Hiking trail - Vachat millstones

This easy hike allows you to discover two points of interest : the Pierre aux Morts marsh and the Vachat millstones.

Historically, millstones were used to grind rye, barley and other grains into flour. A one-tonne millstone could produce several hundred kilos of flour every day. It should be remembered that our ancestors ate more than a kilo of bread a day !

In the past, a millstone was worth the price of a house, so places were highly sought after. While not everyone was capable of cutting a millstone, finding where to cut it was even more difficult !

Millstones were extracted as follows :

The millstone was marked out on the rock face and a groove was dug around it. Fir wedges were driven into the groove and regularly wetted. The swelling of the wood detached the millstone by breaking the stone.

The Mont Vouan millstone extraction site was extremely important as it was one of the largest in south-eastern France, producing more than 200,000 millstones from 72 quarries.

At the foot of the Vachat millstones lies the Pierre aux Morts marsh, or ‘Gouille aux Morts’, which serves as a reminder of how difficult it was to cut millstones, as the stonecutters often took great risks. The pond was named after the fall of two stonecutters while they were working on a Sunday (the Lord's Day!).

Le Vouan, a small mountain range at 978 m, was also crossed by a smugglers' path. The smugglers brought wheat from the Moulin de Pont Morand mill to Geneva and returned with alcohol, tobacco and other goods.

Today, you can still see large round holes nearly 2 m high in the rock where the millstones were extracted. They are part of the ancient Meulières à Vachat and Grand'Gueule, classified as a ‘Historic Monument’ since 2009 and a ‘Sensitive Natural Area’ since 2017.

PAYSALP offers tours for groups throughout the year.
Information and bookings: www.paysalp.fr