ABOVE: Messing about on the river

Messing about on the river

Stretching from the Atlantic coast near La Rochelle to the inland conurbation of Niort, the Marais Poitevin covers a whopping 970 square kilometres. France’s largest wetland after the Camargue, this charming chequerboard of fields and waterways teeming with fauna and flora is ideal to discover in a boat.

We arrived in Coulon, once the region’s most important river port and now capital of Green Venice, on a hot spring day. Strolling through a labyrinth of cobbled alleys lined with low maraîchers’ houses hemmed with pink and purple hollyhocks, we emerged beside the sparkling Sèvre Niortaise, bobbing with bright coloured boats. Housed in a 16th century mansion overlooking the river, La Maison des Marais Mouillés museum contains a wealth of information about the history and traditions of the area. The wetlands were first inhabited by a tribe of fishermen called the Colliberts in the 7th century, then drained and reclaimed for cultivation by monks during the Middle Ages.

Fertilised by river silt, the land proved highly productive. Unfortunately, mosquitoes attracted by the warm wet conditions made marsh dwellers’ lives a misery. ‘The town of Niort would be quite agreeable to inhabit, but what spoils everything is the proximity to the marshes… Because of this, the inhabitants are poor malingering beings eaten away by fever and dysentery’, one local politician wrote after visiting the region in the 1800s.

These days the Poitevin marshes are pretty much mosquito-free – something we were glad about an hour later when we set out from Coulon’s quay in a gondolashaped boat called a plat. Plunging a pigouille (long pole) into the weed-carpeted water, Pierre, our guide, powered us beneath a bridge that looked like a scaled down version of the Bridge of Sighs. “Now I know why it’s called Green Venice,” my husband said.


Read the full article on pages 54-56 of this months issue.

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