Route details
Description
This route is offered to you by the Regional Hiking Committee. From a station or TER bus stop, it allows you to join a walking or hiking route and take an ecomobility ride!
Your itinerary
Step 1: Port Boinot
Former chamois factory until 2006, then National Center for Street Arts from 2010 to 2015, Le Port Boinot is between the Main and Sèvre Niortaise bridges:
– A large urban park connected to the Marais Poitevin Regional Natural Park (2020)
– A variation of 6 thematic gardens
– The conversion of industrial buildings: the employer's house into a restaurant (2023), the factory into an event venue for businesses and the general public (2023), the large dryer into a counter for roaming and hiking (Tourist Office in 2021), information space and awareness of the heritage riches of Niort Agglo and place of memory of chamois making (2021), the port workshops in a space dedicated to sports leisure practices (rental of bicycles and light boats) and events (bar- contemporary art restaurant-concert-exhibition L’ilôt sauvage)…
Step 2: Behavior lock
Built in 1862, this navigation structure, still in working order, allows boats to cross the difference in level between the Comporté reach and that of La Roussille. Since mid-May 2020, its renovation (restoration of masonry structures, replacement of metal doors and footbridges, revision of mechanisms) has been carried out by the Interdepartmental Institution of the Sèvre Niortaise Basin (IIBSN), in charge of the public river domain. This operation is part of the project to develop tourist navigation between Niort and Marans. It follows the restorations of the La Tiffardière and La Roussille locks carried out in 2018.
Many nesting birds, including the heron, appreciate the wooded surroundings of the Comporté lock.
Step 3: Quai Métayer, old towpath
The Quai Métayer follows the navigable canal. In 1808, an imperial decree was declared to facilitate the navigability of the river. The course of the Sèvre is clear of any obstacle (mills, factories, fisheries, etc.).
The width of the towpath is set at 6 meters so that the barges, long flat-bottomed boats used for transporting goods, can be “hauled” (pulled using ropes by men or horses). This results in the uprooting of trees and bush stumps responsible for tearing ship sails.
Step 4: Chain boat
This boat, owned by the city, is available to everyone to pass from one side of the river to the other using a clever system of chains attached to each bank (since replaced by ropes, due to the nuisance problem). caused to local residents). Oral tradition mentions the existence of passages by boat from one bank of the Sèvre to the other, for example, so that the children, who lived on the Chey farm, could go to the Saint-Liguaire school.
Step 5: Roussille Lock
From the Poitevin word roussea meaning both red and stream, La Roussille is the place where rouches, that is to say rushes, grow.
Its lock was installed in 1394 by Duke Jean de Berry, Count of Poitou, to retain the waters of the Sèvre Niortaise in the canal and the Niort basin. It is the most important of the eight locks from Niort to Marans (Charente-Maritime) and one of the first airlock locks in France. The date of 1808 is engraved in the stone of the old lock keeper's post to recall the passage to Niort of Napoleon I who regulated navigation on the river by decree.
As an extension of the current restaurant, the old barn of the lock keeper's house housed the horse used on the towpath to pull the barges on the small coastal river.
Step 6: Galuchet Marsh
At the gates of the city, this protected green confetti extends over 40 hectares, on the banks of the Sèvre. It is made up of livestock meadows, a small alluvial forest ("Guiana Niortaise"), an old fishery (10 hectares of 6 meter ditches and 3 meter wide earthen mounds), a reed bed, a megaphorbia (universe of large hygrophilous grasses resulting from the abandonment of wet meadows), a hillside and the largest heronry in South Deux-Sèvres.