Beyond the Map and the Manuscript

Revisiting the Château d'Arques: Geometry in Stone

The Château d'Arques is an impressive gothic tower, of uncertain age though typically dated to the 11th century, located just outside the village of Arques, in the Haute Vallée de l'Aude in the south of France. I discuss this château at length in The Map and the Manuscript.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Arques for the first time since the book was published in 2022, and since my realisation that this extraordinary edifice also marked the north-east corner of a large, accurate geodetic square of nearly five miles in width.

This square is implied by its diagonal, an alignment marked by five ancient sites along an accurate 45° bearing. I called it the Arques Square. In the book, I propose that this square was intentionally laid out at some earlier era, and present evidence to support the idea.

I was looking forward to seeing the château again.

Do the design and layout of the château offer any support for my idea, that it marks the corner of a geodetic square carefully laid out in the landscape?

At first sight, it is clear that the château is a perfect candidate for a surveying beacon: it is a tall, straight, square structure oriented to the cardinal directions. It marks its location in no uncertain manner.

Then there is the form itself. The horizontal cross-section of the tower is a very obvious square.

Furthermore, the complex itself highlights the 45° alignment, emphasising it by the placement of the prominent square structure in the south-west corner of the walled compound in which the Château itself sits.

As noted in my book, the 45° diagonal which runs through the Château also runs exactly through this corner building. This corner building reflects and embodies the key design features of the main tower, down to the golden balls on the roof.

With eyes to see, it is apparent that the entire layout and architecture of the Château d'Arques complex signals the idea of the Arques Suare.

I moved around in the field to the south-west of the compound, aligned myself with the diagonal running through both the tower and the corner building, and took the photograph below.

Notice the window highlighted by the red box, in the south-west turret, on the upper floor. This position offers the perfect viewing opportunity to sight down and along the 45° alignment to the south-west, over and across the corner building.

As I was preparing this blog post, I came across some excellent recent photographs of the Château d'Arques published on an account on X called Cathar Wars. They have very kindly extended permission for me to reproduce some of these in this post. The photograph below is one of these, as is the image at the beginning of the post.

This photograph was taken from that very window in the red square, looking SW along the 45° alignment.

This is suggestive, as (I assume) that the photographer had no prior knowledge of the alignment, it being unlikely they had read my book. And yet, the architecture of the building itself led the photographer to stand at this window and point the camera in this direction, to capture this scene. The layout of the tower itself directs the gaze and the eye and the lens.

Beyond the hedge is the field where I was standing to take the photograph above looking back towards the château.

If the photographer had raised the view of the camera slightly to include in the frame the landscape beyond those fields, they would have been looking at the scene below.

I took this photograph below, from ground level just outside the south-west corner of the compound, looking south-west. The 45° alignment passes over that prominent triangular rock outcrop in the centre of the view. It then continues on, over the ridge, through Montferrand Château, the church at Rennes-les-Bains, the Templar commanderie of LaValdieu, and the church at St-Just-et-le-Bézu, marking the other end of the diagonal of the Arques Square.

The final photograph below, also taken by Cathar Wars, shows the other side of the Château d'Arques, including the north and east faces. This image conveys powerfully the aura of the site, and the sheer beauty of the tower and its surrounds.

It shows the "private" side of the compound, the grounds of the château, with lawns and gardens and walkways. It is reserved for those who have access to the compound, further emphasising that the other side, the south-west, is the public facing direction of the complex as a whole.

While I was standing just outside the south-west corner of the compound, I took the opportunity to check the GPS reading on my phone. I had determined that the corner fell as close as could be determined to longitude 2°22'00"E, using Google Earth. Here is the screenshot from the GPS app on my phone:

The corner is within 0.5 arc seconds of longitude of the theoretical ideal 2°22'00.00"E.

In terms of length on the ground, this translates to around 10 metres. Given that the accuracy of the phone GPS is at best +/-5 metres, the corner is as close to 2°22'00.00"E as we could hope to measure.

It was the observation that both this corner, and the door of the church of St-Just-et-le-Bézu at the other end of the 45° alignment, fell on whole numbers of arc-minutes, in relation to the Greenwich meridian of course, which drew attention to the east-west displacement of the two sites as exactly 6 arc-minutes, or 1/10° of longitude.

Of course, the position of these sites was determined many centuries before the Greenwich Meridian was fixed. We could not reasonably attribute any significance therefore to the observation that both sites align to zero seconds of longitude in the Greenwich system. We are entitled though to notice that they are six arc-minutes apart, regardless of the frame of reference we might choose to use for the lines of longitude encircling the Globe.

Having said that, I cannot help but wonder if there is some significance, unreasonable though such speculation might be. Is it remotely possible that the Greenwich meridian is based on, or related to, an earlier, ancient system of fixing longitude?

Or perhaps the alignment of the Arques Square to the Greenwich meridian longitude grid is just a synchronicity. In any case: it is aligned.

And that's just it: these five ancient sites do fall on a straight line, at 45° bearing. Taking this as a diagonal, the geodetic square that it implies does have a width of exactly 1/10° of longitude. This square also has many additional remarkable properties, of measure and geometry.

The square itself cannot of course be directly perceived. It is a geometrical construct, anchored by the five buildings which have been carefully positioned within the landscape to achieve the wider scale design.

And yet every aspect of the Château d'Arques seems to point to the existence of this invisible square as the underlying blueprint for its design.

The design, orientation and assemblage of buildings which make up the Château d'Arques are entirely, even remarkably, consistent with the suggestion that it marks the corner of a large geodetic square.

Unlikely as it might seem, in my view the architects of the complex intended the form of the construction as a reference to its position and function marking the north-east corner of the Arques Square.

​

The Map and the Manuscript: Journeys in the Mysteries of the Two Rennes

Available in Kindle, paperback, hardback and now ePub.

​Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Great British Bookshop​