Château de Veauce

Veauce

Built on a promontory above the valley of the Veauce, the fortress dates back to the 11th century, belonged to the Bourbons in the 12th, was raised to a barony by Louis II de Bourbon in 1400, then passed to the Crown after 1527; the Cadier de Veauce family gave it its present face between 1841 and 1846. Five towers of the 11th to 14th centuries are arranged around a courtyard, among them the tower known as the Mal-Coiffée, dated 1385, where the legend is set. It tells that in 1559 a girl of eighteen, Lucie, entered the service of the lord Guy de Daillon, who had just married Jacqueline de La Fayette, and became his mistress. Taking advantage of her husband's absence at war, the baroness is said to have had her locked up at the top of the tower, where she died of hunger and despair around 1560. Since then a White Lady is supposed to return on certain nights along the wall-walk and near the Clock Tower, usually before midnight. No direct historical source documents either Lucie or her ordeal: the drama belongs to popular storytelling, even if the existence of Guy de Daillon as lord in 1559 is well attested. The castle was, however, the scene of a very real media episode: on the night of 8 to 9 August 1984, the journalist Jean-Yves Casgha, of the France Inter programme 'Boulevard de l'étrange', set up a dozen microphones and cameras with a team of investigators, at a time when the castle belonged to Baron Éphraïm Tagori de la Tour. The cameras and ordinary film yielded nothing, but a few shots on ultra-sensitive film show a diffuse silhouette, and witnesses described a light with no apparent source lasting some twenty minutes; sceptics see reflections of the moon, and no expert examination has ever established an unexplained phenomenon in the scientific sense of the term.

Château de Veauce — Wikipédia ↗

Getting there : Veauce is a very small village in the Sioule valley, about 6 km north of Ébreuil and some fifteen kilometres north-west of Gannat. The castle overlooks the village and its church of Sainte-Croix; since 2015 it has belonged to an endowment fund that runs it as a cultural venue, with irregular openings: enquire before travelling, though the silhouette remains visible from the village.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound