Visitor and exhibition centre

In the Middle Ages the Charolais  region was a crop growing area where the cattle were used to pull agricultural implements.

Today in the Charolais countryside you can still see traces of the byways from the Middle Ages where the farmers drove the working cattle to the forests.  These byways are easily recognised, being about three and a half metres in width. Fields, as we know them, did not exist and hedges divided the cultivated zones from the pasture.  Cattle grazed in the forests or on common land.

The larger lush pastures that we see today appeared much later in the 18th century with the development of cattle rearing.

Built between 1879 and 1881 by the family Mangini, engineers from Lyon, these limestone kilns produced lime used to improve the quality of agricultural land.