Château d'Albon

The site occupies an artificial mound raised on a natural spur at the ridge’s end, with the defended area stepping down into a large lower court. The mound sits high above the plain and the lower enclosure once contained the settlement called Vieil Albon. The enclosure took a roughly triangular plan and its protective wall ran down from the mound to enclose the settlement below.

A square keep from the thirteenth century still rises on the summit. Externally it measures about 7.20 by 7.40 metres and its masonry walls are roughly 1.65 metres thick. Inside the tower the space was arranged for three timbered floors. Ground-level light came through narrow slits, while the first floor originally had two large round-arched windows, one facing west toward the plain and one to the south, the latter later narrowed and converted into a slit or arrow opening; an eastern slit was later blocked and the upper level had a round-arched opening to the north. Two faces of the tower show later remodelling. The visible stonework is regular ashlar of grey sandstone with pink veining, set with a thick bed of mortar, while earlier phases of the chief tower were constructed first in wood and then in softer sandstone and pebble rubble.

The lower enclosure was protected by an enceinte about one metre thick built of rolled pebbles with a facing that alternates cut blocks of soft sandstone and aligned pebble bands. That wall sheltered the settlement and the cluster of service and domestic buildings below the mound. Surviving stretches of this wall and other masonry elements mark the limits of the old lower court.

Excavations on the spur uncovered a palatial group within the defended area, including a large multistorey stone residential block of the eleventh and twelfth centuries linked to a reception hall. Those structures were built using soft sandstone and pebble rubble. The chapel sequence is archaeologically clear: a small early chapel and large cereal silos are attested by ninth-century remains, the chapel was replaced at the end of the eleventh century by a Romanesque building with decorative mouldings and painted coverings and stained glass, and that chapel was expanded again in the thirteenth century. A building interpreted as a barn was abandoned after a fourteenth-century fire, and traces of that abandonment appear in the excavated layers.

Archaeology has also documented the earlier Gallo-Roman occupation. Foundations and traces of the villa lie beneath the medieval mound and the cereal silos associated with the early settlement were found during the excavations. Today the tower and scattered masonry remain in situ as visible ruins, while other areas were quarried away in later centuries; the ensemble of surviving walls, chapel remains, hall foundations and the motte have been legally protected to preserve what remains.