Walking through the Morvan in Eastern France




I have just finished a 100-mile (164 km) walk through the Morvan Regional Park in Eastern France, linking two historic sites, for another article for Celtic Life International. The two sites, Bibracte and Alesia, were key sites in the Roman conquest of Gaul. I will upload the article to this page when it is published.


The Morvan is a beautiful, sparsely-populated area, with rolling hills and mountains covered in forests, interspersed with white-water rivers and lakes of various sizes. It is rich in wildlife, as described below. That sparsity of population creates some challenges, planning a walk with food and accommodation in the right places.


There is an official walking route between the two sites, which you can see here. It has two big problems. It takes a direct route through the mountains with nowhere to stay or buy food for most of it. Not wanting to bivouac or hunt for dinner, I designed the longer route you can see below. It starts and finishes at the nearest railway stations to Bibracte and Alesia, which addresses the second problem with the official route - how to get to the start and back from the finish. Doing this by car would be impossible for a single person, and complicated for a group, but the trains worked well. They are on different lines but they both meet in Dijon.


There are three small towns on the route, where you may find a choice of accommodation: Chateau-Chinon, Saulieu and Semur-en-Auxois (which has a beautiful medieval centre). Elsewhere, it’s a case of checking availability on each night. You might have to amend the route if any of the places where I stayed are unavailable. I mainly used Booking.com, which is not ideal, but simplifies the process. I had no problem finding one-night accommodation in late May and early June, but that might not be possible in July or August.


Within the regional park there is a dense network of long-distance footpaths, which are wide and easy to follow - they make much use of farm and forest tracks. Unlike their equivalents in Britain, I never found myself in a field full of cattle ready to charge at me!


On the ninth day, the route leaves the regional park. There was more walking on roads after that, although the volume of traffic is very low, and there are usually grass verges to divert onto. There was just one stretch, on a Departmental road, which I would rather not have walked.


The opening times of cafes, restaurants and food shops in rural France are notoriously variable. Each village seemed to have a different day where everything closes - usually the one when I arrived. So you have to do a lot of checking ahead, to work out where you can find food and for how long you will have to carry it - sometimes up to two days at a time. The information online is sometimes wrong, so I did a lot of phoning or emailing ahead, which saved me from starvation more than once. (Phoning is probably only an option if you speak French - you won’t find many conversational English-speakers in deepest rural France!)


The other issue which took some planning was the arrival and departure times of accommodation. You don’t want arrive with a heavy pack in a village where everything is closed three hours before your room becomes available. Some hosts were mercifully flexible. One took great offence when I asked him if the room might be available any earlier!


If that sounds like a lot of work, it was. I had to keep everything on a spreadsheet, because there was too much to remember. Spontaneity was not really an option, but it all worked out in the end and I was rewarded with some wonderful sights and hours of wild nature all to myself.


Wildlife


People - or at least some of them - are proud of the wildlife in this region. There was an illustrated talk in one of the villages (unfortunately after I left) on the “big predators” in the park. I don’t think that included lions but the poster showed a Eurasian lynx. I didn’t see any of those, but I did see pine martens, brown hares, red squirrels, various deer and some exotic birds we don’t see in England, including bee eaters, hoopoes and golden orioles. I love the song of the golden oriole, like a human voice speaking through a flute.


The tracks I was following were teeming with butterflies, more than I have ever seen in the wild, and the areas near water had a colourful array of dragonflies and damselflies as you can see below.



The Route


If you click on this map, it should take you to my page on Outdooractive where you can zoom in to see more detail. I have put the downloadable gpx file on Google Drive. This was the plan I designed in advance. I didn’t bother recording what I actually walked, but there were no major differences. The paths shown on the map do actually exist on the ground.



All the stops and the distances between them are shown on this spreadsheet.




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