Setting on the Marne

Saint-Martin-sur-le-Pré lies in the Marne département, within the urban area of Châlons-en-Champagne. The commune has 792 inhabitants (2023) and covers 12 square kilometres. It is neither grand cru nor premier cru: anyone looking for champagne here will find a commune on the edge of the city of Châlons, which is above all part of the Marne river landscape.

Several waterways shape the place: the Marne itself, the lateral canal of the Marne (Canal latéral à la Marne), the Canal d'Alimentation and the Canal Saint-Martin. The lateral canal is 67 kilometres long and links Vitry-le-François with Mardeuil, where it joins the Marne. There is also a hydrological measuring station within the commune, whose data show that the Marne carries an average of 70.7 cubic metres of water per second. During the flood of January 2018, the daily mean rose to 483 and the peak on 28 January to 492 cubic metres per second.

Landscape and viticulture

Land use is predominantly agricultural: in 2018, 74.1 per cent of the area was farmland, almost all of it arable. Commercial and industrial land together with transport routes account for 18.3 per cent, and only 5.2 per cent is built up. Permanent crops are given as one per cent. No significant viticulture can be inferred from this, and the source names no champagne houses either.

The commune has 792 inhabitants (2023) and covers 12 square kilometres.

The climate is oceanic. The nearest station, in Fagnières, records an annual mean temperature of 11.2 °C and just over 632 millimetres of rainfall for 1991 to 2020. The extremes: 41.8 °C on 25 July 2019 and minus 21 °C on 6 January 1985.

Name and history

The name comes from the landscape. The village lies beside a broad meadow that once stretched to the Marne and served as common pasture. Flooded every winter, it was fertilised by the river's silt and yielded excellent grass. Saint Martin of Tours, who travelled through Champagne, gave his name to numerous places.

Saint-Martin-d'Ablois in der ChampagneFoto: Roland45, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The area has been settled for a long time. A Palaeolithic site discovered in 1875 shows that people lived here more than 5,000 years before our era, and further finds date from Gaulish and Gallo-Roman times. The village was first mentioned in 1143. In the Middle Ages its history was shaped by church holdings, above all those of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre-aux-Monts and the Priory of Vinetz. In 1329 the Bishop of Châlons gave up his rights in favour of the monks of Vinetz. During the Hundred Years' War the village suffered English devastation. Between 1790 and 1794 the commune absorbed neighbouring Vinetz, and during the Revolution it was briefly called Vinets-sur-Marne.