Chambord is absurd in the best way. François I began it in 1519 as a hunting lodge, and what rose out of the flat forest of the Sologne was a château with some four hundred rooms, a skyline of turrets, chimneys and lanterns like a miniature city, and a famous double-helix staircase in the centre, where two people can climb at once without ever meeting. Legend credits Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his last years not far away at Amboise, with the idea. Scholars treat the attribution with caution, but it is a good story and nobody has proved it wrong.
The king hardly lived here. He visited only for brief hunting parties, and the great rooms stood mostly empty and unfurnished, a pattern that continued for centuries. Molière's company staged the first performance of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme here in 1670, with Louis XIV watching, and later the estate passed through the hands of exiled princes, marshals and finally the state. Despite all that neglect, the building has survived in remarkable shape.
What makes the visit as a rider is the setting. The château stands in the middle of a walled forest park of more than five thousand hectares, the largest enclosed park in Europe, with a wall about thirty kilometres long. The roads that approach it, the D84 and the lanes through the Sologne woods, run flat and straight between oak and pine, with deer in the clearings at dawn and a mist in autumn that makes the towers float. The riding is calm, not demanding, and the main hazards are cyclists, tourist coaches and the slow summer queues on the approach. Come early or late, or in the quieter months, and the long avenue to the front gives a lovely view.
The Loire itself flows a few kilometres to the south, and the villages along it, such as Saint-Dyé-sur-Loire, have small cafés, a quay and a gentler pace. Wild boar and red deer still live in the forest, and you can hear stags roar in the rutting season in September and October. The surface of the roads here is generally good, though agricultural traffic is common, and rain is possible at any time of year.
For fuel, the nearest sizeable town is Mer, about ten kilometres to the south-west, and Blois is a short ride beyond. There are cafés and a restaurant near the château, and an ice cream and a coffee on the terrace in the sun is a good way to take in the view.