Morvan Southbound Weekend

A 285 km loop

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Why this ride

A rider’s loop: clean exit, memorable middle, calm return. 285 km round from Goussainville - plan on about 5 h 54 of riding. On the way it passes near Saintry-sur-Seine, Scenic stretch in Les Ulis, Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines and near Osny. The climb of the day is near L'Isle-Adam.

Roadbook

1. Fuel stop in Goussainville fuel

   Fuel at 0 km.

2. Photo stop near Saintry-sur-Seine photo

   Photo stop near Saintry-sur-Seine comes up 41 km in.

3. Scenic stretch in Les Ulis scenic
4. Near Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, on the way back swim

   In 1951 the poet Louis Aragon and the novelist Elsa Triolet bought an old water mill on the Rémarde river near Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, and turned it into their country home. They lived and wrote there for decades, and they are buried together in the garden. The Moulin de Villeneuve is now a museum, with their library, furniture and the park where they walked.

   Saint-Arnoult lies on the southern edge of the forest of Rambouillet, where the woods give way to the Beauce plain. This stop is a few kilometres away, near Bullion and Sonchamp, in a landscape of forest, meadows and small valleys, with streams winding through the trees. It is a quiet, green corner of the Île-de-France, only an hour from Paris.

   Dourdan, a short ride east, has a castle built by Philippe Auguste in the early thirteenth century, with towers, moats and a keep, and a pleasant old town with a covered market. The forest of Dourdan, next to it, is another large area of oak and beech.

   For a swim, the forest has ponds, but most are not for bathing. The étangs de Hollande, further north in the Rambouillet forest, have a supervised area in summer. The Rémarde and its tributaries are small streams, pleasant for a rest in the shade but not for swimming.

   The riding is relaxed, with narrow forest roads, gentle bends and villages with old churches. Watch for deer and wild boar at dawn and dusk, and for the packs of Parisian cyclists who own these roads on Sunday mornings. The A10 and A11 split just south at Ablis, so this is also the last calm before motorway traffic; Saint-Arnoult is the sensible place to top up the tank first.

5. Food stop near Osny food

   Food at 163 km, roughly 3 hours into the riding.

6. High point near L'Isle-Adam pass
7. Saint-Gratien finish

   Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon, held one of the most brilliant salons of nineteenth-century France at her château in Saint-Gratien. Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Sainte-Beuve, Maupassant and many other writers and artists gathered there in the summers, and the conversation, it was said, was the best in France. The château still stands, though not open to the public, on the edge of the lake of Enghien.

   Saint-Gratien shares that lake with its neighbour, and it is a quiet, residential town of villas, gardens and tree-lined streets. Marshal Catinat, one of Louis XIV's best generals, retired here and died in 1712, and his name is still on streets and a school.

   It is a curious end to a weekend in the Morvan. Two days ago you were on empty granite roads among beech forest and lakes where nobody spoke above a murmur; now you are threading through the northern suburbs of Paris, counting traffic lights. The last stretch is slow, stop-start and full of buses, and a little patience goes further than a lot of throttle.

   The reward is the lake. From the Saint-Gratien shore you look across the water to the white casino and the old spa buildings of Enghien, and in the evening, with rowing boats tied up and ducks arguing in the reeds, it has a gentle, provincial air that seems to belong to Mathilde's century rather than ours.

   Practicalities are easy. The town has fuel and shops on its main roads, and the cafés of Enghien are a five-minute walk round the shore. Leave the bike, walk a loop of the lake, and let the Morvan settle into memory.

8. Back to Morvan Southbound Weekend finish

   Nobody plans a holiday around Goussainville, and that is fine, because this stop exists to get you out of Paris with a full tank. Aircraft pass low overhead on their final approach, so loud that conversation stops and restarts, and the sky is stitched with white contrails.

   For a rider heading south toward the Morvan, the point is simple. Goussainville has about thirty thousand people and plenty of petrol stations, supermarkets and cafés, and Gonesse is nearly as big. Fill up and eat properly here, because the first stretch beyond Paris is motorway or fast trunk road with services that charge a premium. If you are coming back on the Sunday evening, this is also where you will find yourself stuck in the returning traffic, so a coffee before the last push into the city is not a bad idea.

   There is real history underneath all the concrete, though. Gonesse was famous in the Middle Ages for its bread, which was carried into Paris to feed the city, and the town still carries the name. Goussainville has an odd survivor: the old village centre, Vieux-Pays, was largely abandoned after the airport opened in the 1970s and the noise became unbearable, and a medieval church with its tower still stands among empty houses. In June 1973 a Soviet Tu-144 supersonic airliner crashed onto the village during the Paris Air Show, killing everyone aboard and several people on the ground. Locals do not forget it, and a short detour will show you the church, although the area is quiet and residential, so keep the engine down.

   As for the riding, there is little to say. Roads are flat, signalised and full of roundabouts and speed cameras, and the surface is the tired asphalt of an industrial belt. The best advice is to leave early on a weekend morning, before the delivery lorries wake up, and aim for the forests and rolling farmland south and east of Paris. The Morvan, with its granite hills, lakes and beech woods, is a long way from here, which is the whole point of stopping.

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