vanessarama

Well, watching the awesomeness of the last Merlin has egged me on to post these.

What to expect: fangirling of inanimate locations; bizarre camera angles; stuff I found interesting.
What not to expect: actors; le filming; good photography.

We went to Pierefonds in the first week of September. We'd stayed overnight in Compiegne, and took a taxi to Pierrefonds. The taxi driver asked "Pour le filming?" so they evidently are used to fanpersons :) He said the filming was probably over (I didn't tell him it was just about to begin again) and I said we didn't care, we just wanted to see the chateau.

It was a beautiful drive, through countryside and woods that (like everywhere in Europe) seem astonishingly green to us drought-weary Australians. When he dropped us off, it was with a flourishing "Voila le chateau!" And he was right:

There it was facing us. It's big. BIG. Here is

vissy in its shadow:

You get to the interior part of the castle via a path that winds around the base of the chateau and gave us the opportunity to wander through the actual purpose-built set of the outer village of Camelot:

There was a security guard here, sitting in a car watching a DVD and looking extremely bored. We snapped the cunningly-incorporated-into-actual-wall water pump:

This must be a bit of the original castle ruin:

Eventually we wended our way to the entrance:

Yes, that is a crooked shot. I am not the straightest shooter in the world. Over the bridge and we entered the courtyard:

My first impression of the courtyard was, cliche as it is, that it's much smaller than it looks on TV. I almost thought we'd actually got to a smaller secondary courtyard or something, until I recognised this chap:

I took some snaps of

vissy. Besides the obligatory tourist poses,

there were the fangirl poses, like this one of

vissy sitting exactly where Bradley filmed Colin 'doing his homework' in the first season DVD extras:

The courtyard is full of fascinating little extra things to look at. Check out the mini-castles which adorn the railings:

There are also many gargoyles:

and strange rain spouts:

which exhibit strange behaviour:

And then there are the interesting statues on the steps. This is my favourite:

It's a... pelican? With wings. And breasts. Many, many breasts.

Anyway. This cloister-passageway-thingy features in almost every episode:

Each archway here is also adorned with many interesting little carvings and critters. Here, very appropriately, is a dragon:

Here's a little mediaeval dude industriously working away:

And here is a bat. With more breasts.

Continuing on into the castle, we were pleased to discover the gryphon staircase which has featured in many episodes.

THe gryphon itself is also pretty impressive.

Eventually we found our way to the throne room, where you may notice some non-mediaeval banners:

Along with a handy explanation for the one or two non-fannish people who might visit:

Poor Rohan got there first and patiently waited ages to hear us fangirls squee when we arrived :) There were actually a number of little signs about the place showing scenes that had been filmed there, like this one:

But at one point I went back a second time through the barracks, which has also been used in the show:

to find that the signs were being removed! I guess they were getting ready for the filming, which was to begin the next week.

The barracks, incidentally, was where they displayed some mediaeval grafitti from the Tower of Arthur. I kid you not.

We also found this, which gave us a bit of a wtf? moment:

Did they know we were coming?!?

There were many rooms I took photos of which are not (as far as I know) used as filming locations for Merlin, but this post is getting a bit long already to show all of them. Here's a groovy fireplace.

From higher up in the castle you get a nice shot of the village of Pierrefonds:

And you can also see the extent of the Camelot town frontages!

There's a chapel with a lovely stained glass window:

which you can see from the outside here:

This bit is used extensively in the s3 opener:

We also went to the crypt. The crypt is freaky. The stairs down there are, of course, the stairs to the cells which Merlin has run up and down any number of times:

But then you get to the actual crypt bit. Like all crypts, it's full of effigies.

I used flash to take most of these shots, because you couldn't actually bloody well see anything inside the crypt itself. They had some kind of freaky psychedelic light show going on with flashes of colour playing over the effigies. It looked like this:

So you couldn't actually see what you were supposed to be looking at. I wish people wouldn't mess with their monuments in an attempt to make them more interesting. There was also some recorded narration going on, but sadly I don't know enough French to have made any of it out. However, the statues of dead people were themselves kind of interesting. I freaked out when I got to this bit, though:

It reminds me way too much of those nightmares where you're in a morgue and all the corpses suddenly sit up. What? You don't have those?

Anyway. By the time we staggered out of the castle, it had turned into a gorgeous day. We went to the village for lunch and observed the castle looming over it:

Then we had a pleasant walk by the lake:

Where we met the Chat de Pierrefonds!

She was very friendly, but she abandoned us to go have a drink with a friend:

And then we hopped on the bus back to Compiegne. Bonus Compiegne story: I went to buy the train tickets back to Paris and asked the guy behind the counter (in French), 'Do you speak English?' He responded with 'No; do you speak Portuguese?' In my high school French I somehow muddled through and bought tickets. We also bought some yummy pastries and went to eat them by the river where we encountered large, sleek rats. Eeeeek! And... done.