Champlitte: The Château-Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions

Required Activities

• Go through the reconstructed rooms of the arts and popular traditions museum, which since 1957 has filled a count's château with peasant interiors — workshops, kitchens and shopfronts set out in the state rooms — and look for the collection built by Albert Demard, the council employee who founded it and became its first curator, and for whom and his wife Félicie the Haute-Saône departmental museums are now named

• On the château front, pick out the Renaissance decoration that survived the 1751 fire — attributed to Nicolas Moris and dated to about 1564-1565 — and its Flemish "flamanche" windows split by a stone mullion; then walk down to the church of Saint-Christophe, which grew out of the 15th-century rib-vaulted chapel of the sires de Vergy and keeps a 15th-century belfry and gargoyles, and on to the 18th-century orangery-theatre built by Claude Joseph Alexandre Bertrand with its belvedere over the Salon valley

• Walk out from the town onto the protected dry limestone grasslands and find the cabordes — drystone field huts, some original and some rebuilt — on the Lavières site, then compare that open calcareous turf with the woodland that covers 5,500 of the commune's 13,000 hectares and makes Champlitte the owner of the largest communal forest in the Haute-Saône