En un regard
Le château en bref
Pont-l'Abbé-d'Arnoult retains, from its former enceinte, a gatehouse postern listed as a historic monument on 16 June 1926. The priory, given in 1042 by Geoffroy Martel and Agnès de Bourgogne to the abbesses of Saintes, to whom it belonged, was fortified by them in the 13th century: the town then had three gates and dry moats. The Mérimée database dates the main construction of what survives to the 15th century. According to the commune, moats were dug into the rock in 1345, at the beginning of the Hundred Years' War, on the north, east and south sides, the west being protected by cliffs and the Arnoult marshes. The engineer Claude Masse drew up a plan of the fortifications in 1712. During the Revolution, the postern served as a prison. Threatened with demolition at the end of the 19th century to ease traffic, the gateway was saved in 1920 by the installation of the war memorial, which was removed in 1993 and reinstalled elsewhere in 1994. Only one of the three gates survives, its top levelled.