Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Landerneau and Plougastel-Daoulas

Getting tired? Honestly, so were we! But we stopped briefly in the town of Landerneau to see the Pont du Rohan, a bridge over the river Elorn that is occupied by houses. It's one of the last two inhabited bridges in Europe (the other is the Ponte Vecchio in Florence).

It's not as interesting as Ponte Vecchio, but it's pretty.

Especially from the upstream side.

The only notable feature of the enclosure at Plougastel-Daoulas is its calvary.

 

It was put up following a nasty episode of the Plague in 1598. Its two levels are jammed with more than 180 figures.

 

Here are the two thief figures. The good thief is attended by an angel; the bad thief by a demon (who rather looks like a monkey and not especially demonic). What's cute is, each of the attendants is holding what looks like a doll and presumably represents the soul of that thief.

 

Here again we meet the legend of poor damned Kattel Gollet being hauled off to hell.

 

A nice story is told on a plaque here. In 1944, American artillery damaged the calvary. An American officer and art expert, John Skilton, created a restoration fund that paid for restoring the calvary.

 

Plougastel-Daoulas is supposedly known for its strawberries. That was Marian's canny plot in making it last on the route, so we could have something strawberry-related for tea. Well, it took some searching, as the cafés of the town do not have any notion of capitalizing on the local crop. But we found a patisserie with a tea-room and with some fancy pastries that had strawberries in them. They were very good.

And from there we ripped down the freeway to Quimper and collapsed.

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