The Château du Plessis-Josso is a fortified 14th century manor house in the Morbihan département of France. The manor is located in the town of Theix, near Vannes. The manor-house is open for tours during the summer, and offers its main hall for hosting events and marriages as well as a small country cottage outside the enclosing walls.
History
Well-preserved and partially inhabited, the manor-house stands next to a large pond. This feudal Breton ensemble still has its fortified enceinte with towers and crenellated walls that protected it from the armed gangs and pillagers who were operating in the region during the Hundred Years' War and later during the Wars of Religion of the 16th century.
Built around 1330 by Sylvestre Josso, squire of the Duke Jean III during the turbulent period of the Breton War of Succession in the 14th century, it passed next by a powerful alliance to the Rosmadec family and served as a residence for dignitaries such as a bishop, sénéchaux and the governors of various Breton towns. In the late 18th century it became the property of the Le Mintier de Léhélec family who still live there today.
Plessis-Josso, like all 15th century manors in Brittany, had especially an agricultural function as the head of a domaine of 1,500 hectares spread over several parishes and with a population of nearly 500 inhabitants. It had several mills, baker's ovens, a chapel and a small private port in the Gulf of Morbihan. Its role was therefore political, economic and administrative.
Architecture
This medieval site is composed of several sections of varying architectural styles and eras: the main corps de logis dating from the 15th century with its Gothic dormer windows, a 16th-century Renaissance pavilion, Classical 17th century outbuildings, and a complete enclosing wall whose corner tower (tour d’angle) defended the access road that spans the causeway, between the lake and the mill.
The ground-floor hall has a very beautiful example of a crédence de justice (wall-cupboard built directly into the stone wall) that was used by the lord of the manor to place books and documents relating to the administration of the manor-court.

Château du Plessis-Josso

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The Château de Largoët, also known as the Tours d’Elven (Elven Towers), is a medieval castle in Elven, in the Morbihan département of France, 13 km from Vannes.
History
A castle is mentioned for the first time in 1020, belonging to the baron of Elven, Derrien I, but the present building was constructed between the 13th and 15th centuries. The manor became the property of the Malestroit family in the 13th century. The houses of Blois and Montfort fought for it during the Breton War of Succession, before it came to the Rieux family in the 15th century. It was during this period (between 1474 and 1476) that Jean IV, lord of Rieux, protected Henry Tudor, Duke of Richmond, future King Henry VII of England. In 1490, Charles VIII of France, dismantled the castle, but it was restored under the influence of Anne de Bretagne.
Nicolas Fouquet bought it in 1656 and, after his death, it was sold to Michel de Trémeurec and stayed in his family. In the 19th century, it was proposed to demolish Largoët, given its dilapidation, but it was saved thanks to Prosper Mérimée, who had it classed as a monument historique in 1862. Beginning in the 1970s, there has been a programme of restoration.
Architecture
The ruins of Largoët maintain their imposing aspect, notably because of the 14th century octagonal keep. At 45 m, it is one of the highest in France (for comparison, the keep at the Château de Vincennes reaches 52 m). There are five floors and the walls are between 6 and 10 m thick. On the sixth or seventh floor is the room where Henry Tudor stayed.
As well as this colossal edifice, Largoët also boasts
A 15th-century gatehouse, marking the entrance to the fortress, built against another 13th-century building.
A round tower of three storeys, from the 15th century, with cannon openings on the first level, and covered with a hexagonal building. It was furnished in the 20th century as a hunting lodge. It has been used as a location for historical films, including Lancelot du Lac and Chouans.
The remains of the enclosing walls, dried up moats and a lake.
The ruins of a construction known as an ice house (glacière), used as a food store.
The entrance to a vast cellar which was used to store wood.
An underground mystery
An underground tunnel at one time provided an exit from the fortress, but its entrance has not been found. Works in the Lion d'Or inn, in the centre of Elven, could bring this to light.

Forteresse de Largoët

The Zoo and Botanical Garden of Branféré (French: Parc animalier et botanique de Branféré) is a 35-hectare (86-acre) zoo and botanical garden located in Le Guerno, Morbihan, Brittany, France.
The park is open daily except in winter, and an admission fee is charged. Visitors can see the animals roaming freely in a centuries-old botanical garden.
History
From 1662 until 1988, the garden was a private estate, with a château built in 1848 by the family of Freslon Freslonnière. It was acquired in 1884 by Casimir Jourde, whose grandson Paul became a wildlife painter and world traveler. In the 1930s Paul and his wife, Hélène Castori, having discovered a game reserve maintained by Khengarji III, Maharao of Kutch, decided to create an "animal paradise" at Branféré by letting exotic animals from around the world acclimatize to the property and roam free, creating a park where animals and humans could interact. In 1965 the park opened to the public after thirty years of development, and in 1988 it was bequeathed to the Fondation de France.
Animals
Today the park contains almost 1,000 animals representing nearly 150 species, including antelope, gibbons, hippopotamus, lemurs, llamas, prairie dogs, tapirs, wallaby, zebras, and yaks, as well as flamingos, parrots, pelicans, and storks, all set within landscapes of prairies, waterfalls, and small islands. Its grounds have displayed botanical plantings since the 18th century, and today contain about 70 species of trees and shrubs including araucaria, azaleas, camellias, laricio pines, rhododendrons, sequoia, and a 300-year-old weeping specimen listed as one of the remarkable trees in France.
Education
The Fondation de France, in collaboration with the Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature et l'Homme and the commune of Muzillac have created the Nicolas Hulot School for Nature and Man, open since 2004 at Park Branféré.

Château de Branféré

The Château de Suscinio or de Susinio is a French castle, built in the late Middle Ages, to be the residence of the Dukes of Brittany. It is located in the commune of Sarzeau in the département of Morbihan, near the coast of the Atlantic ocean. The spectacular site comprises the moated castle, a ruined chapel, a dovecote, and a few ruined outbuildings.
History
Designed to be a place of leisure, between the seaside and a forest full of game for hunting, the castle's first logis seigneurial (seigniorial house) dates from the beginning of the 13th century.
The castle was fortified and enlarged, at the end of the 14th century, when the heirs of the duchy had to fight to keep their assets (Brittany was not yet fully united to France and did not become so until 1514), after the castle was taken by Bertrand du Guesclin, the infamous Constable of France. John V and John VI constructed a new seigniorial residence block with a large, new corner tower known as the Tour Neuve. A casemate was added at the end of 15th century to protect artillery pieces.
Suscinio and the Wars of the Roses
From 1471 to 1484, the castle housed Jasper Tudor, Henry Tudor (later King Henry VII of England), and the core of their group of exiled Lancastrians, numbering about 500 by 1483. Since the castle could only house some 100 persons, the rest must have been billeted close about, in Kermoizin and other villages nearby.
Francis II, Duke of Brittany, generously supported this group of exiled Englishmen against all the Plantagenet demands that he should surrender them. For 11 years, Suscinio was an armed camp, alert against any attempt to kidnap Jasper and Henry and return them to England where they were under attainder and would have been promptly executed as threats to the Yorkist rule.
Duke Francis II supported the failed Lancastrian rebellion and invasion of England in 1483 with 40,000 gold crowns, 15,000 soldiers, and a fleet of transport ships. When the Duke suffered from one of his periods of incapacitating illness, his treasurer, Pierre Landais, agreed to surrender Henry Tudor to the representatives of the Yorkist King Richard III of England, in return for a pledge of 3,000 English archers to defend Brittany against a threatened French attack. News of this plot by Landais reached the exiled Lancastrians just in time for both the Tudors to separately escape, hours ahead of Landais' soldiers, across the nearby border into France, where they were received at the court of King Charles VIII of France.
Shortly thereafter, when Duke Francis II regained his faculties, he offered the 400 remaining Lancastrians, still at and around Suscinio, safe-conduct into France and even paid for their expenses. This may have been the last official use of the castle by the Breton Dukes. Duke Francis II died in 1488, and was succeeded by his 11-year-old daughter, Anne of Brittany, last ruling Duchess of Brittany, and twice Queen of France. She died in 1514 and Brittany lost its autonomy, becoming part of France.
The castle was then slowly abandoned by the aristocracy. In the early sixteenth century, the former great hall of the 14th century, along the northern curtain-wall, was destroyed. The castle was then confiscated by the French crown under King Francis I of France who offered it to one of his mistresses. In 1795, Suscinio was temporarily occupied by the royalists coming from Quiberon and heading to the north of Morbihan. Written off in the 17th and 18th centuries, the castle was used off-and-on as a stone quarry until the French Revolution.
During the Revolution, it was sold to a merchant who continued to sell the stones, and it soon after fell into even greater ruin.
The restoration
The Département of Morbihan bought it in 1965, from the family of Jules de Francheville who attempted to preserve and restore the castle, and began the restoration in earnest. The remains of a ducal chapel was found in the vicinity outside of the moats; its remarkable tiled floor has been carefully removed and restored and is now exhibited in a hall of the castle.
Nowadays, Suscinio Castle has again regained its allure of an intact medieval fortress, but major restoration work continues.
The castle may be unique in Western Europe because of its restoration to its presumed late-15th century condition; because many other medieval fortresses made obsolete by the use of cannon in warfare were either dismantled or modernised to become "comfortable country houses". Today, few other medieval fortresses remain, structurally, as they were at the height of their late-medieval strength and power; and in this lies the particular interest of the Château de Suscinio.
Exhibitions and summer events attract many people. Since 1840, the castle has been listed as a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture.

Château de Suscinio

According to tradition, the land of Tredion was once owned by the youngest sons of the Maison de Bretagne; At that time the castle was a hunter’s meeting place for the Breton dukes when they stayed at Elven. The construction probably dates back to the 14th century. There is a deed dated 1427 in which the existence of the Manor is mentioned.

Until the beginning of the 17th century, Tredion was part of Largoët which meant that the Lord who owned one of the fiefs also owned the other.

According to Hervé of Halgouet, a descendant of Alan the Great inherited Largoët which, in the 12th century was acquired by the Malestroit family.

The Malestroits owned Tredion until the middle of the 15th century.
In 1461, Françoise Raguenel, Lady of Malestroit, married Jean IV, Lord of Rieux and Rochefort, Marshal of Brittany. This Lord died shortly after the restoration of Tredion manor on the side of the building upon which he had had his coat of arms sculpted.

Claude I de Rieux, son of Jean IV and of Isabeau de Brosse, his third wife, inherited Largoët and Tredion in 1518. After his death in 1532, Suzanne de Bourbon managed his estate. Tredion was bequeathed to Renée of Rieux who married Louis de Saint-Maure, marquess of Nesle in 1541.

Renée de Rieux died in December 1567 leaving no children. Her property, including Tredion, was inherited by her nephew Guy-Paul de Coligny (1555-1586).

In 1584, two years before his death, Guy-Paul de Coligny sold Largoët and Tredion to the Princess of Salm, his mother-in-law.

Anne de Coligny, daughter of the Princess of Salm, then inherited Largoët and Tredion which she sold on 7 July 1613 to Jean de Rieux-Assérac. After his death, in 1630, Jean-Emmanuel de Rieux-Asserac, governor of Guérande, inherited Tredion, but he was soon deep in debt and had to resign himself to the sale of his property in 1643.
In 1650, as a reward for his services, Pierre II de Sérent obtained Letter Patents for the collection of his lands and the creation of a Viscountcy. But at the same time, Nicolas Fouquet (1615-1680), Superintendent of Louis XIV’s finances, purchased Largoët as he did not want to see it separated from Tredion. Fouquet tried in vain to recover Pierre de Sérent’s property.
It seems that Charles II of Lorraine, Duke of Elbeuf and Peer of France (1596-1657) was then the owner of Tredion. His wife, Catherine-Henriette, was the legitimate child of the King of France Henri IV and Gabrielle d’Estrées.
In fact, between 1650 and 1675, there is some doubt as to the name of the owner of the Lord’s residence.
There is, however, one certainty: in 1676, the heirs of Charles II de Lorraine had to sell “castle land, in the lordship of Tredion”. The purchasers were Louis Alvarez, treasurer of the his majesty’s Cents-Suisses and Martin Moisan, a burgher from Paris who, on 8 November 1683, by selling two-thirds to Marguerite Sapien, wife with separate property of Charles Fouquet de la Ferronnière (cousin of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s intendant, who had amassed an enormous fortune during his life thanks to his employment positions, was at the origin of the treasure buried by Charles Fouquet, one of his relations, under an oak tree in the Castle gardens).
Charles Fouquet died at Tredion Castle, where he was interred in the chapel on 6 September 1704. His daughter, who inherited Tredion, also died at the Castle on 18 May 1740.
Guy-Joseph-Joachim de Lantivy, son of Sylvie Fouquet who had married Yacinthe de Lantivy on 25 January 1709 then inherited Tredion. He died on 13 January 1751 and was interred the next day “in the sepulchre of his ancestors, in the chapel of Tredion Castle”.
His son Jean-Louis de Lantivy became the owner of the castle but when the revolution took place, the custodian of Tredion preferred to make his escape.
After the upheaval of the revolution, the Castle was sold to citizen Guillenet. 6 November 1825, Guillenet sold the property to Pierre-Marie Tuffier, who in turn sold it on 21 July 1834 to Hippolyte du Fresne of Virel, who installed a furnace in Tredion, in 1840, to mould cast iron objects.
The extension of the Castle
Shortly after the death of his father, Henri-François-Eustache du Fresne of Virel decided to restore the Castle of Tredion in 1851-1852. This work, which was more in the way of a reconstruction, was entrusted to Jacques Mellet, an architect from Rennes. It was completed in 1859 and cost around 300,000 francs. Mellet only retained the openings from the XIV century building (the East part). This “dwelling” which was just the main building of a hotel without any military equipment was radically transformed by the addition of a perpendicular wing, on the North side. The capacity of Tredion Castle was increased from 9 to 34 rooms. The “castellation” of the castle was brought about by the construction of corner towers, which allowed it to change its status from that of manor house to castle in the architectural field.
Twenty-five years later, in 1844, Henri du Fresne of Virel decided to embark upon a second set of works. He entrusted this project to the Parisian architect Ch. Lorotte who then added “a second living area on the West end of the new wing” and “a large conservatory, with cast iron columns, which doubles the distribution of the lounges on the South side”. While Mellet took pains to ensure the elegance of the outside, Lorotte focused his efforts on the beauty of the interior.
Henri du Fresne, Count of Virel, died on 27 January 1892. He left 2 sons: Alban-Victor, heir of Tredion, and Olivier (born in 1841).
Alban de Fresne, Count of Virel, was the owner of the noble land of Tredion, Grégo (in Surzur) and Vaudequip (near Allaire) in Morbihan, of Virel (in Renac) in Ille-et-Vilaine, Plessis in Saint-Aubin-des-châteaux near Chateaubriand in Lower Loire and Percey in Yonne.
His son, Arthur-Conrad-Guillaume du fresne of Virel, born on 14 January 1878, inherited Tredion. He died on 28 October 1915 at the age of 37. His son Antoine-André-Alban du Fresne of Virel, born in Paris on 6 February 1906 inherited the Castle. He had one daughter, Antoinette. He died on 29 January 1940.
Antoinette du Fresne of Virel, heiress of Tredion married Viscount Jacques de Rougé.
A sales agreement was signed in favour of a property promoter from Vannes, Guy Turpin, on 22 October 1977 and the final deed was signed on 30 September 1978. Tredion entered a new era…
http://www.chateau-tredion.com