Les Touches: Mont Juillet and History

Les Touches brings together distinctive landscape features and buildings with a layered local history. For planning your trip, a simple distinction is helpful: La Chauminette and Mont Juillet represent the landscape, while the church, manor houses, and historical events reveal other sides of the town. This can help you decide whether an outdoor excursion or history and architecture matter more to you.

La Chauminette and Mont Juillet

The La Chauminette circular trail passes through sunken lanes and wooded avenues, by a pond, and on to Mont Juillet, the highest point in Les Touches. There, you can enjoy a panoramic view. A calvary on Mont Juillet was built in 1926 and renovated in 2004. Mont Juillet also has an orientation board, a playground, a picnic area, and toilets. If you are choosing primarily based on the landscape, you can look to the sunken lanes, wooded avenues, and pond; for a clearly defined destination, the trail leads to the highest point in Les Touches.

Traces of different eras on Mont Juillet

The history of Mont Juillet also reaches far back. Neolithic flints have been found there. A mill was built there in the Middle Ages, and four more mills operated there until the Second World War. The finds and mills belong to very different periods: the flints date back to prehistoric times, while the history of the mills extends to those that were still operating until the Second World War.

The church and the history of pilgrimage

The Church of Saint Mélaine brings together architecture and the history of pilgrimage. Its architecture is inspired by the Gothic style and features a low-vaulted choir, slender columns, and ribbed windows. The church houses an 18th-century polychrome statue of Saint James of Compostela. It recalls that Les Touches was a stopover for pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. Thus, specific architectural features sit alongside the memory of the pilgrimage stop.

The Saint-Jacques fair is also part of the town’s historical traditions: it was authorized for Les Touches in 1668 and held on May 1. The date places the fair within local history and adds its own historical context to the church’s connection with pilgrimage.

Buildings and historical events

The historic buildings can be distinguished by age, former function, and surviving structure. La Vieille Cure is considered the oldest building in Les Touches; its foundations date from the 14th century. In the 15th and 16th centuries, it served the Condé family as a hunting lodge. At the Manoir du Bois-Souchard, only the cylindrical tower of the original building survives; it is also one of the oldest buildings in Les Touches. The comparison highlights the age and former use of La Vieille Cure, and the surviving part of the original building at the manor.

The history of the Maquis is connected with Maison Rouge and two dates. On October 16, 1943, Maison Rouge was the site of the first Maquis recognized by London. On June 16, 1944, the Maquis of Maison Rouge was relocated to the forest of Saffré. The two dates mark a sequence: the 1943 event was followed by the relocation in June 1944.

Mining and viticulture in the past

The historic coal mines associated with Les Touches covered an area of 2,100 to 2,200 hectares and extended beyond the commune boundaries. At the end of the 19th century, Les Touches still had around 500 hectares of vineyards, where Muscadet and Gros Plant were grown. Mining and viticulture thus belong to different chapters of local history and add further aspects of life in Les Touches in the past to the history of its buildings and pilgrimage.

For the broader travel overview: Loire-Atlantique.