I decided to do a 'check' on that phone number - of course it is the correct one - it was brought up on this website...which I can remember now...my parents put this into THE TELEGRAPH a long time ago now...it is a property ad for their VIEILLEY chateau with the 'history' of it all attached:


A French resistance hideout is for sale. Anna Tyzack tells its extraordinary story

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George Millar arrived in the small village of Vieilley, in eastern France, by bicycle, and checked in to the Carlton Hotel. It was 1944; he had been parachuted in to the area several months earlier by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), to train the maquis (local resistance), who specialised in blowing up railway lines around Besançon, on the Franco-German border. His orders were to get east in France, to disrupt all German communications and to train the Resistance to use the arms and explosives the Allies would drop to them.

There was nothing glamorous about his hotel: "The Carlton" was simply the code name for his hiding place, L'Ancien Chateau de Vieilley - a half-ruined chateau, occupied by several farming families. "It was called the Carlton as a joke - it was filthy," says Humphrey Gyde, who bought the tower and two wings of L'Ancien Chateau in the early 1990s. He transformed it into a four-bedroom country house, with pool and gardens, and is now selling it for £385,000.

The cleanliness of L'Ancien Chateau would have been the least of Millar's worries, when on August 15, 1944, the Germans encircled the village. Millar watched in horror as the maquis leader was captured. Fortunately, guided by Georges Molle, a local resistance member, he escaped through a window and hid in the long grass.

"Following Georges, we wormed our way across paddocks and orchards and into the mouth of what Georges called 'the aqueduct', which was, invigoratingly enough, the village sewer," Millar explained in an interview with The Daily Telegraph 50 years later. "Occasionally a housewife would sluice a bucket of slops through one of the apertures in the street drains. These constituted our 'window' though which Georges could tactfully communicate with his fellow citizens."

They learnt that the maquis had retreated into the forest, and that the Germans were conducting a house-to-house search in the village. When it was safe to return, there was no question of a bath to wash their stinking clothes: "In all the village then there was neither a bath nor a water closet," said Millar. His mission in Franche Comte was largely successful; on one night operation, he helped destroy all the points in the Besançon railway station.

Millar died in 2004 but when he returned to Vieilley a decade earlier, for a reunion with Molle and the other surviving maquis, he would have noticed that L'Ancien Chateau has had a facelift. "It was done up after the war by local families," says Gyde. "And we have done quite a lot of decorating. The walls are three feet thick, and there is impressive stonework and magnificent beamed ceilings."

The building has a turbulent history. It dates from 1258, when it was a maison fort (fortified building), to protect Burgundy and Savoy against the French. In 1470 French soldiers destroyed the chateau, which was rebuilt only to be burnt down during the Thirty Years War.

In the 18th century it was gifted to the Archbishop of Besançon, who extended the accommodation, and laid gardens, terraces and fountains. After the Revolution in 1792, the house was sold off to the locals in several parts, before being commandeered to house cavalry during the First World War.

"These days it is in very good condition," says Gyde. "And if you had £30,000 you could make an apartment in the first floor of one wing, and one of the tower rooms could be converted into a wonderful bedroom." There is a pool, and a garden with fruit trees, vegetables and lovely views of the local countryside.

Millar, in that summer of 1944, became very fond of Vieilley. In his memoirs, Maquis, he remembers "the finest cherry trees, the best strawberry beds, the coolest cellars, the sweetest hay lofts to sleep in". On warm days he dozed on the banks of River Ognon: on that fateful August day he awoke "with the free feeling of holiday in the air".

Since then, little has changed. "It is a hidden area between Burgundy and Switzerland - you rarely see another English person," says Gyde. But for all its remoteness, the area is accessible: the Eurostar stops at Besançon (Millar's damage to the railway station has long since been repaired), there are low-cost flights from London to Mulhouse-Basel, and the motorway is 15km from Vieilley. L'Ancien Chateau was a handy refuge for George Millar and has been an idyllic retreat for the Humphrey Gyde and his family. But now that he and his wife are in their seventies, it is time for it to be someone else's "Carlton".

L'Ancien Chateau is for sale at £385,000 (01206 391321).
Maquis by George Millar (Orion Books) is available from Telegraph Books for £7.99 + £0.99 p&p. To order, call 0870 428 4112 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk