The Path to the Castle

After Franche-Comté’s defeat, and its inclusion in the Kingdom of France, the local lord and main advocate for Spanish dominance in Franche-Comté, Jacques-Antoine de Maisod, decided to rebuild the Maisod chapel in 1693. This “late Romanesque” chapel may have succeeded the first chapel, dated 1184, and part of this previous chapel’s materials may also have been used to rebuild the current chapel (P. Lacroix, 1981). It bears a coat of arms resembling an alliance of the Guigue de Champvans family and the inscription “Concuccus Resurgo” (Beat down, I get back up).

Made by man in the 1960s to feed a power plant, the ribbon of turquoise water from the Vouglans lake, winds 35 kilometres through the Ain valley from Pont-de-Poitte to the hamlet of Vouglans, in Lect. Its semi-circular dam which is 103 metres tall holds back 600 million cubic metres of water. Every year, it provides electricity to 130,000 inhabitants and, as such, is the second largest hydro-electric plant in France.

With a love of lakes and humid environments, it isn’t rare to see this bird of prey’s dark silhouette over the water. A migratory bird, it travels to France in March and returns to Africa for the winter in mid-August or September. Very much a scavenger, it often snatches up dead fish from the surface of the water. It also flies over meadows during hay-cutting periods in search of prey made vulnerable by the short grass.

The diversity of the shrub species that make up hedges, their height and their varying density attract a diverse range of insect, bird and reptile species, and even some mammals who favour this dense and protective environments. In the summer, you may be lucky enough to see a red-backed shrike perched on a high branch searching for prey, a mimetic praying mantis camouflaged by the leaves, or a green whip snake coiled up under bush formations. Hedges provide a variety of micro-habitats, which allow many species to travel and are therefore real biological reservoirs and corridors that should be preserved.