Lorris is a small market town on the southern rim of the Forêt d'Orléans, the largest state forest in mainland France, and it is one of those places whose name carries more weight in history books than its size would suggest. Fewer than three thousand people live here, around a square with a fine old timber market hall and a church whose wooden organ loft is one of the treasures of the Loiret.
The name matters because of a charter. In the twelfth century the Capetian kings granted Lorris a set of customs that fixed taxes, limited forced labour and protected the townsfolk from arbitrary fines. The "coutumes de Lorris" were so admired that dozens of other towns across the royal domain copied them, and historians still cite them when they talk about how medieval France began to give ordinary people rights on paper. The town also gave its name to Guillaume de Lorris, the poet who wrote the first part of the Roman de la Rose, the great love allegory of the Middle Ages. A darker chapter is told in the Resistance museum: the forest hid a maquis in 1944, and the memorial at the crossroads in the woods recalls the young fighters who were killed there that August.
As a fuel stop it does the job. The town has shops, a bakery and a filling station on the edge of town, and if anything is shut, Sully-sur-Loire is about eighteen kilometres south, with its moated castle on the Loire and every service you need. Coffee on the square, under the plane trees, is a civilised pause.
The riding around here is about calm rather than corners. The forest roads run long and straight between oaks and Scots pines, the land is almost flat, and the surface is usually good, so it is a place to settle into a steady pace and listen to the engine. Watch for deer at dusk and for logging trucks on the narrower lanes, and remember that hunting season brings parked cars and people in orange at the forest edges on autumn weekends. South of town the Canal d'Orléans threads through the woods with old locks and lock-keepers' houses, and the ponds of the forest are good for herons and, in spring, for the noise of frogs. It is gentle country, and after the traffic of the Paris ring it feels like someone has turned the volume down.