Claude-Nicolas Ledoux wanted to build an ideal city, and he started with a salt factory. The Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans was built between 1775 and 1779 on the orders of Louis XV's administration, to boil brine into salt, and Ledoux designed it as a perfect half circle of buildings around the director's house, with the workers, the boiling halls and the management all arranged in a geometric order meant to express reason, hierarchy and efficiency. It never grew into the full circular city he imagined, but what was built is astonishing, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1982, later joined by the great saltworks at Salins-les-Bains.
The brine came from Salins, around twenty kilometres away, through a pipeline of hollowed wooden trunks, because it was cheaper to move salty water to the forest than to haul firewood to the springs. The nearby Forêt de Chaux, one of the largest oak forests in France, provided the fuel for the boiling pans. Today the site hosts exhibitions, gardens and a museum of Ledoux's architecture, and it is worth an hour or two even for riders who usually skip museums.
The riding around here is classic Franche-Comté. The valley of the Loue to the east is superb, with gorges, limestone cliffs and the town of Ornans, where the painter Gustave Courbet was born. Further up, the roads climb into the Jura plateau through forest and pasture, with smooth tarmac, flowing corners and little traffic outside the summer holidays. Salins-les-Bains, wedged in a narrow valley, is a natural pairing for the saltworks theme.
Arc-et-Senans is a small village with basic services, and Quingey and Mouchard nearby are similar. For a sure range of fuel stations and shops, Dole is about twenty-three kilometres away. Food here means Comté cheese, the region's pride, as well as smoked Morteau sausage and the yellow wine of the Jura, vin jaune, which tastes like nothing else.
Come in late spring or early autumn, when the light is clear and the meadows green or golden. Walk into the great courtyard, stand in front of the director's house with its heavy columns, and try to imagine the clatter, steam and salt of a royal factory built like a temple.