Marais Poitevin: Punting the Green Venice

Required Activities

• Take a barque from the Quai Louis-Tardy at Coulon and punt out with the pole yourself, and learn to tell the channels apart on the way: a fossé under four metres, a conche or rigole between four and twenty, an achenal wider than that — 2,100 km of them in the eastern wet marsh, of which only 300 km are waymarked

• In the Maison du Marais poitevin, the house where the collectors of the coutume lived, find out what the boatmen were taxed for — the Grande Coutume on everything moving between Niort and Marans, the Petite Coutume on the village quays — and that the money paid for dredging the canals; then go round to the north facade for the mullioned window and the dovecote

• Ride the rehabilitated towpath on the right bank of the Sèvre niortaise from Coulon through Magné, and count how many of the pollarded trees holding the banks together are still ash and how many are the hornbeam, oak, field maple, elm, poplar and willow being planted to replace them since ash dieback reached the marsh in 2016

• Walk the ruins of Maillezais, founded as a monastery about 976 and raised to a cathedral on 13 August 1317, and work out from what stands how big it was: 105 m long and 60 m high with seven bell towers, against ruins that now reach 25 m. Rabelais spent fourteen years here as secretary to abbot Geoffroy d'Estissac and tutor to his nephews