Cantering on

A journal of château life - 22nd - 28th March 2026

Cantering on – audio version

Sunday 22nd March

The sun is just beginning to make its tired way towards the horizon, its light softening and glowing slightly golden, bouncing off the pale limestone walls and tinging the magnolia blossoms with pink. I stand in the meadow looking back across the moat, Château de Bourneau is a “real” château, with its turrets, twisting spiral staircases and a huge park. It’s exactly the kind of building that people imagine when you say “I live in a château.”

If like Erin and JB you lived in a house like this, no one would send you messages or leave comments telling you that the building you live in is not a château, but a manoir or a maison de maître. Each time we receive one of these messages, usually written spitefully, its intent to wound, I sigh. I’ve stopped explaining, I just roll my eyes and send them the dictionary definition of a château, which has very little at all to do with the style of building, but is entirely to do with the people who have lived in it; in our case a long line of knights and nobles, before it was owned by us two English peasants. Funnily enough they never reply.

We have spent the weekend laughing about these messages and the other bizarre things we’ve had to contend with over the last eight years. Swapping stories and anecdotes about the vagaries of trying to establish and run a business in a France, of managing the wilds of social media and trying to learn French, of DIY disasters and attempting to make the books balance, but most of all of how there really aren’t as many days like these as we’d imagined, where we sit in the sunshine drinking rosé in the garden and soaking it all up.

Monday 23rd March

I kneel between the trees in the lime avenues, carefully tucking myself in between the cowslips and celandines, searching for a bare patch of earth. Beside me a plastic bag rustles in the breeze, it’s full of wild primroses, the palest yellow flowers dug up (with permission) from the woods at Château de Bourneau. Vendéen soil clings to their roots, a little bit of Erin and JB’s home brought back here to the Sarthe. I scatter them between the trees, tucking them into our Sarthoise soil, lugging a bucket of water back and forth to give them a drink and help them settle in. I hope they take, making themselves at home here, growing stronger and reproducing as the years move on, until we have swathes and swathes of them too.

It’s good to be home after a lovely weekend away, a little break to give us the energy and motivation to make good progress with the sitting room. With the boys away there are no constraints on our time, no school runs, no set meal times, fewer interruptions; we’re hoping to get a whole lot done.

Tuesday 24th March

From the top of the ladder I sweep the cobweb brush along the cornice, chasing away the angry spiders and gathering up their webs. I fill holes I haven’t noticed before, caulk gaps and tap in any proud nails I spot on the panelling by drumming a hammer on the back of a chisel so I don’t damage the wood with my blows.

With a bucket of steaming, soapy water and a thick cloth I wash down the old doors, working the cloth between every moulding, digging out years of dirt. Back up the ladder I wipe the ceiling, cleaning away any marks and smudges that might discolour the paint. Tim is in and out, the saw screeching, the drill whirring as he builds the bookshelves. We’re both focused on getting as much of this room done as we possibly can.

Alain pops in for coffee and a catch up, sucking his teeth when he sees the guest salon piled with sofas and furniture and the contents of our sitting room cupboards. “We still have four and a half weeks,” I say. “We’ll get it all done.” I really hope we will. We need to leave ourselves some time for maintenance and pre-season prep, the next two weeks are going to be the most important.

Wednesday 25th March

My head is tilted to one side and then the other, I shift it as often as I can to ease the strain on my neck as I stare upwards at the ceiling. I’m working my way slowly around the room, moving my ladder a few feet each time, carefully painting the old plaster mouldings, wiggling my brush in between the troughs and rounds.

I’ve chosen a warm white for the ceiling to complement the warmth of the pink for the walls, but despite all the washing and scrubbing the old ceiling is still so grubby and yellowed that the white looks bright and bluey. The fresh paint is crisper though, making the cornice look sharper and more defined.

I stop every now and then to ease my neck and shoulders and gaze out the tall window. The sun is still shining and the sky is still blue, but a sharp northerly wind has blown in, making everything in the garden stand stiffly, upright and tense against the cold. The wind makes the daffodils shudder and the trees, with their just opening leaves, are bending and swaying in the feisty gusts.

I run out of time and neck strength to paint the rest of the ceiling today, at least a roller will make swift work of the main section, and then we’ll see about the second coat. Brushes washed, I slip outside to tuck in and close up the greenhouse, stretching out my arms to the wildness of the wind and letting the unfamiliar cold bite at my cheeks.

Thursday 26th March

It’s late, the sun already sliding away behind the barn, but I switch on the light and plug in a lamp so I can keep on painting. With no boys here to feed I can make the most of my time.

I finished painting the ceiling this morning, though an annoying missed spot is now staring down at me in the lamp light, and then I started on this long, slow job of undercoating the panelling. As I work, wiggling my brush into the corners and crevices to coat them in paint, the different layers and colours of wood are hidden away. Tim hates it; unpainted you can see all the work, every single bit of wood cut individually to build each panel, but under a layer of white paint it all looks as one, his hard work hidden. This is how it’s meant to look though and it’s beautiful.

The last of the light plays across it, sending shadows of the garden dancing over its surface, the light bouncing into the room. Tomorrow I will need to sand all the panels down again, then brush away the dust and then finally, maybe I can get some colour on the walls.

Friday 27th March

I vacillate wildly between feeling optimistic that we’ll get this room finished and a sinking, anxious terror that we’ll have to start the season with some bare walls and holes in the floor. Today the anxious terror is sitting heavily in my stomach.

I know that action and good plans are the only way to ease this feeling so I stand in the middle of the room and work backwards from opening day. At this time in precisely four weeks we need to ready to open, to do that the contents of our sitting room, which are currently scattered throughout the house need to be in their new homes.

Wall colour is going to have to wait, as tempting as it is, it makes more sense for me to undercoat the backs of the old wall cupboards so they can be painted out next week and Tim can install the shelves and doors. Then if all else fails we can re-home all the boxes of linens, candles, vases and board games and get the guest side of the house clear.

We have until the end of next week, Easter weekend, to get as far as we can, I tell Tim. Then we’ll spend a week clearing and sorting and moving furniture so the guest rooms are clear and ready for pre-season prep. Then we can divide the last two weeks between the gīte, the guest side of the house and finally the sitting room and see where we get to.

I tuck myself into the cupboards and start undercoating, refreshing my phone map every hour or so to watch the boys make their slow ways home through Italy and Germany and back into France.

It’s late afternoon before I get the first bit of colour on the wall, a milestone I was determined to reach. The first few patches of colour are up, hopefully by the end of next week it will all be painted, but we’ll have to see. There’ll be some late nights of hard work, but not tonight, because tonight I need to hug my boys.

Saturday 28th March

I fill a bucket with garden flowers, tulips, ranunculus, hellebores, anemones and spirea, some wild cherry blossom and some sprigs of fresh mint. Rufus has asked me to make a little bouquet for his girlfriend for their six-month anniversary. It’s such a sweet thought, and I’m so touched to be asked. I smile to myself, remembering when anniversaries were counted in months rather than years, feeling proud of his thoughtfulness and always happy to help with a little romance.

I twist the flowers together and tie them with string, wrap them in white tissue paper tied with a green ribbon and tuck them into a jam jar in the brown paper bag so he can carry them easily. I give him a big hug, watching him go off out for lunch, looking all grown up, with a little lump in my throat.

It’s a greenhouse day, I need to sow my next batch of seeds and start potting up the dahlias. Time is cantering on, the clocks change tomorrow, the days are lengthening and I need to get my flower crops growing so the cutting garden will be full for our guests and our summer retreats.

Some of the dahlias are already starting to sprout in their crates, some are a little wrinkled, some have gone mouldy. I cut away any softened or dried out tubers with my knife, leaving only the good bits for potting on. In damp soil the slightly wrinkled ones will plump back up and should still grow.

I get a little production line going, dividing and checking, finding the right pot, tucking each tuber in with soil and then lining them up along the floor of the greenhouse. We’re due a frost tonight so I’ll water them tomorrow, when hopefully I’ll have worked my way through the rest of the crates. My garden work saved for the weekends, so I can get back to the sitting room on Monday.

Previous posts you might have missed…