The Cisterns of Rennes-le-Château Part 3 : A secret underground ?

 

A hypothetical underground and two blocked wells

We know that there is a well in the enclosure of the castle of Rennes. Several people have seen it when they visited the building and its existence is not questioned. However, we do have two possible locations for this well: one is in a building towards an arch opening up to the outside, the other would have been in an exterior court during the 17th century. Of the latter, nothing remains and it seems that the interior well was filled in by the last inhabitant of the castle.
Then there are the rumours circulated by the witnesses who have claimed to have seen an underground access from the building, the access which was located close to a staircase or underneath it. This access could merely be a cellar or a cave used for storage. But if so, why make the existence of the passage into a mystery and block it off? The existence of an access to the underground parts of the building is almost always present in a stronghold. It could be used for numerous purposes: ammunition storage, an arsenal, grain storage, food, a fridge, etc. To this we can add its use as a refuge, a secret hiding place, a place for monetary deposits, a crypt, a vault, an access to a gallery which would allow one to flee, etc. Though it is pretended that the castle does have no such thing, it seems that the castle must have had to.

Several reasons for an illogical underground

It is clear that the builders of the castle chose a debatable site to establish their fortress, a decision possibly forced upon them because of the requirement to access potable water from inside the castle.
But because of the possibility to build cisterns, this reasoning cannot be validated. A study of the history of the local lords further reveals that there are several aspects that remain enigmatic. Finally, a bastion no matter how strong, will one day fall. In the case of Rennes, we know the village was ransacked on numerous occasions. It was thus essential that a secret route of escape was present.

The safe as we know it today did not exist back then. If someone was in possession of something valuable, then it is obvious that the owner did not want to part with it. This meant that it might be necessary to evacuate it or if that proved to be impossible, to stow it away carefully, hoping that one day, it could be reclaimed – though in practice this was often impossible. Only an underground lends itself to this requirement.

The natural gallery at the end of the fault, underneaththe castle

Still, it is clear that to build such a structure required extreme amounts of labour. Depending on the quality of the native rock, progress could be long, painful, dangerous and sometimes practically impossible. This is attested by the fact that few passages exist that are manmade and which are more than 100 metres long. There was also an inherent contradiction: even though a massive labour force was required, if they were local, it meant that all locals were aware of the presence of the underground gallery, the presence let alone the details of which the lord of the manor would desire to keep secret.

As a result, we can postulate that the existence of natural faults, with a sufficient and accessible depth, represented a prime directive that would justify the risk to position the castle in its awkward location. This advantage outweighed its location at the edge of the cliff.
A shaft sinker could be used for alteration works to the well. No-one would be surprised if the lord asked someone to do that work. Once the water level had been reached, the level of the natural fault was also reached. From there, it would not be complicated for a workman, with a working knowledge of mining, to create a passage towards the secondary gallery located in the same direction as the running water. The nature of the plate of Rennes allows for such a type of work.

Proof

The natural fault, at the height of an adult man (cistern of Rennes-le-Château)

As evidence, let us recall the disastrous event of Rennes in 1362. Pierre III de Voisins made the fatal error to install explosives in the bastion of Salasse. The mercenaries of Henri de Trastamare benefited from this when they used it in Rennes-le-Château. It was used primarily in the first church of the village, in order to recover a treasure which they knew was hidden there – we can only wonder how they knew... Unfortunately, when the hiding place was opened, ten of these plunderers fell into a pit because of a swivelling flagstone.

Further proof

Several parts of this history require some further attention.
This primitive church of St Pierre aux Liens would never be rebuilt and no-one knows why. Was there something to fear or to hide? Who knows…
Then there is this opening which is spoken about by Louis Fédié, a man who could not have been influenced by the mystery as he lived before Saunière became the village priest. Furthermore, one such opening still exists today.
We also need to remember an incident during construction work on the new town hall of Rennes-le-Château, when the machinery suddenly fell into the vacuum of a gallery that ran into the direction of the vestiges of the forgotten church.
Of these events, we need to remember that there definitely are underground cavities underneath the village, whether man-made or natural.

Causes & effects

Underneath this location is a "hole without end" (all that remains of St Pierre – Rennes-le-Château)

Before moving our attention away from the church of St Pierre aux Liens, let us reconsider the attack on the church that was facilitated by the explosives of the bastion of Salasse. We note that at the time of this attack, the “high district” of the village was not ransacked: the castle and the church of St Mary Magdalene remained untouched. We also note that the lord de Voisins was not captured either. This is bizarre, for at the time of this attack on the village, the local lords would have been prized possessions: they could be held to ransom, often with very high sums at stake of the hostage takers. But there are no details on his capture, nor are there references to any heroic behaviour on his part. De Voisins is absent from these accounts. Could we assume that based on these observations, the lord could indeed leave his castle effortlessly and discreetly – which would explain his absence from the records and the scene? This would mean that if there was an underground passage, this could not have been the one that was underneath the attackers at work in the church.

Literary evidence

We are neither the first nor the only ones to consider the existence of an underground network of natural faults. Several authors have briefly tackled the subject.

Michel Lamy, in Le secret du trésor royal de Rennes-le-Château, Payot, 1984: “It is time to remember an old legend of the Razès. It is said that under the castle of Rennes an underground gallery was inserted which communicated with the caves” (p. 201). The author quotes with reference 27 Louis Fedié and his Etude Historique sur le Haut Razès. On the following page, he writes: “there exists under this peak a vast network of underground galleries allowing for communication between the various sheets of water of the area, a hydrological system highlighted by the work of C. Chanel.” Michel Lamy adds that this network links with the undergrounds of one of the most impressive and highest mountains in the area, Bugarach, and we should add that one of the principal underground rivers of this sector has an important resurgence in the castle of Salses, near Opoul-Perillos.

Jean Markale, Rennes-le-Château et l’énigme de l’or maudit, Pygmalion, 1989: “In the years that followed the death of Saunière, the villagers, without attaching bitterness to it, nor even jealousy, were convinced that the priest and “Madame Marie” had discovered an underground gallery which connected the church to the castle. This is what was said.” (p. 246)

Jean-Claude Danis, La Rennes endormie, l’Enigme de Rennes-le-Château. Pyregraph, 1991: “It is known that a network of underground galleries of which we are not showing the layout (others will be able to render them) runs under Rennes-le-Château, connecting the mysterious crypt, an element of the castle, the old church of St Pierre and certain particular house(s) as well as other places” (p. 183). Four lines below, Danis mentions: “two underground entries have been carefully blocked. One of them is still visible on the interior part of the oven wall, partially unobtrusive but nevertheless visible.”

There are many other quotations about these natural undergrounds, but we have specifically selected these three examples which are less known than most other accounts. Nevertheless, we remain astonished that little research has occurred on this subject even though it is not difficult to piece together.

Outline of the galleries that are known to exist

A little bit of geology

We need to follow these observations with further remarks on the geological formation of the plate of Rennes-le-Château. There would be a crack, opening up to the ground, on the plate of Soubirous which would link with the valley of des Bals by a long network measuring more than 500 metres. These galleries appear to have been known and were discreetly used as refuge during the last war by the local resistance fighters. The village is mentioned in another account where there is a mention of at least “three bottomless holes”, to note that “the last of these cracks was entered by accident during works, which was immediately stopped up, as if there was a fear that it would not give access to a fabulous hall”. On the same account, we can read about how “the underground of the village can thus, from a geological point of view, contain caves, and these caves could have been used during the ages, as natural hiding places.”
We are thus in the presence of four faults, which is a lot in this rather small plateau of Rennes-le-Château. It was in these sand formations and conglomerates that the natural galleries were formed, of which a conduit led to the source underneath the castle of Rennes… And it is in this underground network that a series of elements could be placed…

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