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In France, the contrast between the repellent «isolated» rural world and the rest of the country is sharpening. In villages that are shrinking to hamlets, farmers are becoming fewer in number and more isolated, precisely when they are being called on—in addition to producing food—to maintain the physical environment. Paradoxically, it is where population densities are the lowest that the cultivated ecosystem seems to be the best kept. As a consequence, the «isolated» rural space can be likened to a desert, but a farming desert. Put in perspective over several centuries, these increasingly stark demographic contrasts and the accompanying territorial fragmentation in fact reflect profound transformation on a similar scale to the High Middle Ages. Travelling over the plateaux of eastern France, we observe the local effects of this general change: redefinition of natural aptitudes and appearance of new «fragile» environments; homogenisation of the physical environment at its lowest cultivated level and «geometrisation» of the landscape; change in the contact between ager and sylva (farm and forest ecosystems) and disappearance of saltus (grazing land).