The Castle of the La Flocellière

900 years of History

The first document concerning the castle dates from 1090. During the middle ages, it was one of the main fortresses in the region then known as the Bas-Poitou. The main tower (keep) was built in the thirteenth century, then enlarged in the fifteenth century, giving the structure its near present-day appearance.

Until the sixteenth century, the lords of La Flocellière belonged to the powerful Surgères family. The wife of René de Surgères, the last of the line, was a poetess who wrote in the style of Ronsard. During the Wars of Religion, the castle was the scene of several battles between Protestant and Catholic forces.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the castle belonged to Jacques de Maillé-Brezé, a king's officer, who became the first marquis of La Flocellière. He fell in love with the young and beautiful lady-in-waiting of Queen Anne of Austria, whose name was Elisabeth Hamilton and whom he abducted and brought to La Flocellière, where she was known as the "Belle Ecossaise" (the beautiful Scotswoman).

In the time of Jacques de Maillé, the former fortress, which was transformed into a spacious and open residence and equipped with the latest in comfort facilities for the era – particularly running water – took on the appearance that it kept until the Revolution.

The eighteenth century went by without any notable events, except for the marriage in 1743, in the presence of part of the Court, of a daughter of the marquis of La Flocellière with Philippe de La Rochejacquelein, whose grandson became "Monsieur Henri", one of the heroes of the Vendée insurection against the revolutionary forces in 1793.

At the end of January 1794, in the darkest hours of the Wars of the Vendée, the uninhabited castle was taken and burned by the "Infernal Columns" led by General Turreau (the Republican soldiers fighting the people of Vendée in 1793). The property was sold in 1796 to a son of a former Forestry and Wildlife officer, Bonnamy de Bellefontaine, who became Brigadier General the same year and who covered himself with glory in the battle of Moskowa (or Borodino) in 1812.

He undertook the restoration of the keep. The restoration was continued by his heiress, the baroness Alquier, who reconstructed a part of the east wing of the castle within the walls of the former seventeenth century orangery and connected the building to the keep by an elegant gothic gallery.

The property was inherited at the turn of the last century by the Hillerin family, originally from Bois-Tissandeau. The castle was then sold in 1958 to the diocese of Luçon, which turned it into a seminary. It was partially abandoned when it was acquired in 1979 by Viscount and the Vicomtesse Erika and Patrice Vignial, its current owners.

A BLEND OF RESIDENTIAL AND MILITARY ARCHITECTURE

The castle is comprised of 6 towers, forming a vast quadrilateral, in the centre of which is located the thirteenth century keep, which in the fifteenth century was endowed with an exceptional spiral staircase on its north face.

THE CASTLE GROUNDS

The pleasure garden, which is surrounded with trimmed boxwood hedges, extends to the west, at the foot of the castle ruins, and includes a vegetable garden, a flower garden and a herb garden.

On the east side, opposite a wing restored in the nineteenth century, a landscaped park contains a wide variety of exotic species: cedars of Lebanon and the Atlas, tulip-poplar from Virginia, American red beech trees, giant sequoias,Chile pines and a famous Oriental cedar whose branches were transplanted from a single stump so that it resembles on the inside a veritable miniature exotic forest.