Tour du Finiels, MTB circuit #14 (blue)

4 points of interest

• 

  

  Flora

  Subalpine short-grass prairie

  Marker 1
  Like garden or sports pitches, short-grass prairies are shaped by mankind. Grazing and controlled burns are the tools for their maintenance here. The main plants are nard and fescue, perennial grasses related to wheat. If you cut (graze) one of their stalks, five more will soon form; if you trample them, they multiply and become very dense. This kind of “torture” creates a thick plant cover that stabilises the sparse dark soil, which is derived from erosion of the ever-present granite. Here, then, are some clues for the appropriate management of this environment, which becomes weakened if neglected.

• View picture in full screen

  

  Flora

  Other short-grass prairies?

  Marker 7
  After the forest, which is a farmed and worked space, foresters clear areas such as here, where other plant communities establish themselves: peat bogs, meadows, track verges. On the return leg, two large grasses will attract your attention: great yellow gentian with its yellow flowers and a more recent arrival, rosebay willowherb (fireweed), whose fruit “explode” into cottony masses at the end of the summer, when ripe.

• View picture in full screen

  

  Pastoralism

  Down in the valley

  Marker 6
  The hamlet of Finiels shelters both humans and livestock during the winter. Crop land is subjected to the treatments of modern agriculture. Since the mid-20th century, bovines have slowly replaced sheep and live on fenced-in broom heaths. These pastures are very different from those provided for sheep. Cows do not graze moorland undergrowth. 

• 

  

  Pastoralism

  The sheep reigns

  Marker 5
  In the late 19th century 100,000 sheep grazed Mont Lozère’s pastures every year. In the summer, there was intense traffic here. In fog, montjoies (standing stones or cairns) still guide travellers, as they did the famous Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey Modestine. Today, just over 8,000 sheep, divided into flocks each of which is kept by a shepherd, use the summer pastures on the Mont Lozère. They now share the massif’s 6,000 hectares of short-grass prairies and heath with cattle (in pens).