43490 ARLEMPDES
The castle, now in ruins, except the chapel and another building not far from it with the ground floor (the armory) has kept its roof, hood basaltic terrain located along the young Loire, whose eastern wall, facing the river, has peaks to a hundred meters high.
It comes roughly a rectangle 30 to 80 feet, bounded by fronts curtain more or less straight, with the exception of the northeast portion of the enclosure, a jagged pattern, where the castle tends to submit to the topographical constraints induced by the morphology of the cliffs there.
The next most exposed is the northwest flank.
The walls are lined with corner towers and flanking towers (seven in total).
In the center of the fortress wall, now in the form of debris, connected to a circular tower, which once served as dungeon, the castle divided into two distinct parts.
The southern half has the appearance of a median clear, while the north is densely occupied buildings, mostly ruined: the chapel, the twelfth century, preserved; a wall, the only element to survive in the old house built by the Poitiers seugneurial the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, vestiges of jail, near the armory, already mentioned, and finally some remains of walls and windows near the entrance gate (dated XII) in the north-west of the castle.
The foundations of the walls date back to the thirteenth century, and the remaining buildings date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that is to say, the time at which the Poitiers strove to restore and rebuild the fortress.
The chapel Saint-Jacques of the twelfth century, built of red stone, and newly renovated, is the only part of the original castle high in the twelfth century. Few decorated and rustic inside, it consists of a barrel-vaulted nave, sides hollowed out in an arc discharge lowered, extended by a round apse vaulted cul-de-four, more or least the same width. (MH Register February 27, 1926 and the countryside in 1945)