Château de Pépinès

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Château de Pépinès stands in the commune of Hautefage-la-Tour, in the Lot-et-Garonne department. This castrum occupies a limestone spur above the confluence of the Lestaque and Tancanne streams; two wide ditches isolated it from the plateau to the south. The seigneurial residence, built of medium-coursed limestone ashlar, forms a rectangular building measuring roughly 9 metres by 8: a barrel-vaulted lower hall with a pointed vault and a narrow vaulted passage, perhaps an oratory, survive, along with flat buttresses to the south and east. To the east, a quadrangular block, probably a truncated tower, retains the vault of an oven hollowed out of the rock. The curtain wall has disappeared, but the lower bailey with its well can still be made out, as well as traces of the castral village on the slopes. Mentioned in 1259 and 1271, the château belonged at the beginning of the fourteenth century to Arnaud de Durfort, who had it refortified in 1336 at the expense of Edward III. Abandoned after the Hundred Years' War, its remains are privately owned.