Lyons-la-Forêt: The Village in the Heart of the Forest

Required Activities

• Stand in the open ground floor of the 17th-century halles, restored in 1776 by the last lord of Lyons, the duc de Penthièvre, and work out from the posts and braces overhead how the timber frame carries the roof without a single internal wall

• Walk south out of the village into the forêt domaniale de Lyons, one of the largest beech forests in Normandy at some 10,700 hectares, as far as the ruins of the abbey of Mortemer about 4.5 km away — founded in 1134 by Henry Beauclerc and the first Cistercian house in Normandy — and find the 12th-century dovecote and the barrel-vaulted cellar at the south end of the ruins

• Walk the streets Madame Bovary was filmed in twice — Renoir in 1933, Chabrol in 1990 with three hundred extras, most of them villagers — and pick out the corners that appear in both, finishing at Le Vieux Logis, the oldest house in Lyons, dated 1492

• In the church of Saint-Denis, find the eagle-shaped lectern bought out of Mortemer in 1791 when the abbey was sold off, and outside look along the façade and nave at the chequerboard of sandstone and flint they are built from

• Find the villa Le Fresne, where Ravel stayed four times between 1916 and 1922 — he finished Le Tombeau de Couperin here between June and September 1917, and in August and September 1922 completed his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition