Name - Chateau de Rochechouart
Location - Rochechouart
Department - Haute-Vienne 87
State - Chateau/Townview
Rochechouart (Haute Vienne, Dept 87), a beautiful walled town roughly 45km west of Limoges, has two claims to fame.
Two hundred million years ago it was the site of impact of one of the largest meteorites ever to hit earth, a monster 1.5km in diameter. The traces of this cosmic calamity still attract the curiosity of astronomers.
A small museum in the town called the Espace Meteorite Paul Pellas, attempts to uncover the history of the meteorite with artists impressions, an interactive model and a collection of other space debris which has reached the Earth. One building using the stone from the impact is Rochechouart's other source of pride, the handsome Chateau.
A forgotten train station, It's been a long since the last train stopped here. Just recently restored.
The Chateau stands at the town's edge. It started life as a rough fortress before 1000 AD, was "modernized" in the XIIIth century (the keep and entrance survive from this period) and civilized with Renaissance decoration and additions in the XVth. Until it was acquired by the mairie in 1832, it had belonged to the de Rochechouart family for 800 years.
Today it houses not only the town hall, but also the very well-regarded and adventurous Musee Departemental d'Art Contemporain, with an important collection of works by the Dadaist Raoul Haussman, who died in Limoges in 1949. In another room decorated with its original sixteenth-century frescoes of the Labours of Hercules, the British artist, Richard Long, has made a special installation of white stones, while in the garden Guiseppe Penone's metal sculpture grapples with a tree.
