Château de Tanlay

The Château de Tanlay at Tanlay is a French château built in Burgundy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, famous for its beauty and the setting. The walls are of limestone under tall sloping slate roofs à la française, surrounding three sides of a central court with cylindrical towers at its four corners. The château is entirely encircled by its rectilinear moat and approached on axis across a bridge marked by paired obelisks through a gatehouse built in 1558, which straddles the low balustrade and projects forward into the moat. The perfect symmetry of the cour d'honneur is part of Tanlay's serene charm.

The foundations are in part those of the thirteenth-century château-fort. The rebuilding in Renaissance style is owing to the brother of the Admiral de Coligny, François de Coligny d'Andelot, who inherited the site in ruinous condition in 1547 and whose construction campaigns of 1555-1568 during the Wars of Religion, when Tanlay was a center of Huguenot resistance, left…