News from Nowhere

The last time we sailed with Brittany Ferries was two years ago, to and from Brittany.

After our night in Roscoff, we had booked two nights in Dinan, because it was the right distance from Saint Malo for the morning ferry, and we'd passed through before and found a good hypermarket and wine shop to stock up before leaving France - plus, we liked the look of the place. This had confused our hosts in Roscoff, who were accustomed to their guests (particularly those who booked through Brittany Ferries) sailing out of Roscoff. But we had another day's scenic drive ahead of us.

My memory of the day has dissolved into a silvery mist. That's partly the weather, a real end-of-the-holidays melancholy sea-fret, partly the light reflecting from the water - the estuary beside which we picnicked (at a nature reserve which was firmly closed for the season) shone mirror bright under a grey sky. But my memory too is hazy - if that's the word for a collection of perfectly clear fragments which have somehow got jumbled out of order, and which I am now reconstituting with a map beside me. I was placing Cap Fréhel out at the tip of Finistere: such a magnificent lighthouse must surely be jutting out into the open ocean? But no, it's on the north coast, shining into the Channel. We climbed to the top of the tower, but the day was so hazy there was no view, just the horizon dissolving into the rain and the gulls perching on top of the lower, older light.

This was fun, but the real delight of the day came as a complete surprise. The time had come to stop meandering along the coast road and go more directly to our destination. Inevitably, in a little town only a few miles from Dinan, we found ourselves delayed by roadworks, inching slowly down the high street. I glanced idly over to my left:



and barely had time to register that surely that was a Roman town over there, before the lights changed, the traffic unjammed, and we were away. We went back next day, and explored: this was Corseul, a major Roman town and capital of the Gallo-Roman province of Coriosolites. The excavated remains, adjacent to the mairie, have been made into a little park, tended by an imaginative topiarist. Not far away are the even more impressive remains of the temple of Mars, in the middle of the fields.

But how did we manage to fit into that next day - as well as the Roman remains - some intensive, if not entirely satisfactory, supermarket shopping (the wine shop we had remembered was still there, but closed on Mondays; there was, however, an organic supermarket) and an extensive walking tour of Dinan: the upper town, the lower town, the ramparts...? I can't imagine, but there is photographic evidence. And I had completely forgotten the shop whose name combined two of Britanny's major tourist attractions, the Biscuiterie du Graal.

And once we had found the Grail, what could we do, really, but come home?


Pictures of Corseul; photos of Dinan.

Another bright sunny week has dissolved into a grey dreary weekend, and a night of shallow dream-filled sleep has left me feeling rather grey and dreary myself. Looking forward to midsummer week on Lindisfarne, maybe it's time tonight to look back with a holiday post, cheer myself up with good memories and pretty pictures. The earliest notes still awaiting posting - given the mysterious absence of words to accompany the still unsorted photos from Iceland - date from October 2009 in Brittany; with our day-trip to Ouessant we had passed the furthest point of our tour, and now we turned back towards Roscoff.

We drove along the Côte des Abers (an 'aber' being, as I believe it is in Welsh place-names, a narrow inlet), an illustration of the impossibility of measuring the length of the coast: shall we take the direct road that runs parallel to the coast, or shall we drive within sight of the sea, taking the detour that leads to the lighthouse, pausing to walk along the beach, following the signs to a chapel or a prehistoric burial chamber?



We stopped for coffee at the punningly named 'Abri Côtier', which must have been a lively little café in season, but looked sad and deserted with the chairs and tables all folded up on the decking outside. Inside was warm and welcoming, though, and our coffee arrived on a white china tray, the cups nestled in a layer of coffee beans.

Finally we dropped onto the main road, through field after field of maize, and occasionally something green and leafy (this is vegetable-growing country). I was looking out for artichokes, but hadn't seen any and assumed the season was over, until we came to Saint Pol de Leon, and suddenly they were everywhere.

Roscoff, on the other hand, where we were to spend the night, is the onion centre. That archetype of the Frenchman with his beret, his striped jumper and his string of onions? He isn't a Frenchman at all, he's a Breton, and specifically he is one of the Johnnies de Roscoff. Civic pride is expressed by festooning the buildings with tresses of the distinctively pink-skinned onions.

We had passed through Roscoff before, since it is a ferry port, but I think we must simply have driven off the ferry and away, since the old town came as a pleasant surprise - I'd happily visit it again, and for longer than an evening. I liked the Hôtel des Tamaris, too (though another time I'd probably pay the extra for a room with a sea view). And we dined at the Moule au Pot (I'm not saying that its name was the best thing about it, but it's the thing that I remember).

Pictures of Roscoff.

Since our previous visit to France (almost exactly a year earlier than last autumn's Breton jaunt, and yes, another incomplete series of posts, I know), there had been a change in fashion. Previously, when you ordered coffee - just unspecified 'coffee' - the little cup containing the tiny quantity of strong black coffee was always straight-sided. Sometimes the sides were vertical, sometimes splaying out from the case for a little way, and then vertical above that. Now, quite abruptly, a new shape was everywhere: straight sided above a curved base, like a miniature teacup which that been stretched upwards. This is so trivial - and yet I was intrigued how something I had never seen before had become so widespread.

There were a lot of empty shops in Quimper, and businesses for sale; there were quite a lot in Josselin, and there always are vacant properties, and old houses and shops to dream over. But on this visit there seemed to be more, and less building going on.

Walking around Quimper, reading the information boards, we saw more evidence than we expected of the Breton language, more bilingual roadsigns, more little books of vocabulary on sale. At first I thought this meant the language was gaining ground, but as we travelled north I came to suspect that it was a regional variation. By the time we came to explore Le Conquet, following the town trail, the information offered was bilingual French and English, with barely a nod to Breton.

The Place Saint Corentin in Quimper, the open square in front of the cathedral, is probably what 2020 Vision have in mind in their plans to remodel Durham Market Place - an open space paved with pale stone, surrounded by trees and pavement cafés. It even has a pointless water feature. It is, however, several times the area of the Market Place.

More fancy tableware: at the Vieux Port in Le Conquet, our scallops were served on a large plate, shaped like a scallop shell, clear glass but fading to blue at the edge. I was quite charmed by this. The following evening, the moules frites also had their own dish: a giant mussel shell with room for a stack of mussels in the round end, a generous helping of chips in the pointed end. We didn't stay long enough to learn whether every item on the menu had its own dish.

That's five items, and therefore a post. A footnote, though, about the Vieux Port: they have upgraded their web site. We had found them by chance on a previous visit, and I liked the place and wanted to go back; they took some tracking down on the internet, but eventually I found a one-page site, with a couple of photos on a blue checked background, very hand-made in the 1990s. Still, it provided a phone number, and I called and made a booking (which I had to confirm by mail, as, said the nice lady on the phone, they didn't have e-mail). Period charm is all very well, but I can see why they felt the need to upgrade: they now have a fancy new site, with graphics, and multiple pages (though it is so constructed as to prevent deep linking, and several of the pages are 'coming soon'). The print is dark blue on a lighter blue, too small for me to read with comfort, and resists all my tricks for getting round this. Looking on the bright side, it has some very pretty pictures.

Oh, and the site of the people who built it for them is even worse (and plays 'on hold' music to you).

I read enthusiastic reviews of How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read when it was published in English, and promised myself that I would find a copy of the French language original - I don't read as much French as I'd like to, and - outside the comics section - never know where to start looking in a French bookshop. Towards the end of our holiday in Brittany, I tracked down a copy in a religious bookshop in Dinan. (Small digression: I was struck by how many independent bookshops we saw, selling both new and second-hand books - Quimper alone, with a population of around 62,000, seems to have nine).

So, even before I'd read this book, I had certain ideas of what it would be like: I knew it was a philosophical discussion rather than a bluffer's guide, and I expected it to be clever, witty, abstract. ( And I wasn't entirely wrong. )

It may not be obvious from this that I found Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? enormously entertaining, and quite thought-provoking. I was frustrated that my convesration with it was so one-sided.

It was durham_rambler's idea that we should spend a night in Quimper; if there was any particular reason he didn't mention it, but he was keen, and the Brittany Ferries package we were booking offered a hotel there - not the most exciting looking of their hotels, but in the right place and at the right price, so we went for it.

I thought we'd been to Quimper before - I thought we'd explored Brittany pretty thoroughly, and I vaguely remembered a Tourist Office with a display of the faïence for which the place is known... Unless I'm thinking of Nevers? Because I also have vague memories of walking round ramparts washed by the sea, and I'm pretty sure now that was Concarneau - not Quimper, at any rate, which is not on the coast...

Which is how we came to be strolling, in the low light of an autumn evening, around a town that was completely new to us, crossing the Odet, the river which runs down the centre of the main street and whose many footbridges are weighed down by baskets of flowers, and making our way into the old town in search of dinner. And when I say old, I mean it: Brittany is full of towns that look old to someone who lives in Durham, towns like Josselin, where half-timbered houses lean to meet each other across narrow streets.

Quimper has its share of old houses, and a taste for painting them in bright shades - or filling their windows top-to-bottom with primary colours. I wanted to photograph everything, and though I did take a fair number of photos of Quimper, both that evening and the morning after, they aren't all fit to be shown to the world. I'm nowhere near mastery of my new camera - only gradually learning what it can do, and what foibles it displays in doing it. I need to learn how much more I am photographing than the viewfinder shows me, and how it is distributed; I need to makes sure I am holding the camera level (this has always been the case, but more so, now). It's wonderful, taking pictures in narrow streets, to have some extra wide-angle capacity - but the resultant fisheye distortion can be spectacular.

And I need to read the manual. There's a lot of it to read, and it's perfectly possible to set the dial to auto and just point and shoot. But what a waste. I'm absurdly pleased with this picture: walking back to the hotel after dinner, following the little river Steir down to its meeting with the Odet (I was amazed, the next morning, to read that this picturesque waterway had actually been built over in the mid-twentieth century, and only opened again in 2003: even if we had been in Quimper before, we could not have seen it... But I digress) we came across a tiny garden arranged around this bust of resistance leader Jean Moulin, the dramatic lighting throwing shadows from the trees (which were waving wildly in the wind) onto the white facade of the Monoprix shop. I set the 'film speed' to as fast as it would go, braced myself against a handy lamp post and went for it - and the result does catch something of what I saw. But reading the manual later, I discovered descriptions of all the 'scene' settings, including a night-time one which I think would have given me a gentle flash and removed the shadow on the face. I don't know if it would have been better, but I'd like to have tried it.

It's a learning curve.

The south of Brittany, around the great bay of the Morbihan, is rich in megalithic remains: standing stones, chambered tombs, the lot. The best known of these are the aligned stones of Carnac, one of the first sites in France to be protected as a historic monument (thanks to Prosper Mérimée, the man who wrote Carmen): over 2800 menhirs arranged over a site 4 kilometers long. The first time durham_rambler and I visited Carnac was so long ago that I can't say when it was; I remember wandering among the stones, but then I'm so old that I remember wandering freely among the stones at Stonehenge. The last time we were there, there was a strike in progress; the visitor centre was occupied by people (staff or not, I don't know) who objected to the proposed 'improvements' which would, they said, restrict access to the site; meanwhile, parts of the site were open to visitors but others were closed by the strike.

That was long enough ago that the said improvements have now happened: there is a large car park, and a modern visitor centre, selling a wide range of books and souvenirs. In summer, admission to the stones is permitted only to guided tours, but off-season, starting from October 1st, there is unrestricted access. We were there on September 30th, so it was tours only - and we arrived late morning, to be told the next tour was at two o' clock. It was admittedly a glorious sunny day, and we often complain that France closes down its summer attractions too early in the year, but on this occasion we would gladly have had the winter deal. The staff made no attempt to sell us the guided tour: it was in French, they warned us. We might have decided to return after lunch: durham_rambler asked if there was a café nearby, to be shown the centre's coffee machine. Did they have a map, then, to help us explore independently?

They didn't, but the big map on the display panel showed some footpaths, and we set off on the road, peering over and through the wire fences at the stones. I repeat, the stones are magnificent. Few of them are really huge, but the effect of row upon row of straight lines is impressive, and the fencing really doesn't block the view or stop you touching at least some of the stones. More of a problem is that much of the time you are walking along the road; some local footpaths are signposted with information abut the stones, but they are liable to fizzle out; other footpaths coincide with the stones for a crtain distance and then wander off on missions of their own. The National Monuments web site speaks of "setting up themed pedestrian and cycle paths", but a simple map with a suggested route would surely have been no harder to prepare than a fancy visitor centre?

Naturally, summer season or no, the crêperie nearest to the centre was closed, and I was mentally drafting a post recommending visitors to bring a picnic, when we came across Chez Céline, a crêperie as well as a souvenir shop (where I also bought my next year's diary, my annual treat for myself).

The first mystery, then, is why the system - whether the problem lies with the rules, the staff or the staff's application of the rules = turns away paying customers. And the second mystery (and I can think of no connection between the two, other than poetic justice) is why this astounding collection of monuments is not listed as a World Heritage site? Aha! It is on the tentative list, whatever that means; sometimes the solution to a mystery is another mystery.