The Musée de la guerre au Moyen Âge

The collection

The castle states more than 250 authentic weapons and pieces of armour, gathered from across Europe. French Wikipedia gives a larger count, about 300 pieces spanning the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, and goes further: it calls this the second collection of its kind in France, behind only the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. That ranking is Wikipedia’s and is attributed here rather than asserted, but the scale of what is on the walls is not in dispute. The pieces are displayed in the rooms they belong to — the weapons room, the living quarters, the artillery tower — rather than in a separate gallery bolted onto a castle.

The engines on the bastion

Along the bastion stand full-scale reconstructed war machines, set in attack positions as they would have been ranged against these walls. The castle’s brochure names five: the trebuchet, the mangonneau, the pierrière, the bombarde and the bricole — two counterweight and traction machines, a stone-thrower, an early gunpowder piece and a light swing-beam engine, which together read as a century of siege technology laid out in one line. These full-size engines are not the ones fired in the daily demonstration. The machine that is actually fired is a separate trebuchet built at one-third scale, and the confusion between the two is the most repeated mistake made about this castle. How the firing works.

The models, and the 1442 siege

A room of its own holds scale models of siege engines at 1:10 and 1:20, which is where the mechanics become legible: the counterweight, the sling, the release. The other model in the castle is the set piece. A light-and-sound reconstruction of the 1442 siege plays out the three weeks Charles VII’s forces spent in front of these walls and ends with the English leaving. The siege itself, and what the sources actually say.

The six videos

Screens through the castle cover four subjects: how the fortress was built, how a siege worked, the equipment a fighting man carried, and the restoration works that turned a quarried ruin back into a building. A videogame about freeing an imprisoned character sits alongside them. None of it is long, and all of it is the reason the signposted hour stretches. How long a visit really takes.

The other castle, and the other kind of day

Castelnaud’s ticket is sold by the castle itself, at the gate and on its own site, every day of the year. Across the river, Beynac is the opposite proposition — preserved and furnished rather than restored and armed, with seventeenth-century apartments and a thirteenth-century kitchen — and its entry is the one castle interior in this valley that can be held in advance. Visitors who want the whole story usually do both. The comparison in full.

Book the other half of the story

Entry to the Château de Beynac on the far bank, with the exhibition on Richard the Lionheart and Eleanor of Aquitaine and the bookshop. Self-guided, about an hour, valid one day from first use, under-10s free. From around seventeen euros, free cancellation up to 24 hours before.

Frequently asked questions