Geography:
The town of Alligny-en-Morvan, typical of the Morvan with its fir forests, located to the east of the Nièvre department and the Morvandiau massif, borders the Côte-d'Or on about half of its circumference (North and East).
It is organized around the Ternin valley, which drains more than three quarters of its territory towards the Loire basin.
The Ternin valley is closed off at the ends of the municipal territory by two locks (the Serrée to the north, the Roches des Quartiers to the south) between which it forms a basin where the town of Alligny is located.
The very many hamlets that make up this municipality with its scattered habitat (a good twenty plus many gaps) are spread out at the foot of the slopes or on the two relief lines.
This village, which still bears witness to past life, is home to a major historic site in the Morvan: the Museum of Nurses and Children of Public Assistance.
History:
The castle, which can be seen from the center of the village, dates from the Middle Ages. It was remodeled in the 17th century. It probably replaced other fortified houses such as La Crémaine and the Tour d'Ocle, of which some vestiges remain. Under the Ancien Régime, Alligny was the seat of an important seigniory, one of whose barons, Pierre Quarré d'Alligny, was raised to the rank of count by Louis XIV in 1676.
The church dates from the 12th century and was also subsequently revised. It houses a painted wooden Pietà dating from the 16th century and an interior tympanum in embossed copper by Marc Hénard.
The post house located on the road from Saulieu to Autun, passing by Pierre-Écrite and opened at the end of the 18th century, was frequented by a stagecoach service. Napoleon stopped there on his return from the island of Elba in 1815.
A silver-lead mine was mined several times in the hamlet of La Place. Discovered in 1640, it operated intermittently in the 18th and 19th centuries and between 1912 and 1930 it employed up to sixty workers.
The writer Jean Genet lived in Alligny from 1910 to 1923. A space is dedicated to him in the Museum of Nurses and Children of Public Assistance, member of the Écomusée du Morvan network, opened in 2016 in the center of the town.
