Château de Ballon

The site is laid out as an enclosed defensive circuit with a rounded triangular plan, each side measuring roughly sixty metres, and it is surrounded by a ditch. The enclosure is punctuated by truncated towers and retains the footprint of its defensive perimeter, giving a clear sense of the medieval plan.

A large, oblong keep dating to the fifteenth century occupies the western angle of the enclosure. This keep is built of the local masonry typical of late medieval construction and stands as the most prominent surviving vertical element of the fortress; its mass and position mark the principal strongpoint of the enceinte.

The main entrance retains a gate with a drawbridge whose core fabric belongs to the thirteenth century and which underwent alteration in the sixteenth century. The entrance sequence preserves evidence of staged building phases and adaptations to changing defensive needs over several centuries.

The principal residential range takes a horseshoe form and is defended by thick stone walls roughly two metres wide that were heavily reworked in the fifteenth century. A stair-tower is integrated into this dwelling up to the fourth level; it contains a stone spiral staircase, becomes polygonal toward the top, ends beneath a slate spire, and carries a small projecting defensive gallery (a bretèche).

A four-storey tower rises within the ensemble and is crowned by an upper gallery with machicolations, a projecting floor for dropping material on attackers, later opened out with large wall openings. The eastern face of the courtyard side was pierced at the end of the fifteenth century with windows set across by horizontal mullions and decorated with sculptural work; vestiges of a small projecting defensive gallery remain on the walls.

Along the corps de logis that faces the ditch, long narrow openings for archery sit beside the large transom windows inserted in the later fifteenth century. Features such as the machicolations and the drawbridge were erected with the authorization of the suzerain, reflecting the formal permissions required for such defensive additions.

Beneath the surface, a subterranean passage is reported to extend for about three hundred metres, said to link the feudal motte with a town house known as the “Auberge de la Tête Noire.” Above ground, the modern garden complex created in the 1960s comprises five connected spaces: an alley of lime trees, a courtyard called the Cour des Lions, a walled medieval-style garden that contains a well dug to forty-five metres which supplied the fortress with water, a panoramic motte, and a rosery. These planted ensembles reuse and accentuate historic features of the site while the well confirms the means by which the castle obtained its water supply.