This month I’ve visited the Bois de Versoix, a forest of about 1300 acres about two miles from the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. This woodland is a working forest but also contains a nature reserve, Les Douves, with amenities for the public. In particular, there is parking near the nature reserve on the Chemin de Douves, and so it’s a good place to start.
The first set of photos show the Cabane des Bucherons (Cabin of the Woodcutters) which is a picnics and parties building, with open sides and sturdy wooden tables. It’s operated by the Versoix town council and is bookable for events like birthday parties. There are provisions for barbecues nearby and it strongly resembles the picnic shelters in American public parks. There are also toilets and one of the several roofed information boards with a map and pictures of local wildlife. The nature reserve has a large wetland area with a wooden walkway snaking through it, dotted with hides to allow you to watch birds and animals without being too obvious. Interestingly, it has a series of interpretation boards which encourage you to draw what you see and give advice on how to do it.
Heading off from the nature reserve I quickly began to see the signs of forestry work. Good tracks able to take timber wagons, stacks of trunks cut up into logs, deer exclosures fenced off with wooden frames to encourage regrowth, and even some parked up forestry machines. That last one appears to be a Jarcrac Evopro, a tracked forwarder with an aftermarket red crane in this case. I didn’t see any of the red deer which inhabit the wood but there were a lot of exclosures and I saw some guys building one while I was there.
I came across several other interesting features. A fallen trunk positively encrusted with small fungal brackets. The Versoix river itself in flood, pulling down trees and sweeping them away. A footbridge over a dammed stream near the river. There are beavers in the area but I don’t know if they were present here. I didn’t see any of their distinctive felling signs, but I did see a lot of small trees felled with saws. Finally the Tumulus of Mariamont, which has been partially reconstructed as a semicircle of stones. This was a burial mound from the Hallstatt period at the start of the Iron Age, 600 to 800 BC.
There’s another shelter, the pentagonal Cabane Forestiere, where I had my lunch.
Finally, I also walked out along some of the lanes between the fields. There’s an American Bison herd in the distance; a water trough made of an unlined section of tree trunk; and an 1818 border marker made during the restored French monarchy with its fleur-de-lys emblem and red line on the top showing the direction of the boundary. This is the Swiss-French border, and therefore the impregnable frontier of the EU Customs Union which safeguards its citizens from substandard products and its wildlife from animal and plant diseases coming in from outside. I clutched my passport with its Schengen stamp and picked my way back into Switzerland after snatching this photo 😀
