Route details
Description
Safety instructions – Wearing a helmet is strongly recommended. I drive on the right. I respect the highway code. I check the condition of my bike (brakes and lighting). I stay on the marked trails. I respect the marsh, a sensitive and classified site.
Cycle route 6 – Magné/Bessines/Niort
Distance:26,9 km
Your itinerary
Step 1: Saint Catherine Church
The primitive Saint-Germain d'Auxerre building, built in 936 by the Charroux Abbey, was destroyed by the Normans. In 1508, a chapter of six canons under the name of Sainte-Catherine was founded by Catherine de Coëtivy, niece of the king and wife of the lord of Magné. The church was built in 1521 by the architect Mathurin Berthomé. The vaults collapsed in 1568 following the pillaging and burning of the Huguenots. In 1789, the monument became a fodder warehouse and a military hospital for the scabby in 1793. It was restored in the 1913th century and classified as a Historic Monument in XNUMX.
Step 2: Four Pontet Cultural Space
A former pot oven modernized by Mr. Pontet, the factory has become an essential exhibition venue in Niortais since 1998.
Magnesian pottery is an old industry whose first traces of activity date back to the Neolithic period. The first known workshop was born at the beginning of the 1980th century and the last closed in XNUMX. Magné manufactured utilitarian objects (milk pots, pots, coffee pots, mogette pots) and decorative objects (Tours and Paris shape flower pots), as well as devotional articles sold to pilgrims to Sainte-Macrina.
Step 3: The Sainte-Macrine chapel
Located on the highest hill of Magné (42 m.), this high holy place in the market garden country is dedicated to Macrine, patroness of boatmen and patron saint of the agricultural world. In the XNUMXth century, the small church was rebuilt.
Step 4: The Lodge of Pierre Levée
The dwelling of Pierre Levée, from the Latin name “Petra longa” raised stone, designated a place close to a dolmen, possibly a menhir. Since the 1921th century, several noble families have lived in this house. Then in 92 it was the birthplace of Jean Richard, he was the actor who notably played Commissioner Maigret in 1980 episodes, he was passionate about the circus, he bought PINDER and received the national circus grand prize in XNUMX.
Step 5: The Man of Bessines
Fabrice Hyber(t) is the author in 1989 of L'Homme de Bessines. These little green men, 86 cm high, installed on the town's water network, fountains spewing water through all bodily orifices, respond to a public order for street furniture and reflect the close link existing between the market gardener and the Marais Poitevin.
This internationally renowned artist living in Paris also created in 1991 the largest soap in the world entered in the Guinness World Records (22 tonnes molded in a truck bed). In 1995, he transformed the Museum of Modern Art in Paris into a Hybermarché and installed a professional hairdressing salon at the Center Georges Pompidou on the occasion of the Feminin/Masculin exhibition of 1996.
Step 6: Bessines municipal port
The municipal port of Bessines, once the heart of village life, stretches at the foot of a hillside
limestone. You can notice this characteristic alignment of pollarded ash trees and poplars which are the emblematic trees of the Marais Poitevin.
Step 7: La Roussille
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 8: The communal farm of Chey
This old farm, dependent on the abbey of St-Liguaire, raised sheep and cultivated vines. Moreover, its name derives from chai, a word from the Poitevin dialect borrowed from the Gallic language designating a place where wines and spirits are stored in barrels. From 1623 to 1665, it was operated by the Gobeil family. Its last owner, Mr. Norbert, ceased his activity in 1990. Bought by the City of Niort in 1994, the farm became the following year the new headquarters of Chaleuil Dau Pays Niortais (regional group for the expression and maintenance of popular Poitevin traditions). ). In 2003, this site was classified as a place of memory between New France and Poitou.
Step 9: La Tiffardière lock house
At 700 m. downstream of La Roussille, the current lock is built on the site of an old ford which, certainly in the XNUMXth century, was converted into an embarkation port for marine timber intended to build ships in Rochefort- s.-Mer; the oaks of the Secondigny forest retained being marked with a fleur-de-lys and an anchor.
The Bridges and Roads engineer Laffore in 1847 and Joseph Maire from 1851 proposed the digging of canals to straighten the old meanders of the Sèvre Niortaise by piercing the hillsides. The plans were drawn up in 1856. Only a few small curves were taken up, forming new islands, and the locks were built.
That of Tiffardière, dating from 1860, was renovated in 2017-18 to reopen to navigation on the public domain. As for his lock keeper's house, it was sold in 2008 to a resident of the eponymous mill.
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