Fresnes-Au-Mont: Art Trails, Forest and Heritage

Fresnes-au-Mont combines the art trails of Vent des Forêts with a forest-rich landscape and historic buildings. The two named circular routes differ in length, marker color and number of artworks. The town’s history and the buildings around the trails also offer different points of interest for visitors.

Artworks on two circular routes

The Circuit de la Croix Camonin is a 14-kilometer art trail. It is marked in pink and passes a total of 32 artworks, as well as through the village of Fresnes-au-Mont. The Circuit des Trois Fontaines is shorter: this red-marked circular route is 8 kilometers long, includes 22 artworks and passes through the Louvent plain. The routes’ lengths and artwork counts provide a concrete basis for comparing them, without implying anything about their level of difficulty.

The landscape is also part of the route description for the Circuit des Trois Fontaines. The route is crossed by the D901 and runs through the Louvent plain. Three trickles of water converge there to form a stream at the bottom of the narrow, grassy Prairie de Louvent valley. The valley forms the boundary between Fresnes-au-Mont, Lahaymeix and Les Paroches.

Vent des Forêts is a center for contemporary art of national importance. Since 1997, it has been run by an association that brings together six villages with agricultural and forestry traditions: Fresnes-au-Mont, Lahaymeix, Nicey-sur-Aire, Pierrefitte-sur-Aire, Dompcevrin and Ville-devant-Belrain. Around twenty Vent des Forêts artworks can be found along the trails in the municipal forest of Fresnes-au-Mont.

Trails and getting around locally

Vent des Forêts’ seven circular trails are accessible on foot and by mountain bike. The trail maps show, among other things, parking areas and large picnic tables. You can pick up a Vent des Forêts hiking map from a box outside the town hall in Fresnes-au-Mont. The map information and the different route designations can help you find your way around.

Woodland on the Barrois Plateau

The municipal area covers 15.89 square kilometers, about two-thirds of which is forested. The woodland lies on the limestone Barrois Plateau. The landscape is shaped by gentle, shallow valleys and diverse tree vegetation. The forest cover and the terrain offer a different way to experience the town than its individual artworks or architectural history.

A former quarry is the site of the installation “Terrain d’occurrences.” Building materials for the trails and limestone for making lime were once extracted there. The site’s former use thus connects the art installation with the history of the town and its surroundings, without describing the quarry as an active extraction site today.

Church, farm and monuments

The Église Saint-Laurent was built in 1834 to plans by architect Théodore Oudet (1793–1865). A blockhouse near Fresnes-au-Mont is also located on the Circuit de la Croix Camonin. It was built in April 1916 from stones and metal rails and fitted with sheets covered in concrete. As a point of interest along the trail, it complements the contemporary artworks with a structure from the history of the First World War.

The cemetery also preserves various traces of the town’s history: rows of 19th-century funerary monuments, the stele of Abbé Cordier (1833–1933) and the grave of Captain Audibert, who fell in 1914. The stele is decorated with two monstrances and a chasuble, symbols of the priesthood. These individual details differ both in their design and in the people and periods they commemorate.

On the Circuit des Trois Fontaines, the Ferme de Louvent is another historical point of interest. The surviving buildings are a residence dating from the 17th century and an agricultural building constructed around 1820; the latter is visible from the viewpoint. Together with the church and the cemetery monuments, they offer a picture of the different histories of architecture and remembrance in Fresnes-au-Mont.

Discover more destinations: Mécrin, Geville, Buxières-Sous-Les-Côtes, Heudicourt-Sous-Les-Côtes, Nonsard-Lamarche, Chaillon, Amel-Sur-L'etang, Beaufort En Argonne

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