The Tour du Roy

The Tour du Roy is a plain square keep, thirteenth century, standing on its own rock with a walled yard around it. It is the only surviving Romanesque donjon in the Gironde and, unlike the bell tower on the other side of the village, it is often empty. From the top the view goes across the roofs to the monolithic tower, and out over the vineyards toward the Dordogne valley.

At ground level the keep gives a clean, blunt subject: bare stone, a single arched doorway, grass and gravel around the base. It works in hard light, which is unusual here — the flat faces take midday sun better than the carved and cluttered lanes below.

The climb is a narrow spiral stair and the platform at the top is small, so a session up there is two or three people, not a group. The keep is ticketed and, like the bell tower, closes early outside the main season, so check the hours before building an evening plan around it.

The lanes below — the Rue du Couvent and the passage that carries the tower's name — are the best of the village's back streets, steeply stepped and almost always empty even when the main square is not.