Le Creusot: The Queen's Crystal Works and the 100-Tonne Steam Hammer

Required Activities

• In the courtyard of the Château de la Verrerie, find the two flat-tiled cones that held the glass furnaces, and go inside the left-hand one: there is a full Italian-style theatre built in the shell of the furnace, while its twin became first a chapel and then, from 1974, an exhibition room

• Walk into the parc de la Verrerie, laid out by Achille Duchêne, and find the square 19th-century Tour des Bandages off the rue Clemenceau — a copy of the medieval tour du Bost, built so that the family in the château would not have to look at the machine inside it, which tested the iron tyres of locomotive wheels

• Stand under the steam hammer on the place du 8 Mai 1945 and work out the scale of it: a 100-tonne hammer falling on an anvil of 750 tonnes built up in six layers of cast iron, forging steel ingots of more than 120 tonnes — and when it first struck, on 23 September 1877, the blow could be heard ten kilometres away

• Read the plates on the hammer and set its two lives against each other: in service until 1930, taken to pieces, and put back up here in 1969 as the emblem of the town — the largest of the handful of giant steam hammers left on public show anywhere, and listed as a historic engineering landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since 1981