Château de Farcheville

The Château de Farcheville, in the Essonne, is a lowland fortress, an unusual arrangement, and one of the most remarkable in Île-de-France. It has a large rectangular curtain wall surrounded by wet moats, with corner towers and machicolations carried on large pointed arches between buttresses. In the middle of one side, the entrance opens into the rectangular keep, next to an early 17th-century pavilion.

Without excavations inside the enclosure, and given the restorations, no reliable building chronology can be established, but the late 13th-century curtain wall was probably the size of the one that survives. Machicolations on arches are rare in Île-de-France. Inside the enclosure are a seigneurial hall, a tithe barn, outbuildings, a dovecote, coach houses and stables, and a chapel with a panelled vault whose décor probably dates from the early 14th century.

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