I knew it

Last winter whilst I worked on earning money to renovate the chateau I was thinking about it a lot. I realised that one of the original outside walls that is now an inside wall must have had windows or doors in it. For the last few centuries it has been covered in plaster. On my return to the chateau this spring I was having a good look at the wall. I noticed an old oak lined cupboard set into it on what would have been the interior of the wall. Upon

removing the half rotten oak a very old doorway was revealed. This has all been covered in an earlier post. So today we started removing the old plaster from the what was once the exterior side of this wall, already knowing where we would find the door and hoping the original stones had not been robbed out when it was closed off. The plaster came off very easily and we have filmed it all for our new upcoming Youtube channel. I was delighted to find that as expected the stone blocks are still in place. This doorway is very old. As you will see when the middle wing was built onto the chateau it cut slightly across this old door, hiding most of the stone blocks on the right side. It would have been at this time that the door was blocked up. We have managed to work out the age that this middle wing was constructed - early 1500's. So this confirms that the door predates that by quite some time. We know that the first records of the chateau are from 1250. As the doorway is set into a wall of the original main hall of the old chateau it means that it is getting on for 800 years old! Unfortunately as we removed more plaster along the wall we did not find any windows. Maybe on the ground floor we will have more luck!