Reculée de Baume-les-Messieurs

At the edge of the Jura plateau the ground simply stops: limestone cliffs drop up to two hundred metres into a deep, flat-bottomed valley that ends abruptly in a wall of rock, as if the river had backed itself into a corner. This is the Reculée de Baume-les-Messieurs, regarded by geologists as the finest example of a reculée, the blind, steep-headed valley typical of the Jura escarpment, and the most extensive of them all. A village and an ancient abbey sit at its bottom, where three valleys meet.

The landscape is cut into layers laid down in the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Hard Middle Jurassic limestone forms the vertical cornices at the top; softer marls from the Lower Jurassic and Triassic below give gentler slopes, where vines grow. The northern branch runs for about 5.5 km and the southern for some 9.5 km, each between a few hundred metres and more than a kilometre wide. The Seille rises in the cirque of Ladoye at the head of the northern arm, and the Dard, emerging from the rock at the foot of the cliffs, joins it at the village. Below the spring a series of caves runs into the cliff, with several chambers and an underground lake, and the Dard tumbles out over travertine terraces built up from lime-rich water, forming the stepped Cascade des Tufs with its small natural basins. Over 700 hectares of the reculée were protected as a classified landscape in 1998.

The village owes its name to its abbey. Long credited to Saint Columbanus in the sixth century, it is more securely documented from the ninth; after Norman raids it was refounded around 890 by Berno, who went on in 910 to establish Cluny, which makes this quiet valley a forerunner of one of the most influential monasteries of medieval Europe. In 1147 Baume was reduced to a priory of Cluny, and after the French Revolution the place changed its name from Baume-les-Moines, "of the monks", to Baume-les-Messieurs. The abbey church keeps a celebrated Flemish carved altarpiece of the sixteenth century. The village is listed among the Plus Beaux Villages de France, and the GR 59 long-distance footpath passes through it. From the belvederes of Granges-sur-Baume and Crançot on the rim, the whole amphitheatre of cliffs, woods and rooftops can be taken in at once.

Getting there

The reculée lies just north-east of Lons-le-Saunier, the main town of the Jura department, about 9 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Dole–Jura (DLE), about 38 km away in a straight line.