Bibracte and Mont Beuvray: The Capital of the Aedui, Where Vercingetorix Took Command

Required Activities

• In the museum of Celtic civilisation, open on the flank of the hill since 1996, find what the Aedui were buying: the Italian amphorae and pottery dug out of Bibracte's rubbish pits and even out of its house floors, and the evidence for the miners, blacksmiths and coin-strikers who worked here

• Walk in through the Porte du Rebout, where excavation found five successive gateworks stacked on one another — the oldest showing people were on the hill in the Neolithic — then follow the main street up through the craft quarter Bulliot dug from 1867, where the blacksmiths and coin-strikers had their workshops

• On the bare grassy summit at 821 m use the orientation table to name the Morvan summits and valleys south and west, then find the three things standing on it: the chapel of Saint-Martin, rebuilt in 1873 with its apse set exactly over that of a 10th-century Romanesque chapel which itself replaced an ancient temple; the monument to Bulliot, who found Bibracte; and la Chaume, the 100 m² Mitterrand bought for a symbolic one franc in May 1995 to be buried in, before being buried at Jarnac instead

• Find the pierre de la Wivre, the rock Bulliot believed Vercingetorix stood on to argue for Gaulish unity before the assembly of 52 BC gave him command, and on the way back pick out the alignments of queules — the last traces of laid hedges from when the summit was still pasture in the 19th century