France Guide
Burgundy
Abbey of Fontena
Website: www.abbayedefontenay.com
Opening time: Daily: April to mid-Nov 10am–6pm; mid-Nov to March 10am– noon & 2–5pm
Price: €8.90, under 26 years €4.20
6km away, along the GR213 footpath, the privately owned Abbey of Fontenay is probably the biggest draw in the area. Founded in 1118, it's the only Burgundian monastery to survive intact, despite conversion to a paper mill in the early nineteenth century. It was restored in the early 1900s to its original form and is one of the world's most complete monastic complexes, comprising caretaker's lodge, guesthouse and chapel, dormitory, hospital, prison, bakery, kennels and abbot's house, as well as a church, cloister, chapterhouse and even a forge.
On top of all this, the abbey's physical setting, at the head of a quiet stream-filled valley enclosed by woods of pine, fir, sycamore and beech, is superb. There's a bucolic calm about the place, particularly in the graceful cloister, and in these surroundings the spartan simplicity of Cistercian life seems utterly attractive. Hardly a scrap of decoration softens the church: even the carving on the capitals is reduced to the barest-bones outline of an acanthus leaf – the motherly statue of the Virgin arrived after St Bernard's death. There's no direct lighting in the nave, just an other-worldly glow from the square-ended apse. The effect is beautiful but daunting, the perfect structural embodiment of St Bernard's ascetic principles.