 before being sold again to a local farmer in 1834, with the laconic remark "Ce domaine est des plus beaux de France."
One section of Fra Giocondo's facade of Gaillon was removed under the direction of Alexandre Lenoir in the early nineteenth century for his Museum of French Monuments in Paris. Lenoir's collection of architectural remnants stood on land across the Seine from the Louvre, the very ground that the French government provided for the establishment of the École des Beaux-Arts around 1830. At the direction of architect Félix Duban the portal was integrated into the courtyard design and served as a model for students of architecture. Recently the elements of the Galerie des Cerfs and the Porte de Gênes have been restored to their original positions at Gaillon once again.
The Château is distinctly battered in its present appearance. An idea of the refinement of its furnishing can be derived from the marble bas-relief of St, George and the Dragon, executed in 1508 for the high chapel by Michel Colombe, now at the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Château de Gaillon

The Château d'Acquigny is a French castle located in the department of Eure in Upper Normandy.
The present castle was built in 1557 by Anne de Laval and was listed in the French National Inventory of Historical Monuments in 1926.
Topography and climate
Acquigny sits at the confluence of two rivers: the Eure, formerly navigable to Chartres, and the Iton. The two rivers were dammed and redirected during the twelfth century by the monks of Conches-en-Ouche to power mills in the region. These newly created branches also fed into the castle's moats, which protected the Saint-mals monastery and the medieval village located directly behind the current castle.
On either side of the château are heavily wooded hills. This shelters the valley in which the château lies from wind, creating a microclimate slightly warmer than the surrounding areas.
History
Medieval fortress
The Renaissance château that exists today was built on the site of a medieval fortress that had been built in the 11th century to protect Normandy while William the Conqueror was campaigning in England.
Following the imprisonment of Charles II of Navarre in 1356, the Duke of Lancaster was sent by the King of England to rescue Philip of Navarre, brother of Charles. His army of twelve hundred horsemen, sixteen thousand archers and two thousand armed brigandines convened in Évreux.
The original fortress was taken by Navarre and his army. Following the Battle of Cocherel, the castle served as a refuge and stronghold for Navarre. Control of this strategic location along the two rivers caused much anxiety for the king of France, who feared a loss of influence in the High Normandy Region and ordered his forces to retake Acquigny. After a six-month siege by the French forces, the fortress was retaken.
In 1378, the fortress was razed by Charles V, who wished to destroy any fortifications and castles in Normandy that stood for the King of Navarre. Charles V was successful in this aim with the exception of Cherbourg, which the French could not capture.
When the English were forced out of Normandy in 1450, Anne de Laval took possession of Acquigny. In an act to pay homage to the king of France, Anne de Laval combined the baronies Acquigny and Crevecoeur Crevecoeur.
The castle today
The present castle was built in 1557 by Anne de Laval, daughter of Guy XVI de Laval and widow of Louis Silly. She was also the cousin of the king and first lady of honor Catherine de Medici. She wanted the architects Philibert Delorme and Jacques Androuet Hoop to design a castle inspired by the eternal love she bore for her husband. The castle's crest is made from the couple's intertwined initials (ALS); the floorplan of the château also takes the form of this triglyph. On the central turret there is a vault in the form of a seashell in tribute to the Way of St. James. This facade of honor is coated with many other decorative elements that celebrate the love she held for her husband.
The castle was purchased in 1656 by Claude Roux Cambremont. In 1745, Pierre-Robert Roux Esneval, known as the President of Acquigny and the great-grandson of Claude Roux Cambremont, expanded the castle. Pierre-Robert Roux Esneval employed the architect Charles Thibault to rebuild the chapel of Saint-mals as well as stables and sheds. It was at this time that the orangery was built, along with the Church of Saint Cécile and the Little Castle, which was designed to be attached to a hermitage.
Gardens
The vast park created during the 17th century follows a circular route. The forest is filled with large chestnut trees, many over two hundred years old.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the park à la française was converted into a Romantic garden, with elements such as a cascade and a path of rocks based on a theme dear to Jean-Jacques Rousseau inReveries of the Solitary Walker.