St-Maxire – Entre vallées humides et sèches, un paysage de contrastes
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 respect the marsh, a sensitive and classified site.
-> Unmarked route
St-Maxire – Between wet and dry valleys, a landscape of contrasts
Distance:38,9 km
Your itinerary
Step 1: Saint-Maxire
At the junction of the granitic Gâtine and the limestone Niort plain, the village of fourteen hamlets is crossed by three ancient ancient roads: the great Roman road from Bordeaux to London; the Gallic green path of Magné, joining the village to La Chaussée in Charente-Maritime (land communication route conducive to commercial exchanges between Gâtine, la Plaine, Aunis and l'Océan, via the Sèvre Niortaise and the Marais, during all the time of activity of the port of Tiffardière and Sevreau, in Saint-Liguaire) and the Roman road called the Bissêtre starting from Rom, crossing from east to west two arms of the Sèvre of the village and used by the armies until 1622. Saint-Maxire certainly derives from the distorted name of Saint Mathias, one of the twelve apostles of Jesus replacing Judas after his betrayal and death.
Step 2: St. Mathias Church
In the year 1000, the church was donated by Raoul Beluce, his wife and his son Thibaud to the Saint-Cyprien abbey in Poitiers. Until the 1720th century, it was served by the monks of the Saint-Mathias priory adjoining the building and belonging to the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Martin de Tours. Before 1798, the vault of the Romanesque span threatening ruin was demolished and the bell tower replaced by a bretèche. The church was converted into a fodder store and stable for the horses of the Vendée army in 1860. The current monument dates from the 1957th century. Stone coffins were discovered during the clearing in 277 of the foundations of the apse of the apse. In XNUMX, after a controversy between the parish and the municipality, the sanctuary was equipped with a XNUMX kg bell offered by families in the commune and named Françoise-Dominique.
Step 3: The Fontaine washhouse
The limestone soil of Saint-Maxire is one of the receptacles of the waters of the granitic Gâtine. This natural phenomenon is explained by the fact that the Deux-Sèvres department is crossed by the Poitou threshold. This is located between two granite massifs (Armorican and Central) and two sedimentary basins (Parisian and Aquitaine). On the granite part (north and east), a dense network of watercourses irrigates their surface basins (Sèvre Nantaise, Thouet, Cébron). Its water tables are shallow. This old land offers a bocage landscape with few crops and drilling. On the sedimentary part (south and west), the tables are aquifers. The young, limestone lands present a plain landscape (Niortais, Lambon and Dive basins) with underground, but shallow, rivers.
Step 4: Gazeau Castle
The Château du Gazeau is a historic monument located in the territory of the commune of Sainte-Ouenne in the department of Deux-Sèvres in France. It is a former Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle relay station whose construction dates back to the 1796th century. The castle was built in the XNUMXth century by Pierre Aymeret and his wife Jeanne de Gazeau. It remained in the possession of the Aymeret family for more than three hundred years, until XNUMX. In ruins at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, it was partly demolished, only certain buildings remain today.
Step 5: Health Washhouse
The hamlet of Optolleries is located near one of the routes of the Deux-Sévrienne Jacquaire Way. It is mentioned in 1498 as the village of the Hospitallers. This monastic and chivalrous order was to provide room and board and provide care to the jacquets, pilgrims traveling in the direction of Santiago de Compostela. The commandery of Saint-Jean de Jerusalem of Saint-Rémy-en-Gâtine had outbuildings there.
Step 6: Habites Washhouse
Abbot Vilaine de Saint-Cyprien de Poitiers (?) donated the Saint-Genest or Habites priory to the Benedictines who would work to deforest the region. It was rebuilt by its chaplain Pierre Berlant, canon of the cathedral of Poitiers, who was buried in its chapel in 1668. Traditionally, every August 28, a religious procession took place from the town of Saint-Maxire to Les Habites
Step 7: Mursay Castle
This manor house, today a garden of ruins classified as a Historic Monument, was in the 1576th century the stronghold of Agrippa d'Aubigné, grandfather of the Marquise de Maintenon, great poet of the Baroque period and squire of the future Henri IV who passed through there in XNUMX the happiest days of his life. Moreover, the Allée du Roy, an avenue of lime trees three hundred years old, bears this name in memory of his stay.
Located on the left bank of the Sèvre, on a terrace placed on stilts out of the floods, below the Gallic path known as Magné, close to a ford, the old castle serving as an outpost at Coudray-Salbart has been transformed from 1596 to 1613 as a pleasure castle by Agrippa d'Aubigné who basty it strongly and conveniently new.
Step 8: Wolf Castle
Private property. In a green setting stands the Château des Loups which has managed to preserve its anonymity far from all eyes.
This magnificent estate with the castle as a backdrop, a 19th century Renaissance style residence overlooking the Sèvre Niortaise.
Step 9: Surimeau district
Surimeau is one of the many districts forming part of the city of Niort.
Step 10: Sciecq
Sitting on a promontory, the town, grouped around its church, is surrounded by a large loop of the Sèvre Niortaise. Moreover, its Latin name, Scissoe aquae, is thus linked to the existence of four ancient fords. Saziacum is mentioned in 989 regarding a reconciliation between the Duke of Aquitaine William IV and his wife Emma. The shell, sculpted to the right of the old south door of the sanctuary, reminds us that Sciecq is located on one of the secondary routes of the Way of Saint-Jacques de Compostela. In this natural enclosure, its landscape – the miniature meeting of the plain, the marsh and the bocage – and its river heritage are an invitation to refreshing rural walks.
Step 11: Church of St. Mary Magdalene
The church consists of a single nave with a ceiling of 25 m. long, without transept, with vaulted apse and painted with a starry celestial vault. The capitals of the second bay supporting the bell tower are decorated with an ox's head held by the horns by two monsters, a centaur hunting by shooting his arrows, a mermaid (La Mellusine) braiding her hair and accosted by 'a wild boar... To the right of the walled southern door, a sculpted shell reminds us that the building is located on one of the secondary roads of Jacques via the Deux-Sèvres.
Step 12: Chain Boat
The chain boat called "Le Mursay" is a system that was put in place to cross the canals of the Marais Poitevin simply and quickly. Pull on the chain, it is the latter which, with the strength of your arms, will take you to the other side of the bank.
Step 13: The Sèvre Niortaise
The Sèvre Niortaise is a coastal river which has its source near Sepvret in Deux-Sèvres, crosses Niort, then descends into the Marais Poitevin of which it forms the main hydraulic artery, to end up flowing into the Atlantic Ocean in the Anse de l'Aiguillon opposite the Ile de Ré.
Step 14: Saint-Rémy
The small rural town, labeled Organic Territory in 2019, is located between Gâtine and the Marais Poitevin, on the road to the Vendée beaches. Cited for the first time in 1080, in the cartulary of Saint-Cyprien de Poitiers, its parish was part of the election, seat and castellany of Fontenay-le-Comte. Its habitat is nestled in the hollow of a cereal plain, its streets are labyrinthine and sometimes lined with old dry stone walls. In 1804, the first prefect of Deux-Sèvres, Etienne Dupin, wrote that there was a windmill in Saint-Rémy near La Goupilière, that the land in the commune was nothing more than a vast quarry of limestone and that the trade consists of mules, horses, oxen and sheep. A passion for horses that still continues on the edge of the town with the Relais Equestre Equinoxe.
Step 15: Saint-Rémy Church
Although the central stained glass window of the apse represents the bishop who baptized Clovis, his surname perhaps also recalls the legend of Rémy, a pagan shepherd who, witnessing a miracle of the Pezenne nun (the gushing of a spring) , converted and then became a hermit in the Sèvre valley. The 1621th century church depended on the Benedictine priory of Saint-Martin de Livrée, part of the abbey of Saint-Liguaire. It was ransacked by the Protestant soldiers of the lord of Saint-Gelais in 1713, then renovated in 1902 as evidenced by the inscription on the double arch of the apse. The nave was rebuilt in 1925 under the ministry of Father Denizeau as evidenced by the year engraved on the gable of the main facade. In XNUMX, it was listed in the supplementary inventory of Historic Monuments.
Stage 16: Border between Deux-Sèvres and Vendée
Now, you are on the border between the department of Deux-Sèvres and Vendée.
Stage 17: Villiers-en-Plaine
Villiers-en-Plaine is a village whose history bears witness to many adventures. Originally, Villac was a lakeside town established on the banks of a lake which disappeared around 1350. In the Middle Ages, it took the name of Villiers and became Villiers-en-Plaine in the 1242th century. The feudal castle was erected in the 1868th century in the current town by the Norman invaders, who became lords of the locality. Razed in 1954 on the orders of Saint-Louis, it was rebuilt in the XNUMXth century by the Jourdains of Embleville. By marriage, it became the property of the La Forterie family from XNUMX to XNUMX. Not far from the recently built village hall, there is a seven-hectare wooded park around the castle, rebuilt in the XNUMXth century and today the town hall. Its outbuildings have been converted into a children's area and its old stables house the Georges-Louis Godeau media library.
Step 18: Saint-Laurent Church
The church is one of the stages of one of the routes of the Deux-Sévrian way of Jacquaire. It was given in 1080 to the Benedictine priory of Saint-Laurent under the abbey of Saint-Cyprien in Poitiers. The building was rebuilt in the XNUMXth century. Its bell tower dates from the XNUMXth century. The sanctuary is the burial place of several members of the Jourdain family, lords of the parish from the XNUMXth century (see the epitaphs engraved in the stone and decorated with their azure coat of arms with the golden lion, known weapons like those of Poitou and the mayors of Niort).
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