Château du Paty

The château occupies a defended site with a main house set beside ditches and a surrounding moat, flanked by multiple towers and ancillary buildings. Masonry visible today mainly reflects building phases from the late 15th and 16th centuries, while earlier elements survive within and around that later fabric. Roof timbers dated to about 1550 attest to mid‑16th century roofing work.

An interior cellar preserves stonework from the 12th or 13th century, standing in place beneath later floors. That early subterranean space is built of traditional medieval masonry and survives as an in situ part of the complex. Two towers attached to the house rest on foundations characteristic of the 13th century and contain narrow vertical defensive openings, commonly called arrow slits or loopholes, which were exposed again during façade repairs carried out in the 1980s, confirming their medieval date.

A southwest tower, separated from the main house by the ditches and set roughly one hundred metres away, belongs to an older phase probably of the 11th century. This detached defensive point is constructed of deep foundations and large masonry blocks appropriate to an early medieval fortification and remains a visible element of the site’s defensive layout. The south and northeast towers both show evidence of medieval defensive design and have been integrated into later building phases.

The north kitchen wing was added in the 16th century and is notable for its thick load‑bearing walls measuring about 1.40 metres. Service buildings for horses and storage form a pavilion of stables dated to the 16th and 17th centuries; these were remodelled in the 19th century when two lateral pavilions with added upper floors were built, so the present stable range combines Renaissance and 19th‑century construction phases.

Door and window openings on the main walls mainly reflect work of the 15th and 16th centuries, with a single opening surviving from the 15th century in the south tower and a number of later openings produced in the 18th century. An internal staircase installed around 1770 survives as evidence of late‑18th century interior alteration, a project whose progress was halted by the Revolution.

Bridges and access survive as part of the ensemble. The principal bridge that now leads to the house dates from 1850 and displays mid‑19th century structural work. The older approach, historically a drawbridge called the pont de la futaie, served as the only entrance until that bridge was replaced in 1850. The roofs and tower coverings have seen recent conservation: the last known slate covering carried a date of 1870, and a thorough roof restoration undertaken in 2011–2012 lasted approximately eighteen months. During that work each tower covering was renewed using thousands of slates—about 3,700 per tower—laid in seventy horizontal courses with the number of tiles constant by course and slates decreasing in size toward the ridge. Zinc elements from an earlier phase were removed and replaced by metal valleys. Some repair and restoration tasks were carried out by local craftsmen from Chenu who signed their work. The façades, roofs, the access portal, and the bridge over the moat are recorded as protected historic elements, and the fabric visible today thus combines medieval, early modern, and 19th‑century construction preserved through modern conservation.