Bresse: Blue-Footed Chickens, Saracen Chimneys and the Plaine Tonique

Required Activities

• Eat a Bresse chicken, poularde or capon — the only French poultry with an AOC, held since 1957, from a district just 100 km by 40 across the Ain, Saône-et-Loire and Jura — and before it is cooked, check the bird yourself: the leg ring the producer put on it at the end of its nine weeks outdoors, and the blue of the feet, whose exact shade is fixed by decree

• At the Ferme-musée de la Forêt at Courtes, stand right round the hearth — a Saracen chimney sits over a fire in the middle of the room that you could walk around, not against a wall — then go outside and place it in its group: pyramidal on a square base in the north of the Bresse, octagonal with a conical point in the south. Over four hundred of these were counted in 1923; barely thirty were left by 1977, and exactly thirty-four in 2007. Despite the name, nothing about them is Moorish

• Visit the Ferme du Sougey, where it is the Saracen chimney and its stack that have been listed since February 1946, not the farm around them — the first monument protected in the commune — and look up into the hood from inside to see how a central hearth was vented through a roof

• Walk round or paddle on the lake at La Plaine Tonique, the leisure base signed for Montrevel-en-Bresse but actually just over the boundary at Malafretaz, where the lake, the swimming centre and the tennis courts share one site