Landes de Gascogne Dark Sky Reserve: Marquèze and Solférino

Required Activities

• Leave the van in the free car park at the old Sabres station and take the Train des Résiniers, the only way in, out to the Marquèze quartier in the middle of the forest; walk the whole hamlet and find, building by building, what a Landes farm of the 1800s had to be able to do for itself, then come back on a train whose time you have checked, because there is no other way out

• Find a break in the pines inside the 945 km² core zone of the reserve, kill the headlights and give your eyes twenty minutes, then photograph the Milky Way — this is the only lowland dark sky reserve in France, and with nothing above 145 m anywhere in it the horizon stays dark all the way round

• Walk the single street of Solférino from end to end and count the houses of the imperial estate — 38 were built, 28 of them for the farm workers, who lived rent-free with a plot in return for 75 days' work a year and could own it after ten years — then finish at the church of Sainte-Eugénie with the presbytery and the mairie round it, exactly where the plan of 1863 put them

• Take the road west from Sabres to Solférino and read the forest as the piece of engineering it is: pines sown in straight lines behind wide firebreaks, the pattern imposed after the August 1949 fire killed 82 people and left half the massif burnt by 1950, all of it drained by the ditches Henri Crouzet cut — the same engineer Napoleon III put in charge of Solférino, who drained 20,000 hectares and built 428 km of roads. Count the firebreak crossings between the two villages.