Paris · Fontainebleau Forest and Loing Sweep
A 175 km loop from Barbizon village pause
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Why this ride
Sandstone, forest shade, old towns and civilized southern flow. A 175 km loop that starts and ends near Barbizon, about 3 h 01 of riding. It goes by way of Fontainebleau forest road, Moret-sur-Loing water stop and Nemours window. Back roads rather than main roads, where the map allows.
Roadbook
- Barbizon village pause
sight · 80 m
Barbizon is a single long street on the western edge of the forest of Fontainebleau, and it is a village that owes everything to a handful of painters. In the 1830s and 1840s, artists began to arrive from Paris, tired of academic studios, and set up easels among the oaks and boulders to paint nature directly. They included Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, who painted peasants at work in the fields, including his famous Gleaners, and their approach, known as the Barbizon School, paved the way for Impressionism. The village's Auberge Ganne, where many of them lodged and covered the walls with paintings, is now a small museum.
A walk along the main street gives you a feel of how the place has changed. Galleries, antique shops and restaurants now occupy the old farmhouses, and the walls are covered in roses and wisteria. Robert Louis Stevenson spent time here in the 1870s and wrote about the forest. The Fontainebleau château is about eight kilometres away, and the village has the air of a quiet corner that has never quite recovered from being so photogenic.
For a rider, Barbizon is a pleasant pause rather than a long stop. Roads from Fontainebleau, which skirt the forest, are smooth and gently twisting, shaded by tall trees, with speed limits that are strictly applied. At the village, parking is simple on the side streets, though on fine weekends it can be busy. Fuel is not usually available in the village itself, so use the larger town of Fontainebleau, which is close by and has several stations. There are cafés and restaurants on the main street, some quite smart, and a coffee at a pavement table is a civilised way to rest.
Come on a weekday morning if you can. The light in the forest is soft, the crowd is thin, and you can walk a short way into the woods to see the boulders and heather where the painters worked. In autumn, the leaves glow, and a few of the old oaks stand with their branches bare against a grey sky.
- Fontainebleau forest road
scenic · 90 m
Fontainebleau is a small town that holds a very big place in French history, and the forest around it is one of the finest woods in Europe. The château was a royal residence for eight centuries, from medieval kings to Napoleon III, and each ruler added something, so that the building is a glorious jumble of styles. It was here, in the courtyard known as the Cour des Adieux, that Napoleon said goodbye to his guard in April 1814 before leaving for exile on Elba. The town of nearly twenty thousand people sits at about ninety metres above the sea, and it has every service, including several fuel stations.
The forest covers some twenty-five thousand hectares, and its sandstone boulders, heathland and tall trees make it unlike any other woodland near Paris. The rocks are the remains of ancient dunes, and some of them are the size of houses. In the nineteenth century, painters of the Barbizon school came to work here, leaving the studios of Paris to paint the trees and light directly, and their work helped lead to Impressionism. Today climbers come from around the world to scale the boulders, in a sport that was practised here long before it had a name, and the climbing area is known simply as Bleau.
The forest roads are a joy to ride. They run through beech and oak, with long gentle bends and flickering light, and the tarmac is usually in good shape. However, the speed limit is low, and police and cameras are active, so stay within it. Wild boar and deer cross the road, especially at dawn and dusk, and cyclists and walkers are everywhere on sunny weekends. On wet days, the leaves and pine needles make corners treacherous, so take care.
Spend a little time in the town if you can. The streets around the château have cafés and restaurants, and pastry shops where a slice of something sweet makes a fair reward. A walk in the palace gardens, with their carp pond and formal parterres, is a gentle way to rest between rides.
- Moret-sur-Loing water stop
photo · 52 m
Moret-sur-Loing is what an impressionist painter would have ordered if asked for a small medieval town. It sits on a quiet bend of the river Loing, where an old stone bridge with a mill arches over the water, and the whole composition, with a church tower, reflections and drifting willow, is the one that Alfred Sisley painted again and again after settling here in the 1880s. He is buried in the local cemetery. The town was fortified in the Middle Ages, and two great gates, the Porte de Samois and the Porte de Bourgogne, still stand at the ends of the main street, which runs between them past old houses and tiny courtyards.
It also has a sweet claim to fame. Moret's sugar of the Sisters, a hard, golden barley sugar sold in little twisted sticks, was invented by nuns here in the seventeenth century, and you can still buy it in the town, in tins, with an old-fashioned label. A few hundred metres away at Saint-Mammès, the Loing meets the Seine, and barges laden with grain, sand and containers pass through the locks, so the water stop there is full of working boats rather than pleasure craft.
The surrounding countryside is particularly pleasing. Moret sits on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, a huge royal hunting forest of oak and beech with sandstone boulders scattered through it, and the roads in and out are shady, with gentle bends and not much traffic during the week. The surface is generally good, though forestry lorries and cyclists share the lanes, and weekends are busier. Early morning, with mist on the river, is the best time. In spring the woods are fresh and green, and in autumn they turn copper.
For practicalities, a town with a few thousand inhabitants has bakeries, a supermarket and a couple of cafes beside the river, and the neighbouring Veneux-les-Sablons has fuel and bigger shops. There is a public tap and benches near the bridge, which makes it a convenient water stop. It is also a useful half-day escape from Paris, easily combined with a loop through the forest and the castle at Fontainebleau.
- Nemours food window
food · 60 m
Balzac set a novel here, and if you ride into Nemours at midday you can see why he found it a good stage. Ursule Mirouët, one of the quieter books in his huge Human Comedy, takes place among the notables, notaries and doctors of a small provincial town on the Loing, and Nemours, with its grey stone, its canal and its slow, watchful streets, still has something of that atmosphere. It is a town where people know each other's business and where lunch, at midday, is a fixed point.
The town has about fourteen thousand inhabitants, and together with neighbouring Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours it forms a pleasant, practical base for the ride. The Loing flows through the middle, split into channels by the canal, and the quays are lined with plane trees and cafes. The castle, which stands on the river, gives the place a bit of scale, but the pleasure lies mostly in the ordinary things: a baker with a queue, a market stall, a fishmonger.
For lunch, the usual French rhythm applies: restaurants serve from noon until about two, and after that the kitchens close, so the food window is real. The food of the Gâtinais, the region around, is plain and good, with a plat du jour of roast pork or chicken with potatoes, vegetable soup, a cheese plate and a fruit tart. The honey of the Gâtinais is well known, a pale, creamy honey made from rapeseed and wild flowers, and a pot makes a good souvenir.
The riding in this part of the Loing valley is quiet and easy, through farmland and woods with long views and light traffic. The roads are generally good, though some are patched, and the main hazard is the tractor or the cyclist on a narrow lane. In autumn, mist can lie in the valley until late in the morning, and in winter, black ice on bridges is a risk.
Bagneaux-sur-Loing, a few kilometres away, is a quieter village, but Nemours has everything: stations, supermarkets, cafes, and a bakery on nearly every corner. Eat well, take a short walk along the canal, and ride on refreshed.
- Back to Barbizon
finish · 80 m
Barbizon comes back at the end of a day with a different face, once the day-trippers have gone. The shops close, the terraces empty and the village slows to the pace of the forest behind it. The sandstone ridges around Barbizon, the Gorges d'Apremont and the Franchard area, are a short ride away, and they catch the evening sun in layers of grey and orange, with heather and silver birch growing between the boulders and the sandy tracks. It is wild country, in the middle of a densely populated region, and it is a strangely quiet place when the light is low.
An ancient wood, the Bas-Bréau, lies on the edge of the village, and it contains some of the oldest oaks in the forest, some of them hundreds of years old. The painters of Barbizon came to sketch them, and a few of the trees were given names and protected as early as the nineteenth century, when the forest became one of the first protected landscapes in the world. In 1861 a decree set aside part of the forest as an artistic reserve, one of the earliest protected landscapes anywhere, reflecting how seriously the painters took their woods.
The ride from Fontainebleau along the forest road is the nicest way to arrive or leave. The surface is smooth, bends are gentle, and tall trunks flash past on both sides, with the road dipping in and out of shadow. Be wary at dusk, when deer and wild boar cross the road and the low sun can dazzle, and watch for cyclists and walkers without lights. In the village, a couple of restaurants stay open into the evening, and sitting on a terrace under the trees is a fine end to a day's ride.
Sleep, if you can, nearby, and wake early. Mist often hangs between the trunks at dawn, and a rider setting out from Barbizon at first light feels the whole forest holding its breath.