Villa Hortense, Voisons-le-Brettonneux, Paris, France

This continues the visit to various reserves in the St-Quentin-des-Yvelines new town area from Saturday 24 September 2016. Here your humble reporter got a bit bogged down in his possibly foolish dependence on his phone for directions/locations, as 'Villa Hortense' didn't show up in the directory and the system was very keen for me to get in a car (or spend four days walking) to the actual Montigny. However, by random accident, I did manage to stumble on Villa Hortense (I didn't actually realise this until locating the space depicted below, 18 hours later, on google maps!).

Some of the IRs in this region have a certain formal resemblance to 17th century French estate gardens - some of which have been redesigned as public parks and gardens. In this case, the space is a long, elegant, resilient and simple park, with seating, lighting, and gate (low or high) entrances into back gardens. 

As in many other similar spaces in this area, there is a kind of formality to entrances, either incorporated into standalone archways or in simple archway structures probably intended to guide foliage.

One tiny detail which struck me, and which I annoyed I will probably never know the reason for, is the unevenness of the through-path known as Allée Noémie. As you can see, it doesn't quite line up.  

I followed Allée Noémie westwards, a narrow (pedestrian - or at a pinch, cyclist- only) laneway through a few blocks:

These crossway north-south lanes intrigued me, mainly the fact that they opened out for some short distance before the crossing with Noémie. There must be a rationale for this (but what!?).

The west exit of Allée Noémie:

It opens into extensive parkland, the easternmost section of which is maintained lawn with some sporting facilities. A range of different groups of (mostly older) children and (aside from a woman pushing a pram) no adults in sight.