Description: Fontenay Abbey was founded in the 1100s and was in use as a monastery until the French revolution. After that, it was turned into a paper mill for 120 years or so. In the 1900s it was restored as a historic site and is now available for your visit.
Most people probably begin their visit with the large romanesque church, to the far left after you enter the site proper. The church, also built in the 1100s, is rather plain inside (since it was stripped of any ecclesiastical decorations long ago, but the austerity is befitting a monastery anyway). It is still a very imposing space, however.
Exiting the church, you can continue upstairs to the monk's dormitory area. When we visited, it contained a special exhibit featuring large posters describing and showing aerial photos of various other ancient European monasteries.
Downstairs from the dormitories is the cloister area, also in the romanesque style and from the 1100s. Walk along it and you come to the council room and monk's room with its ribbed ceiling vaults. It's amazing to think that it was right in the very room where you are standing that the monks created the beautiful illuminated manuscripts.
Behind the dormitory and cloisters is a pleasant garden with a fountain where you can rest midway through your tour. Continuing on, you can see the infirmary building, and then the forge, which is one of the interesting highlights. The monks had invented a huge hydraulic powered forge hammer for their iron works.
Other buildings on site include the bakery, the hostel for pilgrims of old, the gate house that you enter through, and the 18th century abbot's manor house. You can also hike a few km through the forest surrounding the abbey to an old mill site.
Most of the buildings are nearly empty since it has been so long since it was actually used as a monastery, but it is still interesting to wander through the site. They provide a nice map to make a self-guided tour.
If you come via the A6 motorway from Paris, watch out for the brown towers of the town of Semur, after you exit the A6 on the way towards Fontenay. It's a very pictuesque town.
The abbey is a few kilometers north of the small town Montbard. It took quite a while to get to the abbey driving from Dijon, longer than we expected just looking at the map. We had an interesting visit to it, one of the oldest abbeys in Europe, but might not have come if we had realized how far away it was.
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