Tours et détours

As part of the ‘Tours et détours à Saint-Gervais-sur-Couches, à pied, en vélo, à cheval ou en voiture’ local heritage days.

Enjoy guided tours of the local heritage: coachmen’s plaques, wash houses, fountains, drinking troughs, dovecotes, the public weighbridge, the history of the schools and canteens, crosses, the war memorial, the boundary stones engraved with the initials of Charles Gravier, Count of Toulongeon and Vergennes – an ambassador and diplomat who became Minister for Foreign Affairs under Louis XVI – the hamlet of Vergennes, and even a contemporary work, *Medus*, by the sculptor Nik.
Nik (Jean NICOLAS) 1942–2014 was a contemporary artist from Autun. In Saint-Gervais-sur-Couches, one of his works, *MEDUS*, greets you as you approach from the Château de Digoine (a sculpture in pink Montoy granite, created in 2005, weighing 596 kg and measuring 103 cm in height). This multifaceted fish (as always with NIK, there are multiple interpretations!) could be a sunfish or a freshwater fish with an elongated body and red fins. This imaginary inhabitant of the deep sea, with a grouper’s snout, which contains within its centre, on one side a sort of trout and on the other a jellyfish, reflects NIK’s imagination in this fish-shaped sculpture. It was donated to our village in 2017 by his wife, Denise.

The walks to explore the dovecotes (3 in Saint-Gervais-sur-Couches and 2 in Digoine in the commune of Saint-Martin-de-Commune, as well as the water tower in Saint-Gervais) and the detours to discover all this heritage that once formed part of the inhabitants’ daily lives – traces of the past across three communes (St Gervais-sur-Couches, Epertully and Saint-Martin-de-Commune): fountains, wash houses, drinking troughs, reservoirs, the public scales and the bread oven, coachmen’s plaques dating from the stagecoach era, as well as the landscapes, ponds and so on

You can bring a packed lunch to make the most of the whole day.

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