The Saône valley

Graced by ancient, golden buildings, Tournus is a beautiful little town on the banks of the Saône, 28km south of Chalon. Its main attraction is the old abbey church of St-Philibert, one of the earliest and thus most influential Romanesque buildings in Burgundy. Its construction began around 900 AD but the present building dates back to the first half of the eleventh century. The facade, with its powerful towers and simple decoration of Lombard arcading, is somewhat reminiscent of a fortress.

The Mâconnais wine-producing country lies to the west of the Saône, a 20km-wide strip stretching from Tournus to just south of Mâcon. The region’s best white wines, including all the grands crus and some of the best white grands crus, labelled Pouilly-Fuissé, come from the southern part of this strip, around the pretty villages of Pouilly, Vinzelles and Fuissé.

Scattered among the houses of the attractive modern-day town, the abbey of Cluny is the Saône Valley’s major tourist destination. The monastery was founded in 910 in response to the corruption of the existing church, and it took only a couple of vigorous early abbots to transform the power of Cluny into a veritable empire. Second only to that of the pope, the abbot’s power in the Christian world made even monarchs tremble. However, Cluny’s spiritual influence gradually declined and the abbey became a royal gift in the twelfth century. Centuries later, in the wake of the Revolution, Hugues de Semur’s vast and influential eleventh-century church, which had been the largest building in Christendom until the construction of St Peter’s in Rome, was dismantled. The most exciting thing that has happened since has been the burial of Mme Danielle Mitterrand, the President’s wife, in the town cemetery; her grave attracts many visitors.

What you see of the former abbey today is an octagonal belfry and the huge south transept. Standing amid these fragments of a once huge construction gives a tangible and poignant insight into the Revolution’s enormous powers of transformation. Access to the belfry is through the Grand École des Ingénieurs, one of France’s elite higher-education institutions, and you can often see the students in their grey lab coats. At the back of the abbey is one of France’s national stud farms, Haras de Cluny, which you can visit, but only on a guided tour. The Musée d’Art et d’Archaeologie, in the fifteenth-century palace of the last freely elected abbot, helps to flesh out the ruins by renting tablet PCs which provide a representation of what the abbey looked like as you stand on particular spots; from the top of the Tour des Fromages (entered via the tourist office) an amazing virtual reality screen projects the old buildings onto a live cam that shows the street below.

The Charollais takes its name from the pretty little water-enclosed market town of Charolles, with its 32 bridges, on the main N79 road. In turn, it gives its name to one of the world’s most illustrious breeds of cattle: the white, curly-haired, stocky Charollais, bred for its lean meat. Throughout this region, scattered across the rich farmland, are dozens of small villages, all with Romanesque churches, the offspring of Cluny’s vigorous youth.

Some 14km west of Charolles, across countryside that becomes ever gentler and flatter as you approach the broad valley of the Loire, is Paray-le-Monial, whose major attraction is its Basilique du Sacré-Coeur. Not only is it an exquisite building in its own right, with a marvellously satisfying arrangement of apses and chapels stacking up in sturdy symmetry to a fine octagonal belfry, it’s the best place to get an idea of what the abbey of Cluny looked like, as it was built shortly afterwards in devoted imitation of the mother church.