Château-Thierry: Champagne Cellars, La Fontaine and Belleau Wood

Required Activities

• Tour the Champagne Pannier cellars in Château-Thierry, the 13th-century chalk cellars carved under the town

• Start at the Porte Saint-Pierre, the last of the town's four medieval gates and the one Joan of Arc rode through in 1429 to drive the English out, then take the long stair up from the place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville and go into the castle by its main gate, the Porte Saint-Jean, for the view down the Marne valley

• Go into the 16th-century town house on the Grande Rue where Jean de La Fontaine was born in 1621, now a Musée de France, and find how many different illustrated editions of La Cigale et la Fourmi the collection holds — the fable the town has been living off for three hundred years

• Walk up from the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery into the wood itself and find the name the French Sixth Army gave it after June 1918 — Bois de la Brigade des Marines — then work out from the ground how a brigade could lose nearly 60 per cent of its strength, a thousand dead out of eight thousand, in twenty-six days taking a wood you can cross in twenty minutes