Clamecy: The Wood Floaters' Town and the Bishops of Bethlehem

Required Activities

• Go into Saint-Martin, open every day, and find the three things that date it: the Burgundian Gothic nave of the 13th century, the rood screen standing in front of a choir and ambulatory that are square rather than rounded, and the Cavaillé-Coll organ of 1864 — then step outside and look up at the Flamboyant tower, built between 1497 and 1515

• Cross the Yonne into the Bethléem quarter — Panténor until the exiled bishop of Bethlehem set his see here in 1224 — and look at Georges Théodore Renaud's reinforced-concrete church of 1926-1927 from the outside, since it is not open, then find the bishops' own 12th and 13th-century chapel in the same quarter, three rib-vaulted bays of it still standing and now the dining room of a restaurant

• Walk the quays where the Beuvron meets the Yonne and follow the canal du Nivernais out of town, standing where the rafts were tied together: the last half-train of firewood left here for Paris in 1877, and the very last loose logs were floated out in 1923

• On 14 July, take a place on the Yonne quays for the water jousts, inherited straight from what the floaters did for sport, and watch how the jouster is braced on the platform as the two boats close

• Go into the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire Romain Rolland on the avenue de la République — the house the Nobel laureate was born in, in 1866 — and find the flottage display, then work out from it how a raft of Morvan firewood was steered down to Paris