Information on Guided Tours in the Area

Also available from the Cluny Tourism Information Office website is this brochure of guided tours in Cluny and Clunisois.

from: Cluny Tourist Information
(click image for brochure)

The guided tours are for groups rather than individuals and cover a wide variety of subjects including wine tasting, meals, cheese tasting, berry picking, lavoirs, crafts, churches, chateaus, gardens and old Cluny houses. They operate in places such as Taizé, Cormatin, Chapaize, Brancion and Berzé-the-city as well as Cluny.

I have not been on any of these guided tours, but its probably true that you can gain much by knowing more about the place you are visiting and a guided tour is an easy way of doing this.

Things To Do In The Clunisois Area

The image below is from a map showing Cluny and surroundings, which can be found on the Cluny Tourism Information Office website. The darker brown area which we call the Clunisois Area (Communauté de communes du Clunisois) offers a range of attractions centered on Cluny a major religious centre of the Middle Ages.

Click Image to Download Complete Map

The map shows the villages within a short distance of The House at Le Gros Chigy that have interesting buildings and facilities although the keys to these is not on this extract. Click the map to access the full PDF document with the key.

Although even the church and grounds of a little village church like Massey are interesting, Cluny, Brancion, Cormatin and St Hippolyte are better known and offer more to the visitor.

The map is well worth downloading or getting a copy of as it holds much useful information.

Les 5 villages, 3 mars 2013

Have a look at the photos and comments in this post by Poirier Bouchot who walked a 20 km route from Salornay passing through Gros Chigy, le Bourg Rameau, Chevagny sur Guye, Passy and Chérizet.

from: Nos rondos et balades
(click image for full story online)

Some HDR Photos From Paris, Chigy, Montceau and St Flour in 2012

photograph by GrosChigy

published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Catching Up on What We Did

Our time at The House at Le Gros Chigy turned out to be much busier than we expected, especially with the house renovation which took a lot of our time. One of the results of this was that there is a lot that I didn't blog at the time - so you will see some of these posts over the next while.

We were always surprised by the number of activities that there always seemed to be on the go in the villages around the region. One of these was was in the Church at Saint-Vincent-des-Pres.

photograph by ChigyTweet

published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This was an evening of music by The Black Velvet Band three Austrians from Germany singing Irish songs in a French church! This is an amazing band which still attacks their music with passion after playing and touring for more than 20 years. They are well known in the area and even have a CD entitled "en Bourgogne"

Of course the church is not that large and supports it's roof with rather too many columns for good uninterrupted viewing. We therefore ended up to the side of the later. This have us a very close up view of the singers, although from the side.

photograph by ChigyTweet

published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

The three are Christiaan Hartung the violinist, Udo Hafner the percussionist and flautist and Peter Wendel the guitarist and singer - we thank them very much for a great evening!

Massy - Clunisois villages 3

Another village, although even smaller than St-André-le-Désert is Massy, between Salornay & Cluny, it boasts a beautiful early 11th Century church as well as a chateau.

click image to visit site

 

Thinking About What To Do When We Arrive - Clunisois villages 1

Now that our return is approaching, I am starting to think about what to do and maybe what photographic theme to attack when we get back to The House at Le Gros Chigy. A good place to start is the small Clunisois villages in the area. I am going to be publishing single screen clips of the villages, maybe with a sentence or two, over the next while.

Obviously the place to start is St-André-le-Désert the "capital" of our commune.

click image to visit site

 

Comparing Churches in Massy and Nylstroom

When we stopped in Nylstroom for lunch on our way to the Waterberg, we parked in the grounds of the Dutch Reformed Church for our picnic. I took a few photographs of the church and its surroundings, one of which you see below.

photograph by ChigyTweet

published under a Creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

The church is interesting for many reasons, firstly for being situated in Nylstroom which was founded in the 1860s by a Voortrekker group known as the Jerusalem Trekkers who aiming to trek to the Holy Land. Following the maps at the back of their Bibles they believed they had reached the Nile river and decided to stay.

The Dutch Reformed Church was built in 1898 and is the oldest church in sub-saharan Africa north of Pretoria. The church was also used as a hospital during the Second Boer War and was near a British concentration camp 544 lives were lost.

Compare this to the Saint Denis in Massy from my last post,

photograph by ChigyTweet

published under a Creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

which was built sometime between the years 1030 and 1040. It was Constructed to replace a chapel thought to be too old and too little it still stands almost 1 000 years later and was already more than 800 years old when work started on the Nylstroom Church

The roof of the church is supported by a wood frame that was covered in 1708. The altar dates to the period of Louis XV and sits atop another altar that might date to when the church was built.

On the outside of Saint-Denis the most striking feature is the church’s bell tower with it’s descriptive Lombard Bands and the zigzag stone work.

Concepts of age, history and craftsmanship are vastly different in the two "towns"

What to do - Bissy sur Fley & Cafe Papyllon

Please note that Le Papyllon has moved to Cormatin - see my recent post.

This is one of my favourite places to visit, just 26 km from the house, there's a beautiful Romanesque Church and a Chateau to view and after that a cafe with more than 110 different beers for sale! Even on a wet day like the one when the photo below was taken there's a warm conservatory where you can enjoy a great beer.
WOLFGANG SCHMIDBERGER, the owner, doesn't simply rely on distributors to deliver beer but goes on his own collection trip to breweries, to try and provide as fresh beer as possible. Wolfgang also tries to serve the beer in the marked glasses of all sorts of shapes and sizes available from many of the breweries as shown by the photos below from the website.
website: http://monsite-orange.fr/papyllon.com/page2/index.html
phone: 0033-385 492 191
address: unnamed street
GPS: 46.6631338764, 4.6206968185  /  46°39'47.28"N   4°37'14.51"E
directions: