Château de Fougères: 13 Towers, a Moat and Brittany's Border Fortress

Most castles stand on a hill. The Château de Fougères sits at the bottom of one. It was built in a loop of the river Nançon on a rocky spur, with the river turned into a moat, and the town grew up on the slope above it, looking down into the castle instead of up.

That seems backwards until you remember what it was for. Fougères stood on the eastern border of the Duchy of Brittany, facing Normandy and France. The castle was there to hold the frontier, with water on three sides, and it took sieges and changed hands more than once over the centuries.

The photo below catches it on an overcast summer day. A fat round tower with a pointed slate roof stands in the moat, curtain walls run off to the right, flags flutter over the ramparts, and weeds grow out of the still green water at the foot of the stones.

What you see

The fortress has 13 towers, built and rebuilt from the 12th to the 15th century, and you can read the changes in the stone. The later towers, squat and massive, were made for the age of cannon. Walk the ramparts and you go through three enclosures, one inside the next, each a defensive line of its own.

Inside the walls there's no palace to visit. The living quarters are long gone. What's left is the shell, the towers and the wall walks, and that's the point: you see the castle as a machine for war.

Writers fell for it too. Balzac set much of his novel Les Chouans, about the royalist revolt in Brittany, in and around Fougères.

Tickets and hours

Full-price entry costs €12, reduced €5, under-6s free. A combined ticket with La Coursive, an exhibition space in the town, costs €14. From June to September the castle opens daily 10:00 to 19:00. In May it's closed on Mondays. From October to April it opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 12:30 and 14:00 to 17:30, and it shuts entirely from early January to early February.

The rest of the town

Climb the steps to the upper town for the view down onto the castle, best from the public gardens by the church of Saint-Léonard. On the way up you'll pass the belfry, a 14th-century tower and one of the oldest in Brittany.

Fougères is under an hour by car from Rennes or from Mont-Saint-Michel, which makes it an easy add-on to a trip to either. It's quieter than both. The castle rarely has a queue.

More on the fortress: Château de Fougères: Inside Europe's Largest Medieval Fortress on Travel Marketing.