17th Century Château de Balleroy | Normandy - Seas the Day

Hey everyone and welcome back to the channel. So today we are in somewhere that we've wanted to come to for quite a while now. As you can see I am dressed in my work wear. I'm actually on my lunch break so this is good fun for lunch. But what a place to come for lunch. We have come to the Chateau de Balleroy. No, Palais Roi. Sorry, my bad French. If I spin round you can see it's there. So we're going to go and check out the gardens and have a look around, get some lunch and obviously bring you guys have a look around while we're here. And I've got some fun facts. Of course we've got Jess's fun facts. As usual don't forget to subscribe to the channel and let's go and explore. So this village of Balleroy was actually founded by King Henry IV who sent his wine merchant here to provide all of the wine for his council. And it was only about 40 years later that the chateau was built. It was built in 1631 and it remains quite unchanged since. So it's a pretty impressive building as you can see. So we have just come today to look around the gardens here because it's such a beautiful day and although you can have access into the chateau it is still residential and it is quite closed off. From what I've read online there's only about six rooms you can actually go in and a lot of them have been refurbished to quite modern standards I suppose. So we're going to have a walk around the gardens, we're going to have a look at the architecture from the outside because it is beautiful and probably have a bit of lunch as well. I have taken some photographs and things as well so check out our Instagram account, it's on the bottom. And yeah, pretty exciting. In the way I see your smile There's a warm and welcome feeling For a while In the beginning Just to take us out of here When I hear the way you talk I want nothing else to speak about again I took a nice picture of a tree so I'll let you know on Instagram. There we go, nice picture of a tree. So the chateau was built as I said in the early 1600s and it was actually owned by the same Ballois family until 1970 so it was like, oh sorry, there was all like descendants from the family lived there for all the centuries. In 1970 it was bought by Malcolm Forbes who was the director of Forbes magazine in America and he had a fascination with hot air balloons. So here as well is also a museum dedicated to hot air balloons which we're not going to see because again it's inside and it's such a nice day we don't want to be indoors. But there's been a hot air balloon festival here from when Malcolm Forbes bought the place in the 70s all the way up until 1999 but they stopped the festival for 17-18 years and due to the demand from the locals it started up again in 2007 but it's held locally in a stadium and we were just saying we're quite surprised there's a hot air balloon festival here because there's quite a lot of trees which I've taken pictures of yeah but what Matt doesn't know is that the chateau is in 200 hectares of land so I'm sure in that land somewhere there's a nice clearing for what was the hot air balloon festival. We are just heading back now towards the house and then we're going to have a look around the outside of the house and take some video there but I just wanted to leave a little teaser for you guys. So next week's video we are heading to Cherbourg and we're going to go and have a look around Cherbourg and the marina and things as a possible first stop for when we move our boat on our Mediterranean trip. If you don't know about this trip that's coming up I'll leave a link in our top corner for a video that we sort of spoke about it and what we're going to be doing. We need to go and get a few bits for the boat hopefully this weekend so we're doing that as well. So I just thought I'd let you know what was happening and keep you updated on our travels for next year. So yeah, to the house! So we're walking now to a very rare building found in France, it's called a Colombier which is the pigeon house. So this is the pigeon house there are space for 1,700 pigeons in here and obviously some of them nest in twos and a parrot and a parrot oh yeah there's a parrot right above my head and the reason that these buildings are so rare in France is because during the French Revolution these pigeon houses were seen as being old regime and part of the monarchy rather than the new the new way so they were all ordered to be destroyed. The only ones that weren't were the ones that belonged to aristocracy or to the clergy and this particular one had a central, you can still see the central thing, it had a central ladder that went up it spun around and went up so you could get closer to the pigeons that were nesting. So this pigeon house was very popular at the time because pigeons were sent, were used as messengers, obviously send messenger by a carrier pigeon, they were also used for food and also their droppings were used as fertiliser on the gardens. The pigeon droppings at the time were quite a rich commodity and sometimes they were even seen in dowries for marriages when rich people got married so this one being so huge showed that the landowner had a lot of wealth and I'll do a bit of research as to why it survived how it managed to survive the French Revolution and I'll put it in our blog which you'll see in the description box below. Okay hopefully you can hear us okay the wind has picked up a little bit we've finished looking around the chateau definitely worth a visit if you're coming here and it's one of the top 300 prettiest gardens in France yeah and it is a gorgeous garden there's lots of walks lots and lots we paid six euros just for the gardens but it was well worth it there's lots of places for picnicking and you can have a real big explore and lots of different walks definitely add to your list what three words will be in the description I'm sure show you guys where we are as I said earlier Cherbourg is our next stop yes so we will be there next Friday as always thank you guys so much for watching we really appreciate all the support we're getting from the channel right now so as always keep subscribing give us a thumbs up for the video and of course ring the bell to notify you when our video comes out which will be next Friday so until then have a great week and we'll see you then