The Revolution Starts in the Forest

This is a reworking of a post I wrote in September 2019. 

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The source of the Sauvaget, known as la Fontaine Bourbon, full of crystal clear water even in the drought.

The little stream called the Sauvaget starts as a spring, deep in the Forest of Preuilly. It descends rapidly from there, just a few kilometres, to meet the River Claise on the outskirts of Bossay sur Claise. Along the way, this insignificant seeming stream powered the hammers and bellows of an iron smelting complex called the Fourneau de Claise in the 17th century.

The humps and hollows in the topography of the forest tell you man was here.

Iron ore was extracted from under the ground in the forest. Trees were cut to provide charcoal to feed the Claise furnaces. Mule trains, loaded with ore or sacks of charcoal shuttled materials down to the ore refiners. Slag, the waste product from the foundries, was dumped in the forest on the return journey.

All this section of the forest is full of old mounds and hollows.

A few more snippets about the industrial activity centred on the Sauvaget are to be found in these previous blog posts:

The Claise and its Mills -- 17th century to the present.

A Walk Along the Sauvaget (Part I).

A Walk Along the Sauvaget (Part II).

A Walk Around Sauvaget.

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