“The Château Gaillard was so magnificent… … its plan is marvellous, the execution wonderful, and the situation perfect. The whole construction bears the unmistakable stamp of genius… I took ten [photographs] altogether.”
I arrive at a viewpoint above the Seine and find the castle laid out on a ridge before me, its ruined walls and towers standing like a range of broken teeth. In fact there are two main redoubts surrounded by moats (which were always dry). One, in the south, faces uphill like the prow of a ship – it would have borne the brunt of the oncoming wave of invaders. The northern redoubt is far more substantial: it straddles the full breadth of the ridge, with a curtain wall and an interior moat around the main walled bailey, itself set atop another mound. Inside this, the keep, the final sanctuary, stands proud.
I make my way down, arriving between the outer-outer wall and the inner moat, and walk up the wooden bridge to the entrance of the main bailey – its wall, about 75 metres long, is unexpectedly beautiful, built with repeated curves, or scallops, fifteen feet wide.
So far so good, but the ticket office is having trouble and I am asked to wait. I mill around watching the children’s displays and tracing the ruined walls in this enclosure. Once, it contained the Great Hall, a bakery and store-rooms. And here stands the keep, with weird squared sections build into its walls. It contained the throne room and the King’s accommodation. Further delay gives me a chance to read up a little history and then look at Lawrence’s images.
Reputedly designed by Richard the Lionheart himself, as highlighted by Lawrence above, Castle Gaillard was built in just two years at the very end of the twelfth century, 1196-98, as he (the King of England and Duke of Normandy) was battling the French king for Normandy. Having wrested control of the area around Les Andelys he erected Gaillard as a statement of his power.
The castle contained many new features for the age. Machicolations, holes built into the battlements (which themselves no longer exist), enabled hot oil and rocks to be dropped on attackers at the foot of the walls below (relatively easily undermined here, as the ridge is made of chalk). The scallops in the main bailey wall were also new, effective firstly because they gave a greater angle of fire for defenders and secondly because their shape withstood impact better from missiles.
When the ticket office sorts itself out, the keep turns out to be locked up anyway, so I wander around the various battlements and walls, to the look-out across the Seine basin, along the various moats – there would have been a bridge between the two sections of the castle – and along the curtain wall that gave onto the Seine itself, some 400 feet directly below. As always with these castles, eighty or a hundred feet of rock wall is impressive, But Gaillard has a superb position on the ridge. If castles were built to impress the country-folk as much as a defence – they were painted bright colours and were visible from miles around - the farmers of the Seine area would have been in awe. For Lawrence, writing to his family:
“The whole constructions bears the unmistakable stamp of genius… Richard I must have been a far greater man than we usually consider him: he must have been a great strategist and a great engineer, as well as a great man-at-arms. I hope Mr. Jane will emphasise this in his book. It is time Richard has justice done to his talents.”
For all his excitement at seeing and photographing Château Gaillard, his comment offers an interesting insight into his attitude of mind - and the assertive age into which the he was born. He was well informed, confident, decisive, dismissive sometimes, and for all of these qualities, you might add, just a little precocious. He wrote this when he was 18.
