Exploring the bocage of Fontenoy-le-Château

Date of your route : Jul 31, 2023
Reliability of the description : ★★★★★ Very good
Ease of following the route : ★★★★★ Very good
Route interest : ★★★★☆ Good
Very busy route : No

Hello
A pleasant walk.
A few roads (with little traffic between 4 and 5, and between 10 and the finish).
It’s not easy to find the arboretum, which is very poorly signposted. Groups should be aware that there isn’t much space for cars. The arboretum looks abandoned The information boards are in very poor condition.
Before and after point 7, you need to be careful to follow the path as the vegetation is dense.
At point 8, I had to carry on straight ahead as the vegetation was too dense to get through.
Kind regards
jp

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Date of your route : Nov 01, 2022
Reliability of the description : ★★★☆☆ Average
Ease of following the route : ★★★☆☆ Average
Route interest : ★★★★☆ Good
Very busy route : No

Hello,
A pleasant walk and fairly easy to follow, except at point 3. We missed the path that branched off to the right and took the next one running parallel to it a little further down. And that’s when it turned into a nightmare; as it had rained the day before, the path was completely flooded, with fallen trees blocking the way and overgrown with brambles and all sorts of thorny bushes. To top it all off, it came to an abrupt end… We were forced to climb the hill and then cut through some fenced-off fields to reach the path running alongside the canal. I think a more precise description of this section is needed, as even with the GPS track it’s easy to go wrong, given that the two paths run parallel to each other.

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Date of your route : May 03, 2021
Reliability of the description : ★★★★★ Very good
Ease of following the route : ★★★★★ Very good
Route interest : ★★★☆☆ Average
Very busy route : No

We used the GPS app for this route, as the ageing signposting along the way isn’t always easy to follow. A 3-hour walk with a 10-minute break halfway through.
The route is pleasant to start with, passing through the arboretum and then overlooking the eastern canal. The central section on the outskirts of the village is, as is often the case, a little disappointing, but the end of the route offers some lovely scenery.
A lovely spring hike – thank you for suggesting it.

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Hello Loic
Regarding your walk in Fontenoy, it is indeed not possible to describe several alternative routes within a single walk.
When an option of this kind arises in my own walks (see “Domgermain, History and tags in the forest”, end of point 4), and if one of the alternative routes does not require any new waypoints and is therefore easy to follow, I provide the relevant information: for example, for your walk, shortly after point 4 at the Ruelle des Bannes:
1) Explanation regarding the more complicated alternative ‘to be seen on the ground’
2) supplemented by: “option to head directly to point 5 by turning right onto the Ruelle des Bannes … until you reach the stream”

This is merely the opinion of a hiker and online hiker, offered in a spirit of friendship
We’ll certainly be heading out soon to explore your other two routes

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Hello,
thank you for your feedback.

I’ll go ahead and make the necessary changes to points 2 and 3 straight away to make things clearer for future walkers.
Regarding point 4, it’s true that a detour through the village could be an interesting option. I don’t think it’s possible to create alternative routes to offer several options along a single linear route, is it? As for the route changes, I’ll test them out beforehand to ensure the description provides the best possible guidance for walkers.

Loic

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Date of your route : Mar 07, 2021
Reliability of the description : ★★★★★ Very good
Ease of following the route : ★★★★★ Very good
Route interest : ★★★★☆ Good
Very busy route : No

Hello
We really enjoyed this short walk. As we did it on 7 March, nature was still a bit asleep; we missed the birdsong (apart from a few buzzards and jays), the pretty flowers in the meadows and the trees in bloom, but that’s not the fault of the author of this walk, of course.

A lovely, idyllic route with some lovely, pleasant views.

The route description is very well done; adding details about the immediate surroundings is reassuring – for example, at point 8, which could be a bit tricky without these specifics. Well done!
We noted two points in the description that left us a little puzzled:
At point 2, it says ‘at the second bend… and at a junction where several paths meet’: this junction isn’t obvious; being on a wide road makes you search for it, but it’s actually on the left, hidden in the vegetation, and isn’t very well marked. At this point, the key detail that really helped us was “a sign marked 36 indicates the direction”. In a spirit of friendship, I’d advise removing the reference to a crossroads and keeping only the reference to the bend and signs 37, 38 and 36, which are in fact forest plots and have remained relatively consistent over time.
At point 3, itsays “cross the stream … and continue along the same contour line”; this made me think of a contour line, so I was trying not to go up or down, but you do in fact have to climb up the opposite side in a section where the path isn’t very well marked – the young beech copse and the intermittent yellow markings aren’t easy to spot. You simply need to head uphill until you come across a small path which gradually becomes better and better marked.

The route might be made a little more interesting by heading down to Fontenoy via the small street after point 4, at a sign marked ‘La Vieille Cote’, and then heading back up towards point 5. This doesn’t alter the route much. We hesitated, and stuck to the route for this walk, only to regret it a little afterwards. This is just a suggestion.

We rounded off our day in the Vosges by visiting the Manufacture – a lovely, interesting site – and walking through Fontenoy-la-Chaîne.

Thanks again for this lovely description.
Fanfan

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