St David's Day

Sadly no rugby today but daffodils were out in my garden to offer a button-hole to celebrate St David's Day. After meeting up with friends who are just back from Hong Kong, I bumped into Fred Dixon at the supermarket. His well-researched novel Ring of Minos (about ancient Thera and Crete) is just out, and definitely a recommended read - available now on Amazon.
I was pleased to receive in the post a contributor's copy of Now Write: Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, published in the USA by Tarcher/Penguin. I was asked to do something for this volume a long while back and publication is finally here. My article and creative exercise for those looking to develop their writing skills is entitled Leaping into Landscape, and mostly about the work on forest I was pursuing when the Signal contract came along and distracted me. The Mirror of Landscape themes will now form the major part of my output this year instead, but in conjunction with an artist for a pictures and text exhibition. We have our first meeting on the project coming up this week.

On the coast

Stayed with friends this week and we made a trip to the north coast at St-Samson. Ran the dogs on the beach and then walked south past the Pierre Double towards Terenez. Perfect weather, lively sea and great company.

Book Fair

I was at Cloitre-St-Thegonnec today for the annual book fair. Good day chatting with fellow authors and visitors, and lunching with my good friends Paul and Yvonne, who took some photos of the day.

Stormy spring

Been a rough old couple of weeks since finishing the book - storms and long power-cuts wearying enough, but a severe throat infection and the totally impossibility of getting warm or dry inside my hovel have created something of an endurance test when I have no energy to deal with it.
Walking has been very limited for these reasons lately - I even missed the Brittany Walks event last week, only the third absence in 10 years - but I did get into the forest in Huelgoat on Sunday. More trees are down but water levels are now lower than during the December deluge. The river bridges were passable although signs they had been underwater earlier. Yesterday on a brief sortie in the rain the atmosphere was spring-like with banks of primroses, budding trees and excited bird song all around.

Double celebration

Wales won AND I've finished my book. Look out for it later in the year with Signal Books (www.signalbooks.co.uk) in their Landscapes of the Imagination series. Now I am excavating my desk and the dining table, having seen the surface of neither for many months. Then will be time for friends, cooking, cleaning, meditating, poetry and exercise. After a rest, I have a little megalithic book to sort out, two articles in the pipeline and a much bigger writing project for later in the year. So today is a great day, despite the weather - even the dogs were happy to curtail their walk in the rain.

Landscape talk

The Great Cairn of Barnenez

I'm working pretty much day and night to finish the book at the moment, but was pleased to take a few hours off yesterday to talk to the AIKB association in central Brittany about Landscape and Legends. This was about the relationship between natural sites and the stories that are developed to 'enhance' them. The Forest of Cranou and Rumengol church, for example, where we have a nautical cross-dresser, Le Chevalier de Freminville (nick-named La Chevalière for obvious reasons) to thank for a Druid connection.
It was a really enjoyable occasion, the highlight being given a gift of postcards of her paintings by Jill Jamieson. One was based on a guided visit I did with the AIKB to the Cairn of Barnenez last year. My photo here in no way does justice to Jill's work, which presents the physical and emotional layers of landscape in a way I really appreciate. Have a look at her website - www.jilljamieson-12640-painter-brittany.com - to get the full flavour.

Moor wind, moor rain

After being up most of the night - unable to sleep so used the long dark hours to work on the completed first draft of the book - I needed a burst on the moor this morning despite feeling hardly able to put one foot in front of the other, exhausted and aching in every bone and joint. It was a real battle to meet the storm blasts head on, but turning north-east came as a sudden relief and it seemed as if rather than trudging I was suddenly moving  at the speed of a galloping horse (actually about 4kph). The wind is less forceful today than at the weekend, but still racing about with all the energy of anger. I missed the rain, so came back dry, but weary as could be.

New Year's Day

Odet rising in Quimper, Dec 24th

Stormy weather to see in 2014 in western Brittany. I've returned this morning in torrential rain from a week's stay in Huelgoat, where many trees are down in the forest from the pre-Christmas gales. My hovel was without power all the night of the worst storm I've known here on December 23rd so it was good to pass some days in warmth and comfort. But work must resume today and I need to be in my own office with access to all books and documents accumulated during this year long travail on the new book - only a few weeks until deadline, so no time to be lost.
Instead of resolutions for the New Year I'm adopting the ZenHabits policy of habit-breaking on a month by month basis. In January I will abstain entirely from my favourite computer game and one website where I waste a lot of time - the idea being to channel those extra hours into something constructive. I have made a long list of small creative projects I'd like to do this year, mostly unconnected with the day-job writing, so that should work well. If only my fingers are not so cold there is little possible beyond emerging from a nest of blankets to press buttons on the TV remote... No, I'm very positive and looking forward to 2014.
Happy New Year to you all.

Happy Yule and 2014 to all my readers

Wishing everyone a very happy holiday break, with thanks for all the phenomenal support I've had from friends and readers during this year. Looking forward to 2014!

Quimper - new perspective

Made a quick dash to Quimper today in beautifully clear weather. Everyone knows about the unusual crooked nave of the cathedral, but a crooked spire too?  Who knew.

Came home in a violent storm.

Pliny the Younger and Penmarc'h

This morning I've had the strange experience of baking Christmas biscuits in my Breton hovel whilst listening to Melvyn Bragg and his guests talking about Pliny the Younger. It brings back my decades of teaching ancient history and many relatively tedious hours of Pliny's letters in Latin. What made me glad to have come out of that world is the fact that eveything being said by scholars this morning was pretty much exactly what I was taught at university and what I went on to relay to my pupils. Pliny is inevitably something of a finite figure despite his prissy verbosity. How I prefer to be working now in the context of a living culture, attested by many thousands of individuals, alive and dead, and a range of source material to make any ancient historian weep.
Yesterday I was in very familiar territory in Pays Bigouden, renewing my close links with Penmarc'h and St-Guenolé on that unique flatly perilous coast on the south-west tip of Finistère. Highlight? The Phare Eckmuhl.

Parish closes

The Parish Closes, particularly those of north Finistère (like Guimiliau - pictured above), will of course feature in the new book. They are very special to me and I've enjoyed teaching a course on the subject, including practical visits, from time to time. No consideration of Breton culture could really ignore these supreme expressions of faith, community and artistic achievement. They also represent a period of great commercial prosperity, based on the cloth trade with England, when thousands of locals were involved in one or other of the many stages of process from growing the flax to selling the finished product.
The symbolism of death and resurrection and tales from the story of Christ predominate in the decoration, but there are plenty of oddities from a more pagan tradition including Green Men, monsters and bare-breasted women. What a lot those early saints had to put up with!

Reflections of nuclear power

Today in the Monts d'Arrée

Sardines and surrealism

In Douarnenez today: one of my regular haunts and part of the Coast chapter of the new book. The prosperity brought by the prolific sardine harvest in such a vast, shallow bay was abruptly snatched away when stocks inexplicably failed in the early years of the 20th century. The hardship was brutal, as, when business resumed, were conditions in the factories, which led to one of the most notorious strikes of the inter-war years by women desperate to be paid a living wage for their gruelling efforts. An armed attack on the communist mayor was one of the strike-breakers' tactics.
On a contrasting note, the town has long attracted artists of many persuasions, drawn to the coastal scenes of everyday life and natural beauty. Englishman Kit Wood produced some of his last (and best) paintings here before his suicide in 1930. The church in Tréboul (see photo) was one of his subjects - in those days at the heart of a tiny village, today part of Douarnenez and home to the pleasure marina. Surrealist Yves Tanguy, whose mother was from nearby Locronan, not only painted many of his bizarre but compelling pictures here, but asked in his will that his ashes be scattered on the bay, far from his adopted home in the USA.

Winter is here

We've had an abrupt autumn in western Brittany, shortened by the Indian summer and dulled by the earlier lack of rain. Walked today along the Nantes-Brest canal near Chateaulin. The Aulne is grey and smooth in sharp, cold air without a breath of wind. Some trees are still green, other unleafed to skeletons without any transitory colour. Here and there along the Aulne valley there are splashes of orange, brown and gold, but that's a deceptive sideshow. Winter is here.

Rennes again

I've been working in Rennes this week, looking especially at modern art and architecture. The photos above show the sculptural shadow-play of Alignement du XXI siècle by Aurelie Nemours at Beauregard.
Below, Georges Maillols' Horizons tower block (1970), is still a mesmorising spectacle from any angle, like its contemporary the Tour de l'Eperon by Louis Arretche.

I was also on the Odorico trail. This famous mosaicist and football fan has left his mark on many buildings in the city.

Great trip! Now time to write it all up...

Moor (and the language of landscape)

Out early this morning on the moor, after a night of torrential rain and storm-force winds. The sun did put in a short appearance but it's hard to enjoy our puny extremes of weather with images of the Philippines in mind. The top photo shows Tuchenn Gador, often marked Toussaints on maps as early French map-makers did not understand the Breton Tuchenn (a mound or prominent spot) and assumed a word that sounded like it - hence All Saints!

Rennes

Writing about Rennes at the moment, mainly on the architerctural development of the city in line with its political fortunes and redevelopment after the great fire of 1720. It's interesting that few observers over the centuries seem to have anything positive to say about the regional capital. In 1788 Arthur Young was surprised by the people's affection and support for the exiled Parliament despite the huge gulf between the nobility and the poor, and terrible living conditions at the lower end of the social scale. A French visitor in 1636 had never seen so many rats and mice in his life, and everyone complained about the smell ...

Now we are six...

We still like playing on the beach...

We are still a young pup at heart...

And we like staying in hotels with this kind of view from our window...
And having HAM for breakfast ... just once a year.

Concarneau

Sunny visit to Concarneau today and very pleasant to experience the walled city without the usual summer crowds.

Merlin's tomb

Which of these do you think makes the best tomb for Merlin? You might like to bear in mind that he was supposedly trapped forever in a grotte. The top picture is so-called Merlin's Tomb from the forest of Paimpont, heavily marketed as the Brocéliande of Arthurian legend (for no very good reason). It is in fact the remains of a neolithic dolmen. There are no caves in that forest, so nothing can be made to fit in the way they've managed with the Valley of No Return (nice valley, shame it was once publicised somewhere else entirely until a factory was built there). The second photo shows a veritable grotto, tucked under the rim of Mont Dol near Dol-de-Bretagne. This area on the eastern edge of Brittany was once covered by a great forest. And wait a minute! Wasn't Brocéliande supposed to be near the sea and in the Marches de Bretagne?
Of course Brocéliande is a literary creation, first mentioned by Wace in the 12th century Roman de Rou. He was a Norman with Plantagenet patrons, just up the road from Dol and Combourg, once in that eastern forest. He said he visited the forest himself. And Geoffrey of Monmouth who started the whole Arthur saga in its recognisible form today may also have ties with Dol. But no-one could possible doubt all the hype surrounding the Arthurian forest of Paimpont - could they?

All around the forest

Working on a short text about Cranou at the moment, so yesterday had a great day out and about the forest with friends. We had a very good lunch in Le Faou (haddock in crab sauce with puff pastry filled with sautéed leeks) before visiting one of my favourite churches in Finistere at Rumengol. Then we gave the dogs a good walk up and down the beautiful forest which once supplied wood for building ships for the French navy at Brest.

Peaceful walk

After an intense period of work glued to my office chair - except I am now working half the time standing up, which is fine if the computer is at exactly the right level - I really enjoyed lunch at L'Autre Rive today, followed by a long peaceful country walk with my good mate Jude. I'm working on the forest chapter of the book, so this kind of scenery was perfect, even if far from my featured forests.
Pleased to receive the new edition of Voyage (Brittany Ferries magazine) this morning, with my article on what to do in Brittany in winter featured. The suggestions are for visits and festivals, but it's not a bad time for a short break holiday or a few days walking, with careful choice of location. And my favourite season, but then, I'm a true child of winter.

Away again

I've had three days away, partly in Malestroit for a book fair and partly pursuing another river, this time the Oust. As much of its length forms part of the Nantes-Brest canal, the Oust and I are already pretty good friends, but I've enjoyed revisting some highlights - Montertelot, the lock at Beaumont where I was filmed for French TV years ago, the sweep round into sight of Josselin castle (above), etc.
I stayed in Malestroit with friends Jean and Adrian who have an excellent B&B (www.alamaisonblanche.eu) in the centre of town and right on the towpath, so I could sleep to the sound of the Oust dashing over its weir opposite the house. Finished up today at the Bosméléac barrage and the upper reaches of the river towards the source near Haut-Corlay. What a lovely river it is, and what lovely people I've met in Malestroit at the very well-attended book fair. Michel Hidalgo, famous French footballer and former national team manager was the star, with people queuing all day to shake his hand and have their photos taken with him, fathers bringing sons and grandfathers their grandsons just to see a legend of the game ... great to watch all the reactions. Also Yves Arnal promoting his book La Caravane du Tour de France, a history of the publicity machine behind it all - his wife Isabelle was a delightful 'neighbour' for me (not to mention their very pretty little dog who entertained Tex during the day).

Back

Really quite sad to be back from my month in eastern Brittany, not even roused by sights of misty/stormy Monts d'Arrée which welcomed my return. Only back a few hours and my beloved coffee machine is broken, internet problems causing frustration, rotting mouse corpse in my office causing terrible smell, taps dripping, same old traffic noise, etc. After weeks of silent working space in beautiful surroundings and lots of trips to interesting, lively places, stunning castles (Vitré pictured) all around and the chance for regular Rance walks with my dear friend Lesley, it all feels very flat today. As I left Combourg yesterday my lovely landlord Lionel handed me a bag of peaches, yes PEACHES, from the garden to remind me of that wonderful, serene (apart from Tex and the six cats scenario) space and all the kindness I received from all those who helped with my research.

Dol and the rewriting of history

The gap between tourism and history gets ever wider. Dol-de-Bretagne now hands out tourist information stating prominently that Nominoe was crowned first king of Brittany at the cathedral here in the 9th century. There is even a recent statue of that great man wearing a crown opposite the cathedral entrance. Perhaps this is a response to falling visitor numbers; it is certainly a case of self-aggrandisement.
The 'evidence' for Nominoe's coronation comes a text from hundreds of years later, suddenly appearing at a time when the status of Dol cathedral was under threat and its challenge to the Metropolitan see of Tours was about to be put to rest. Contemporary documents do not use the title king, not even in the Cartulaire of Redon Abbey, an establishment he was instrumental in founding. It's all a bit like Glastonbury Abbey miraculously discovering the grave of King Arthur just when funds were short .... any legend in a storm.
Nominoe's actions regarding Breton bishops and episcopy of Dol in particular are complicated and difficult to interpret confidently - such is the fascination of the 9th century in Breton history. His son Erispoe certainly has the status of king, a reflection of his achievements against Charles the Bald,  but to claim definitively that such an event took place with Nominoe is a travesty, a triumph of competitive tourism over intelligent presentation of historical issues.

Rance

What an amazing day to be cruising on the maritime section of the Rance!

Not a bad place to be buried

Spent a day around St-Malo today, including a visit to Chateaubriand's grave on the island of Grand Bé as the tide was low enough to give access. I've been thinking and writing so much about him in the context of Combourg - where he lived in formative teenage years and which remained the scene of his 'madeleine' moments, a touchstone of his identity, for the rest of his life. He was born in St-Malo, and his fame and significance managed to persuade the municipal council and the 'department of war' to whom the island belonged to agree to his request to buried in a spot where the only sound would be the wind and waves (and the piercing shrieks of lunch-hour school kids echoing across from the town beach).

Polders

Long walks today across the polders in the Baie de Mont St-Michel and I have the wind burn to prove it. Sun and showers coming and going all the time but constant blasts of up to 50mph with nothing on those flat lands to impede their force. I'm happy to look at the Mont itself from a distance for the moment and have no intention of revisiting until 2015 when it will have been returned to its natural island state. Destroying the causeway which has so disturbed the currents and tide of the bay and replacing it with a low passerelle will achieve this effect. Until that's done it's all a bit of a mess.

Fabulous Fougères

High on the list of my all-time favourite places, Fougères has one of the best castles in Europe and inspired settings for novels by Victor Hugo and Balzac. The old town in the Nancon valley contrasts with the mainly 18th century High Town where there's a statue of the Marquis de le Rouerie, founder of the original Association bretonne in 1791 and key anti-Revolutionary figure. After lunch at Le P'tit Bouchon in rue Chateaubriand - Eric and Isabelle's welcome and cooking recommended - I had a pleasant afternoon in the adjoining beech forest, with 12th century cellars, megaliths and lots of good walking to enjoy.

Viking Camp

After a sunny walk along the Rance at Taden with my good friend (and nature expert) Lesley, I went further north in search of the 10th century Viking camp at St Suliac, lying greenly in the bed of the same river at low tide. It is best viewed from Mont Garrot, a spectacular viewpoint over the estuary in both directions, and of course the burial site of the giant Gargantua. They had to fold him in seven - it's not a very wide hill...