I passed by here as a young man when I was hitch hiking to Spain. I've seen the most wonderful castle, I told my mother. Oh that was made on steel girders in the nineteenth century, she told me. But, since it looks wonderful, isn't it? Since then I've come to admire nineteenth century buildings probably more than the medieval ones they were so successfully imitating. The Victorians were brilliant engineers with exciting new materials and the wealth to create extraordinary lay structures. Apparently it was the conical roofs on the turrets, so beloved by later Disneylands, which offended the purists.
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But isn't that Carcassonne, in southern France? I'd swear it is. It isn't a fake at all. It was extensively restored in the mid 19th century, but that work did not create something new, it just saved it from falling completely into ruin.
It is Carcassone. According to my mother it was restored from ruins using Victorian technology, that is including iron girders and poured concrete (???) by ?. In the early twentieth century this kind of inventive restoration evidently came to be more despised than a stack of authentic ruins....by certain romantics at any rate.
I just looked up Eugène Viollet-le-Duc on wikipedia. Actually his additions to Notre Dame seem far less authentic.
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