“Landscape and heritage” summer workcamp 2024 at Bibracte-Morvan des Sommets

Since 2022, Bibracte and the REMPART Federation have been organising the Landscape and Heritage summer workcamp (launched in the frame of INCULTUM program), during which volunteer participants are invited to take part in a comprehensive programme to safeguard and enhance the heritage of the Bibracte - Morvan des Sommets Grand Site de France. 

The Grand Site de France area is home to a small-scale heritage that is still largely unknown in a landscape where forests and hedged farmland are omnipresent. While the Bibracte oppidum and a number of archaeological sites around it attract thousands of visitors every year, the area's more modest heritage is much less visible and deserves to be revived and promoted.

Along the 1100 km of paths that criss-cross the twelve villages of Bibracte-Morvan des Sommets, fountains and wash-houses, wells and captured springs, water mills and vestiges of the timber rafting era are all landmarks in the landscape. These buildings and water management facilities, often overgrown or deteriorated through lack of maintenance, bear witness to the links between the landscape and the people who shape it, and are veritable little reserves for biodiversity.

This workcamp is part of the pilot project being run by Bibracte as part of SECreTour, with a view to strengthening the attachment of communities to their landscape heritage and using this attachment as a lever to develop a tourism project that genuinely serves the region. 

The aim of the programme is to understand the landscape and promote a shared heritage in a time of climate change by promoting cooperation and participative approaches.

In the village of Villapourçon, the ten or so volunteers (men and women aged between 18 and 55, profiles: students, university lecturer, professionals undergoing retraining, asylum seekers) are supervised by a group leader from the Fédération REMPART BFC and a craftsman from the NGO TREMPLIN Homme et Patrimoine. Their supervisors are responsible for introducing them to restoration techniques to enhance three washhouses and their springs in three hamlets in the village located on the Tour du Morvan des Sommets hiking itinerary or on other routes.

During the workcamp, a programme of activities and workshops is offered by Bibracte archaeologists, researchers and mediators, focusing on the local landscape, small-scale heritage and archaeology. Alongside this programme, the ethnopole team at the Maison du Patrimoine Oral de Bourgogne is gathering information on the memory of the renovated washhouses from local people who live or have lived near these facilities. 

The programme is also punctuated by moments of sharing and feedback with the residents of Villapourçon and local elected representatives.

Carried out in collaboration with the partners of the Grand Site de France label, this programme is made possible thanks to funding from the French State, the Conseil Régional and the Département de la Nièvre. It is also financed by the Horizon Europe programme as part of the SECreTour research project (no. 101132584), in which Bibracte is participating and which is devoted to the development of sustainable cultural tourism in rural areas, in order to offer a new range of visits to the Grand Site de France territory. It is also part of the COUDRIER research programme (ANR-23-SSRP-0006-02 project), a participatory research project on water-related issues supported by the French National Research Agency.

https://grandsite-bibracte-morvan.fr/fr/chantier-paysage-et-patrimoine-2024