Renovating a 13th-century French castle may seem a little extreme by way of stress relief from the law, but that’s exactly what Dawn Goodman, the head of Withers LLP’s contentious trust and succession group, has been doing for nearly six years.

“We were thinking of buying a house in Provence,” recalls Goodman, who joined Withers in 1981 and is widely regarded as the doyenne of trust litigation, “but my husband returned from an exploratory trip to France with a photo of what looked like a pink castle. ‘Wouldn’t you rather buy this?’ he said.”

Goodman’s husband was indeed brandishing an image of a castle. It was located in the village of Souilhanels, in the Languedoc, but, Goodman explains, it had seen better days. “Its pedigree was remarkable. It had been owned by Louis XIV’s naval minister Bertrand de Molleville, had been damaged during the Revolution, become the town hall and finally fallen into ruin before an architect and his wife bought it in the Eighties and started restoring it. Unfortunately they divorced and passed on the chateau to an elderly gentleman and his mother. They were living in just a few rooms – the rest were uninhabitable. Overall, it was in a sorry state.”

What, then, possessed her to buy it? “The opportunity to pass up such a slice of history was irresistible,” says Goodman, whose meeting with the vendors contains a remarkable vignette. “There was a portrait of the vendor’s great aunt standing beside her Spitfire – she was one of the very few lady fighters in the Second World War,” she says. “The vendor pronounced her to have been a magnificent lady. He said she had six husbands and didn’t kill any of them.”

Goodman’s three children and husband eagerly awaited her return from her first viewing. “I told them I couldn’t get my head round the idea, but they were very persuasive,” she says. “We decided to go ahead, not without a few misgivings.”

The project was a labour of love from start to finish, with Goodman and her family encountering everything from eccentric French officialdom to an engineer who marched to his own tune, not to mention what might have been one of the more remarkable quirks of French planning law. “I met with the architect early in the first year and told him that we wanted to have a swimming pool in place for the summer,” she explains, laughing. “He said that the only way to get planning permission that quickly would be for me to sleep with the mayor.”

Days later, covered in grease and dirt and with her hair standing on end from a day’s labour on the chateau, Goodman bumped into the mayor. “He was completely charming and has proved to be a great friend. The architect was being a little mischievous with his talk of the droit de maire.”

Similarly bizarre, but this time existing in reality, were the idiosyncrasies of French conveyancing. “You sign up to a compromise de vente under which you agree to take the property with all hidden vices – except lead piping and termites,” Goodman explains. “This is your only safeguard.” She adds that she had to certify that she was not insane, adding wryly “six years later, I’m not so sure.”

The hard graft has yielded an all-but-restored castle that is the pride of its village. Goodman says that the locals have taken to her and her family, and that she’s “delighted to have been welcomed so graciously as part of village life”. The journey has not been without its battles – low points include dealing with an elusive engineer and insulating a filthy, soot and pigeon dropping-filled loft in the heat of summer – but it has been worth it.

“The chateau looks truly magnificent now,” Goodman says. “It’s a really comfortable home as well as an historic monument.” She says that the castle will play host to a party for the villagers this Christmas, and that the project has set her creative juices flowing. “It has been hard work, getting over to the Languedoc on weekends and at every snatched moment, but it has been a wonderful creative and artistic outlet from legal life.”

Having discovered tunnels underneath the foundations used by the Resistance, not to mention blood-stained tapestries, one might be forgiven for thinking that this lawyer’s adventure merits a book, something rather more eclectic than, for example, Jordan’s International Trusts and Divorce Litigation – of which Goodman is a co-author. Goodman isn’t letting on too much. “Let’s just say that I’m taking one day every two weeks off to write, and that I have a sabbatical coming up,” she says.

Watch this space – Goodman might just be better placed than anyone to write a novel called, maybe, the Keys to the Castle . . .

For more information, see www.chateauofthegreatsun.co.uk

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