Château de Gisors

The castle at Gisors was a Norman border fortress, built to hold the frontier between Normandy and the French king's lands. The Knights Templar held it for a period in the 12th century. That is the whole of the documented connection between Gisors and the Templars, and it is the seed of everything that came after.

Roger Lhomoy was the castle's gardener and caretaker. Convinced that something was buried under the feudal mound, he dug at night, alone, for years. In March 1946 he came to the town hall with an account of what he said he had reached: a Romanesque chapel underground, stone sarcophagi set along the walls, and 30 metal chests stacked in the nave in columns of 10.

The tunnel was declared unsafe and filled in. Lhomoy never brought out a single object from it, and nobody else ever saw the chapel he described.

The story would have ended there. It did not, because the writer Gérard de Sède published it in 1962, and André Malraux, then France's minister of culture, ordered official excavations at the castle. They ran into the mid 1960s. They found no chapel and no chests.

The castle is open today, and the guided tour goes down into the cellars beneath the mound Lhomoy spent six years digging into.

The Prisoner's Tower. The graffiti cut into its walls by prisoners is real, medieval, and on the standard tour. It is the one thing at Gisors that is old, strange, and still there.

Lhomoy's six years. He dug at night for years without being stopped, which tells you something about how loosely the mound was watched, and produced nothing portable, which tells you something else.

Malraux's excavations. A sitting culture minister putting state excavators into a castle on the strength of a gardener's story is the most remarkable fact in the case. They dug. There was no chapel.

The castle park is free and open all year, from 9am to 5pm between October and March and until 7:30pm from April to September. It is entered directly from the streets of Gisors.

The keep, the Prisoner's Tower with its medieval graffiti, and the cellars beneath the feudal mound are reached only on a guided tour. Tours run from the 15th of April to the 30th of October at 10am, 2pm, and 5pm and last about 90 minutes, with tickets at 9 euros and a reduced rate of 4 euros. Children under 12 go free and children under 6 cannot join the tour. Groups are capped at 18 people, so it is worth booking ahead and confirming availability with the castle office.

The monument has more than 300 steps along with slopes and narrow staircases, so sturdy footwear helps. Gisors is on the rail line from Paris and the castle is a short walk from the station.