Château de Tramayes

History

The lordship of Tramayes appears in 1380. In the mid-16th century Jean and then Mathurin Bullion, of a Mâcon family that rose to high office, gathered its different parts. In 1599 Mathurin obtained permission from Henri IV to fortify his house, work he had already begun the year before. In 1672 Claude Bullion bought the rights to the town's four yearly fairs and its weekly market.

The estate then changed hands several times before being sold, at the end of the 17th century, to Claude-Hippolyte de Damas, lord of Dompierre and Audour, whose family kept it until the Revolution. In 1808 the notary Claude Bruys, mayor of Tramayes and a friend of Lamartine, bought the château. From 1825 he filled the moats, levelled the walls, remodelled the rooms and created a park.

Architecture

The house once stood inside a vast rectangular enclosure with towers, now gone. It has a rectangular main block flanked by two square towers set at an angle, a taller square tower and an overhanging turret. On the east, a door framed in vermiculated rustication sits beneath the slot of a vanished drawbridge and the corbels of an old projecting lookout. The dovecote is also listed.