To Quimper by Church

Right. Historic background. In Brittany in the late 1500s and early 1600s there was a lot of money around, an economic boom based on linen, apparently. And some of that money got put into parish churches. There was a style, then, of giving a parish church a walled enclosure within which would customarily be certain elements (besides a church): a cemetery, an ossuary (where the dry bones of people were kept, after they were brought up from the cemetery to make room), often a decorated arch (for processions to go through), and usually a "calvary." The latter is the proper term for a grouping of sculpted figures including a crucifix, on a common base.

Lots of such parish church complexes were built and many remain with some or all of the 15xx art works intact. The tourist board has a signposted route to see them, and the guidebooks list several. Marian selected seven of what seemed like the most interesting ones and that was the route we ran today, going from Morlaix to our new base, Quimper.

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(By the way, we asked at the hotel desk. The proper pronunciation of this town's name is cam pear. With a little fricative rasp on the final "r" of course. But not cam pay, and obviously never to rhyme with "whimper".)

So we visited seven churches packed full of amazing art. Sometimes bizarre and eerie, as religious art of that period can be, but always amazing. And took more than the usual number of pictures, and kept more than the usual percentage. And ended up more than usually dissatisfied with the job we did. And then it took longer even than usual to get fed some supper. (More on that in the wrap-up.) Point is, it's past 11pm and we're turning in without finishing the blog. Maybe catch up tomorrow. Here's a couple pics.

Twenty-four Hours of Surprises in Morlaix

Morlaix provided a number of surprises, some pleasant and some not-so.

Number one was, driving in yesterday afternoon, how dramatic the town is. It's basically built in the bottom of a deep gully at the head of a tidal river. Quite tall buildings line the streets, including some impressive half-timbered ones. And a huge 19th-century railroad viaduct spanning from ridge to ridge dominates everything.

Morlaix Viaduct

Half-timbered buildings.

Number 2 was learning from the hotel clerk that tomorrow was a bank holiday. What, another? In the month of May, May 1st was a national holiday, as was the day after the presidential election, then there was a bank holiday two weeks ago. Now another? And that means that practically everything except boulangeries (they're always open—a day without baguettes is unthinkable) and a few cafés will be closed.

Surprise #3 was discovering that the battery charger for the Nikon, and the second battery for it, were apparently left behind, probably in Dinan. Some hurried internet research verified the model number and the location of Nikon retailers here and in Quimper, the next town, but of course—tomorrow's a bank holiday.

Surprise #4 was when we got up and there were amplified voices and commotion in the street outside our hotel window, and going out we found that today, Morlaix is hosting the Petit Tour de France, a bicycle event for 1,530 children ages 3 to 11, and of course their parents. The entire big Place d'Otages a block down from our hotel was full of people and vehicles supporting this event.

Crowd for the Petit Tour de France

Surprise #5 was when we realized that Place De Gaulle where we had parked our car last night was also full of sponsor and official vehicles—and our car was gone. Towed. We had seen but failed to absorb the meaning of this sign:

[No-Parking symbol] Monday 28th May 2012 6am to 2pm (petit tour de france) [tow-away icon]

Back to the hotel and ask the concierge to find out what to do. He said, go to the Commissariat of Police, just a few blocks away. We go there, explain the problem; policeman introduces us to tow-truck driver who explains that he will drive David to get the car, on payment of €110. Ohhhh-kayyy. Go to ATM, get cash. Marian is left standing outside police station while David rides off in tow truck, a couple Kms out of town. Check car over, it is not damaged, give driver his ransom money. Also on the windscreen, a €35 parking ticket. Show it to tow truck guy, he says, "Oh, that is for Police." Ohhh-kayyy.

David starts back to rejoin Marian. However, all of centre ville is barré. Morlaix, being confined to a narrow valley, has not got a lot of alternate routes; David and the car are at one end; Marian at the other; 1,530 kids and their parents are milling around on bikes in the middle. Very fortunately we had left the Garmin in the car. That made it possible to navigate, with difficulty, over the hills and around to the bottom end of town, where David parked the car (legally!) about a kilometer below the center of town and hoofed it back to find Marian taking pictures of adorable kids on bikes. Here are some.

One of the 153 designated groups waiting to push off behind its sponsor vehicle.

Team Spiderman, note Mom is in costume too

 

 

 

How much cute can you handle?

A push from Mom to get over the speed bump

Though fewer than half the groups had started, it was time to deal with the parking ticket. Surprise #6, showed the ticket to a cop at the station, asked, "How do we pay this?" The cop said (in French) "Are you the guest of the Hotel d'Europe?" Uh, yeah, I mean, Oui!. So then, he takes ticket and puts it in his pocket. "Pas de probleme." Later back at the hotel we found out the hotel clerk had called the police and got them to annulez le procés verbal. Nice service! Big hotel recommendation going into TripAdvisor soon!

It was not a surprise to find that the two historical houses we were to visit in Morlaix were closed for the bank holiday. So: what to do with a day? Well, we can go look at more of the rugged North coast. Paged through that section of the guidebook and more or less at random decided to visit Château Kerjean.

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Courtyard of Château Kerjean.

The next surprise (what number are we up to?) was that the Château was actually interesting. First it had a temporary exhibit on Breton music and musicians.

The Bretons are a Celtic peoples, related to the Irish and the Welsh, and since the 50s have run a Breton consciousness campaign that has succeeded to the extent that the Breton flag (inset here) is available in every tourist shop, and every road sign is bilingual in French and Breton. So the Bretons have a music tradition that sounds a lot like Celtic music, using clarinet, accordian, hurdy-gurdy, and bagpipes. The exhibit in Château Kerjean had lots about the musicians, the rediscovery of their music in the 1960s, and the instruments.

Breton bagpipes. They had a short documentary on the making of these.

They also had some 16C furnishings on display, including several "box beds" like this. We'd never heard of a "box bed."

Cozy, no?

Kerjean had been badly trashed in the Revolution and by profligate owners but one piece, its chapel, was still somewhat intact including some very interesting wood carvings by an unknown Breton master.

Carvings by an anonymous Breton master carver whose work has been identified in other nearby churches.

Carving.

Following this we drove to a charming little harbor and sat with our books sipping café créme for an hour like popular flâneurs. Following which we drove a route that crossed some deep tidal canyons that some optimistic people say are like fiords. Through all this driving it was something of a surprise, and a pleasure, to find the countryside flat and open with big wide fields. Horizons in the Normandy countryside are quite short. Here is one of the tidal "fiords."

 

Slow transit to Morlaix

Today we really proved our skill as flaneurs: we ambled, we idled, we dawdled and fooled around and turned a one-hour transit from Perros-Guirec to Morlaix into a 4-hour tour, then went off for more.

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This coastline is full of little harbors each with its little resort village. No more pink granite, but on a sunny Sunday morning it's all very pretty indeed.

 

 

 

One thing we dawdled over was trying to get a good shot of an artichoke field, of which there are many.

Every green strip is an artichoke field.

 

By the way, we've decided that we mis-read the artichoke seller's sign at the market in Paimpol. The were one Euro apiece, not seven. Also, we hadn't mentioned that they were about six inches in diameter. Unfortunately, we haven't had a chance to eat any – haven't yet seen them on any restaurant menu – what to they do with all of them?

Eventually we got to Morlaix in time for a late lunch and checked into our hotel, then went for more coast browsing up to Roscoff, where the main attraction is the Jardin Exotique, a botanical garden. We were kinda, ho-hum, seen botanical gardens (yawn) but this one was really well-done. Quite small but they had very cleverly run a complex of paths through it so you kept discovering things. Many of the plants we had seen before, like the King Protea we last saw in the Auckland botanical garden.

 

This place had a speciality of Echium, the plants that you see in California coastal gardens as "Tower of Jewels." We'd seen these in gardens on Île de Bréhat but here they had them in several varieties. Turns out they are from the Canary Islands.

 

For all it was a dawdlin' day we got in late and tired, so we'll cut it off here. Tomorrow we look around this town of Morlaix, which is surprisingly and dramatically picturesque. Had no idea.

Good Things and Less Good

We did five "things" today, three in the original plan and two ad-hoc.

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Thing one was to take a nature walk along the Traouïéros river valley. And do not ask us how to pronounce that. Tra-oo-ee-ay-ros? (Move your mouth like Dory in the "speaking 'whale'" scene from Finding Nemo.) Anyway it's a little creek that has cut a steep valley through those granite boulders and there is supposed to be a walking trail, but the only guide book to mention it was quite ambiguous and Google maps had no idea. And there were no signs. But with half an hour of searching and by asking a friendly person, we found it!

David waves to show where the trail is among the boulders.

Marian celebrates climbing yet another long stairway.

So we walked a kilometer or so out and then back through nice green woods.

Thing Four was a visit to the City Aquarium in Trégastel, which we found by accident while looking for a fresh baguette on the way to Thing Two. Looked interesting but it wouldn't be open until 2pm, so on to Thing Two.

Thing Two was to visit a church in Lannion which a guide book claimed had a "magnificent" view from its porch. It is built on the edge of a steep hill and has a nice view of central Lannion, if you wanted one, which we didn't, so on to Thing Three.

Thing Three was a stop at Chateau de Kergrist. This place has papered our town of Perros-Guirec with posters advertising an exhibit of mechanical sculptures. So we threw that into today's mix. It didn't turn out to be much. At first we thought the place was closed, it was dark and deserted and no tourists around. But there was someone to sell a ticket after all. The sculptures were cute, robots and big insects and such assembled from junk mechanical parts, but no info on the sculptor or anything. We walked around the grounds of the place a short while, too.

Chateau looks good from a distance. Close up, not so much.

Marian was fascinated by a huge old topiary Yew tree in a back garden.

Frankly this place was a disappointment. One can sympathize with the family that has owned it for five generations; maintenance must be horribly costly. But they aren't keeping up, that was clear to anyone walking around the place. And the advertising posters that drew us in rather overstated what they had to offer.

So back to Trégastel to the Aquarium, which is small but very nicely organized and presented. The site is unique, a vast pile of those pink granite boulders with the building worked into the gaps and caves among them. This site has been a chapel, and during WWII it was an ammunition bunker. Now it is an aquarium centered on the local tidal pools and North Atlantic fisheries.

There is an aquarium insinuated among those boulders.

The exhibits are worked in among the rocks.

There was a class of French kids there. They apparently had been given an assignment. Each had a sheet of paper, possibly a list of questions to answer, and each was intent on finding whatever it was they had to look for.

We only saw one fish that was new to us.

The Lompe, or Cyclopterus Lumpus

Finally, Thing Five came up on the way home through the center of Perros-Guirec. Marian recalled that a guide book said that the town church, Église St. Jacques, was a "must-see," and fortuitously we saw a parking space near it. It's not pretty on the outside,

Church from 14C, Octagonal thing mushed on in 17C.

...nor indeed on the inside, very dark with heavy romanesque columns.

But the organist was practicing which was nice, and there are a number of very old polychrome figures.

"Rood beam" with figures from the 15th C.

St. Laurent, 16C polychrome wood figure

That was pretty much it. For more pics of polychrome figures, more green woods along the Unpronounceable River, more gannets, and so forth, check out the Perros-Guirec Gallery where Marian organizes everything with informative captions.

Tomorrow we shift again to "fresh woods, and pastures new."

Birds of the Seven Isles and Douanier's Path

When we got up, the area was shrouded in light fog, which created a golden light over the yacht basin.

The fog stayed around all day, making all distances hazy and lowering the contrast of the pics. Don't tell, but Photoshop has been used to blow away some of the fog from these pictures. WYSInot-quiteWYG.

After breakfast we did two things local to Perros-Guirec. First up, a boat ride to Les Sept Îles, the Seven Isles, a small archipelago about 10km off the coast, to look at sea birds. The primary and most spectacular of these was a colony of Gannets.

We saw a gannet colony once before, in New Zealand. Or, David did, because Marian was unwell and stayed behind.

This time we didn't get quite so close to the birds. But the colony is huge. Here's an early glimpse of it.

That white frosting on the right? That's birds.

Closer...

And soon we are right under them.

Lots'o'gannets.

These are not kin to the New Zealand birds. These migrate down the Atlantic to Africa. How about another gannet pic?

All right, just one more.

Note natural arch.

There were other birds out there too, but not in big numbers. Cormorants, for one.

Just up from a dive, shaking his wings dry.

Also saw razorbills, oyster catchers, and the two local kinds of gulls.

Back on shore we had a nice lunch and then went for a 90-minute ramble on Le Sentier du Douanier, the Customs' Officers' Path. Seems that this part of France was once a primary entry point for smuggled goods. No wonder, there are so many little bays and harbors. The Customs enforcers developed a path along the cliffs for their patrols, and it's a hiking trail now. The piece of it just here passes some spectacular pink-granite formations.

There were lots of people on this popular walking path.

Have we mentioned there are Monterey Cypress all over around here?

Note the matching layers suggesting these were once a single piece.

Eroded pieces trapped between others.

Hanging rock.

We dubbed this "the laughing dolphin."

There were flowers, too, and a checker-spotted bug.

Back at the hotel on the other side of this peninsula, we noted it was low tide which reveals the structure of the yacht basin. This wall is invisible at high tide.