Forêts

The Parc national de forêts, declared in November 2019, is the eleventh French national park and the first built around lowland forest: some 560 square kilometres of core on the plateau country between Champagne and Burgundy, where the woods of Châtillon, Arc-en-Barrois and Auberive have been continuously forested since at least the Middle Ages — Cistercian monks from Clairvaux and Auberive managed them from the twelfth century, and the abbeys still stand at the clearings' edges. It is a park of oak and beech aisles, sinkholes and dry combes in the limestone, and springs that build tufa terraces in the marais tufeux, the little alkaline marsh-gardens on the valley rims that hold the park's rarest plants.

Its boldest gesture is invisible on a day walk: at Arc-Châteauvillain, 3,100 hectares of forest — the largest réserve intégrale in metropolitan France — have been withdrawn from forestry permanently, left to storm, deadwood and fungus so that a plateau forest can be watched becoming old-growth over centuries. The park's emblem rides the consequences already: black storks, the shyest large bird in France, nest in the quiet cantons and fish the brooks, alongside wildcats, six species of woodpecker and roe and red deer in medieval densities — the September rut, the brame, is the park's great set-piece, listened to at organised dusk sit-ins. Human depth matches the natural: on Mont Lassois above the Seine — the river rises just west of the plateau — a Celtic princely seat commanded the tin road, and the grave below it yielded the Vix krater, a 1.64-metre Greek bronze wine vessel of about 530 BC, the largest to survive from antiquity, now in the museum at Châtillon-sur-Seine.

What's worth knowing before you go

This is a park for a car and quiet expectations: Châtillon-sur-Seine (with the krater and the Douix spring) serves the Burgundy side, Arc-en-Barrois and Auberive the Champagne side, and Langres — Diderot's walled hometown — makes a fine southeastern base; the practical railheads are Montbard and Chaumont. Trails are gentle, waymarking is young, and villages are far between — carry your own lunch. May for bird song and orchids; late September for the brame and the first colour.

The connoisseur's detail is the marais tufeux: ask the park for the Auberive-side circuits and you get orchid-and-grass-of-Parnassus springs that most visitors drive past without suspecting.