Versailles

Versailles was named, like so many Kentucky towns, with grander European ambitions than its size ever justified, but locals settled the matter of pronunciation long ago by rejecting the French entirely — it’s ver-SALES here, flat and unapologetic, and correcting visitors on this point seems to be a minor local pastime. What the town lacks in palace scale it makes up for with the horse farms surrounding it in every direction, Woodford County pastureland considered among the finest thoroughbred breeding ground in the world.

Horse farms and the Kentucky Castle

We spent a whole morning just driving Versailles’s back roads, white plank fences running for miles past mares and foals grazing in bluegrass pasture, a few of the farms recognizable from magazine spreads even to us. On one of those roads sits the Kentucky Castle, an actual turreted stone castle built in the 1960s by an eccentric local businessman and now a boutique hotel and event space, entirely incongruous with the surrounding farmland and somehow perfectly at home in it anyway. Lia insisted we stop for the photo; I didn’t argue.

Woodford Reserve and downtown

Woodford Reserve’s distillery sits just outside town on Glenns Creek, its limestone rickhouses among the oldest still operating in Kentucky, and the tour ends on a porch with a view straight down the valley. Back in downtown Versailles, a compact grid of brick storefronts holds a genuinely good bakery and a courthouse square quiet enough that we could hear horses whinny from a farm somewhere past the edge of town. It’s a place built entirely around the rhythm of the farms around it, and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

Getting There

Versailles is about twenty minutes west of Blue Grass Airport in Lexington (LEX) via US-60. A car is essential for exploring the surrounding horse farms and distilleries, since the appeal here is almost entirely in the drive between them.