Another "what's that thing?" from Autun. You can't miss them, two almost perfectly conical hills rising from nowhere. It's instantly obvious what they are, not so obvious the cause.
These are the Les Télots spoil heaps. Autun sits on a large oil shale deposit which by 1837 was being exploited for gas for public lighting. The Les Télots concession was granted in 1865, and production of shale oil gas started in 1881. The refinery constructed an oil distillation plant in 1936, employing several hundred workers who produced automotive fuel. Following closure in 1957, the site was dismantled and partially demolished. Remains of the installations (ruins) and these two large spoil tips still mark the landscape, overgrown with particular vegetation studied for its biodiversity. Les Télots is recognized as a natural zone of ecological, faunistic, and floristic interest (ZNIEFF).
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