The River & The Owl
Touring Mayenne Through the Ages
by David & Helen Oldham
The first English-language book ever dedicated to the Mayenne department of France. Nobody has ever written a book about Mayenne — not in English, not a single volume dedicated to one of the most beautiful, most historic, and most completely overlooked departments in France. Sitting quietly between Brittany, Normandy, and the Loire Valley, Mayenne has been hiding in plain sight for centuries. While the Dordogne fills with tourists and Provence graces magazine covers, Mayenne waits in the hedgerows with five thousand years of history that nobody has thought to tell. This book finally tells it.
The River & The Owl is not a conventional France travel guide. It is a book that tells the extraordinary stories of a place most visitors drive straight through on the way to somewhere else, then puts you in the exact locations where those stories unfolded. Each of the ten chapters follows a chronological theme and a practical touring route that can be driven, walked, or explored at leisure.
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Inside the Book
The First Footsteps — prehistoric Mayenne
Stone and Legend — megaliths and myth
The Roman Road — antiquity along the Mayenne river
Castles in the Mist — the medieval frontier
The Wars of Religion — a land divided
Revolution and Resistance — the Chouans of Mayenne
The Industrial Valley — mills, linen, and the river
Between Two Wars — memory and monument
The Owl at Dusk — folklore and the natural world
Mayenne Today — a touring companion for the modern traveller