Montbard

Montbard doesn’t try to sell itself the way Beaune or Dijon do, and honestly the approach from the train station, past light industry and the unglamorous stretch of the Burgundy Canal that runs through town, doesn’t do it any favors. We came for one reason — the abbey a few kilometres outside town — and stayed a full day longer than planned once we realized Montbard itself had its own quietly interesting story to tell.

Buffon’s town

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one of the most important naturalists of the eighteenth century and the author of the vast Histoire Naturelle, was born and largely worked in Montbard, and the town has preserved the park and tower where he did much of his research and writing. The Parc Buffon, laid out around the surviving medieval Tour de l’Aubespin and the round Tour Saint-Louis, gives a strange, pleasant sense of walking through the actual grounds where a man catalogued the natural world before Darwin, before evolution as a concept existed, working from observation and correspondence rather than any of the tools we’d take for granted now. Lia, who studied biology before switching to photography, found the small Buffon museum more absorbing than either of us expected, reading display cases about eighteenth-century taxonomy debates for far longer than I did.

The abbey that justified the whole trip

The Abbaye de Fontenay, a few kilometres from Montbard, is one of the oldest and best-preserved Cistercian abbeys in Europe, founded in 1118 by a companion of Saint Bernard and never significantly altered after it was converted into a paper mill in the nineteenth century, which paradoxically saved its bones from the kind of aggressive restoration that reshapes a lot of medieval sites. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site now, and walking through its stark dormitory, its cloister, and its unheated church, you get an unusually direct sense of the discipline and quiet the Cistercian order built into their architecture — no color, no ornament, just proportion and light doing all the work. We spent nearly three hours there and could have stayed longer, especially in the gardens, which still use the abbey’s original spring-fed water system.

When to go: Late spring, when the gardens at Fontenay are at their best and the canal towpaths around Montbard make for a good easy walk before or after the abbey visit.