Jacques Lacarrière  " Chemin faisant "

For a long time Morvan was for me as an ink stain on a blotting paper: a country which the borders changed ceaselessly.

Where does it begin, where does it finish exactly? According to the map recently edited by the Office of the Regional Natural Reserve, I see in astonishment that it begins very in the North, in fifteen kilometres hardly of my village of Sacy. Its north border indeed follows roughly speaking a line which crosses, above Avallon by Savigny-en-Terre-Pleine, Montreal, Lucy-le-Bois, Sermizelles and Châtel-Censoir. Nevertheless if we ask inhabitants of Lucy-le-Bois or Sermizelles where they live, most will answer in Burgundy or in the Yonne, never: in Morvan.

To cross it moreover we feel at once, instinctively, the feeling that Morvan begins, in fact, there where begins the granite. Its current borders are more administrative than natural.

Because Morvan, it is above all some granite, ferns, digitales, more audacious hills, more asserted eminences and air different from those of Low Burgundy. I felt it, from the beginning of my new march, by leaving the forest to the Duke to arrive on the heights of Vieux-Dun: we are already between 500 and 600 metres. Reliefs become more marked, forests thicken, brooks and brooks teem. Certain heights are steep enough to have served as shelter and as refuge for the Celtics which lived here. Here we are, I found the word: since yesterday, I am in celtic country.

That is Morvan for me , with the souvenir of near wet of dawn, the big forests of spruces, the multicolored madness of flowers: some granite, a lively air and the earth of election of our ancestors the Celtics.