Les Clefs, 71800 Gibles.
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Are you a nature lover or do you enjoy culture, do you like a good glass of wine and dine heartily? Then ‘L’Étang des Clefs’ is your holiday home in the Burgundy. This cottage is particularly suitable as a holiday home or as a cottage to rent. We have rented the house for several years as a gîte via “Gîtes de France”. The gîte received an official qualification with 3 stars. It is a former railway guard house built around 1885. It is situated at an idyllic location on a lake at Mont St. Cyr (770m) in the south of Bourgogne. The train track has been out of use for a long time. A sandy track now replaces the rails, but you can still sense the atmosphere of ages gone by. Holiday home Burgundy.
Background
The railway guard house was built around 1885, simultaneously with the construction of the rail track ‘Chalon-sur-Saône / Pouilly-sous-Charlieu’. It breathes the atmosphere of ages gone by. You imagine yourself in the age of old Agatha Christie movies and with a little imagination you can see the heavy locomotives heaving by.
With the introduction of the car, the rail track was removed before the Second World War. If you know where the railroad used to be, you can often find small houses located at each railway crossing with roads or dirt tracks. This is how we found our railway guard house. The house is located at the crossing of two unpaved roads, one was formerly the railroad track, the other is a path that was already used in the Middle Ages; this path runs along the lake and an old watermill. Holiday home Burgundy.
Originally each house has the same lay-out: a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms upstairs. Behind, attached to the house, is a barn and under the house there is usually a basement. Each house has its own well. The toilet used to be outside and consisted of no more than a few planks above a hole in the ground.
Times change and our railway house has been modernized. The thick wall of about 50 cm between the kitchen and living room was put down to create a spacious room with open planned kitchen. The extension houses a bathroom with shower and a separate toilet. The cosy wood-burning stove, central to the living room, provides warmth as the evenings get chillier.
Within less than one kilometre lies the village of Gibles. A few shops can be found here, like the baker, the butcher, the chemist and the post office. There is also a simple restaurant. At about 5 km lies the town of La Clayette, with various supermarkets and a lively market on Tuesday mornings.
