Seeing the sea

I'm concentrating now on coastal walking for the new book. This section will include some linear suggestions for Finistère's sensational littoral, so a route of about 10km becomes a day long out and back excursion (or a lift, taxi or even bus can make it a one way walk if so desired). The point is to highlight the best bits so walkers who only have a limited time can be sure of getting a memorable journey - and best bits usually means avoiding the obvious (i.e. places easily reached by car, like the Pointe du Raz).
So today I was on Cap Sizun, revisiting some favourite sections of the coastal path and enjoying the mild sea air, softened by occasional misty rain drifting across the high cliffs, as below at Kastell Koz.

 A good day's work, even if my knees would have preferred to stay at home and watch TV.

Village in a sacred space

I had a wonderful walk in Locronan in beautiful sunshine on Thursday. The route concentrated on the wooded countryside around this unusual village, which has a strange dual nature, the sense of artificiality spread unconvincingly over something profound. The name means the holy place of Ronan, the Breton saint of Irish origin who came to Brittany and like many others, faced opposition and antipathy. He moved around, settling finally in this sylvan paradise said to have been the location of a well-defined Celtic nemeton or ritual space, with specific points linked to movements of the heavens.
Each day he walked the boundary of this area, an action commemorated today in the annual Tromenie walk (extended to the full 12km every six years). The chapel of Penity attached to his imposing church in the village centre has the saint's tomb. Locronan sits between the Bois du Duc and the Bois du Nevet, remnants of ancient forest. Anyone following the walk (to feature in my new book) will have the sense of the numinous landscape that is the source of these legends and religious affiliations.
But the other more obvious face of the village, which has brought many film-crews (including Roman Polanski who filmed some scenes for Tess of the d'Urbervilles here) and attracts hordes of tourists throughout the year, is made up of handsome 17-18th century façades around the centre square before the church. Remarkably unspoilt, these reflect the wealth derived from sail-cloth making in the heyday of the Breton cloth trade.

Today many artists and craftsmen have their workshops here and there are plenty of bars and restaurants, making it doubly desirable for a day's outing. Not always to be relied on though: a couple of years ago I decided to come here on my birthday just before Christmas, to buy a few presents, have lunch and a walk, as the weather was unseasonably sunny and mild. Everything was closed, even the bakery, so with no possibility of food, I paid my respects to St Ronan and drove home for a cheese sandwich.

At the opening

Delighted to be presented by the artists (organized by my great friend Liz) with a calendar containing wonderful images from the exhibition. The opening was a very happy occasion for us all with lots of appreciation from the public (and sales).

Today

High moor by Jill Jamieson

My exhibition on Breton landscape at L'Autre Rive in the forest of Huelgoat opens today at 16.30 (rather than 17.30 as advertised initially because of important politcal meeting in the evening at same venue). Booklets of the texts I'm displaying with some other collected pieces of my recent landscape writing are on sale. I have to say the paintings look magnificent now that the exhibition is hung and ready to go - my friend and fellow-exhibitor Liz Ridgway worked with me and Marc from L'Autre Rive all yesterday evening to get things right. I owe her many thanks for many things and also here thank the other artists who have produced such fine work. All welcome to the opening this afternoon.

Texthibition

Busy preparing for my exhibition on Breton landscapes at L'Autre Rive in the forest of Huelgoat. I invited four friends who are professional artists living in Brittany to work with me on this project and they've produced some fantastic work. I have six texts for display on Layers, Place-names, Moor, Forest, River and Coast, all very different in form and style. There will also be for sale a little booklet of those texts plus other landscape writing I've done this year. Hoping for a good turn-out at the opening.

Downhill all the way

Very frustrating day checking out a walk for the new book: a walk that turned out to be useless. It looked good on paper, starting at a ruined church on the bank of a beautiful river, then climbing to a hill-top with long views. This was all fine, but the bit of road walking which followed turned out to be past not what looked on the map like small farms but in reality were enormous intensive complexes. Then a long section through a stream valley and extensive woods began and turned into a nightmare of confusing paths, flooded stream-beds and scrappy overgrown scrubland with no mature trees and no views whatsoever.
A strange and unpleasant sense of claustrophobia set in as hours passed in attempts to reconcile the two maps I had with what was on the ground and actually to get out of this dense part of the route to breathe freely again in the outside world. In desperation I made a long, very steep scramble up a hillside and finally got a limited view to orientate myself back to the start point, abandoning any hope of creating a circuit. Even with a good map and good directions there would always be elements of uncertainty and disorientation on this cursed route and that's not what people want when they buy a book to be sure of good walks. So a day is gone for nothing and another walking day has to be scheduled at a time when I'm already overstretched with commitments. But a friend reminds me it comes with the job and that it's the whole point: I must waste my time so others don't. OK then, but I'm not going to smile about it.

Coastal unseens

Lesconil

Texts for my exhibition in October are moving along now, with Moor, Forest and River pretty much finished, and I'm starting to concentrate on a piece to be called Coastal Scenes. Fortuitously, I had planned to take a friend to the coast this week for her birthday treat, staying in a hotel just above the beach at the Baie des Trépassées in the far west. Our first day, after a visit to the allée couverte at Lesconil, we arrived in a thick Atlantic mist, the mass of surfers suddenly bursting into view on the shore as if from nowhere. We decided to walk the 3km to the Pointe du Raz along an undulating coast path, despite the lacks of views, the fact it was already 5 o'clock and that I was limping after quite a bad fall on rocks at the Moulin de Keriolet earlier in the afternoon. We could hardly see the water at all, and arriving at the huge, hideous statue of Our Lady on the point, had no visual sense whatever of being anywhere near the sea, whilst just below us churned one of the most dramatic and malevolent straits in Europe - an unusual perspective on the nature of coast.

Hotel

Day Two began in heavy rain but we made a slow start and arrived at the Pointe du Van to clearer, drier skies and were able to have a good walk, with views towards the Iron Age éperon barré of Castelmeur. This was followed by coffee in Audierne and a (for me, yet another) visit to Menez Dregan, where the paleolithic cave was still fully uncovered and much more visible than on my last trip a couple of weeks ago. We sat for a long time on a bench further down the coast just gazing at the sea before the long drive home. Although at no point was I consciously thinking about my text, I found myself quite unable to sleep last night, despite being physically exhausted, and several times had to leap out of bed and rush to my desk to make notes, a process that felt at the time not unlike rushing to the bathroom to be sick in the night.

Coastal seen

Canal again

Several things have brought me back to the Nantes-Brest Canal lately, a construction I wrote two books and several articles about quite a few years ago and a territory that once so often mirrored my inner landscape. In clearing out some old CDs I found a copy of the French TV programme in which I appear tallking about the canal. French people sometimes recognise me from that production but I've never actually seen it before, so it was strange to watch my self of eight years ago, so familiar and yet so long gone.
More practically, I'm doing a feature on the canal in Finistère for the new walking book, and yesterday went out to rewalk one of my favourite circuits at Pont Coblant, which includes a 4km stretch of the beautiful Aulne river (a bit insulting to call it a canal here) in countryside far removed from roads and noise of any kind. The inland section goes over a hill to give great long views, particularly towards Karreg an Tan, the Fire Rock, which will also be in the book.

The canal does not start in Nantes, nor end in Brest, but its original military prupose was to link the two naval bases (and Lorient via the Blavet canal south from Pontivy) and provide a secure inland route at a time when Napoléon was frustrated by English naval supremacy and the resulting blockades of Breton ports. Most the 365km length is made up of beautiful rivers - the Oust, the Blavet and the Aulne being the most remarkable - with artifical sections cut and ladders of locks built to cross the hills between their valleys. It was only fully open long after Napoléon's time and became used mainly for the transport by barge of materials like stone, slate, wood and sand. The railway soon became quicker and more economical, with a better organised infrastructure of depots and loading facilities. Great leisure resource though the canal undoubtedly is these days it was always something of an economic white elephant.

A load of stones

At Menez Dregan today, doing a leisurely circular walk for the new book to take in the magnificent prehistoric site on top of the Pointe du Souc'h. I mention the point because a two-handled rounded pottery vase discovered here in the late 19th century gave the name vase du souc'h to that style of find. The various tombs discovered are the result of nine phases of development of the site during the Neolithic period. Recent reconstruction work has given an indication of the original cairn covering which enclosed the dolmens.

Just down the road is the enormous allée couverte of Pors Poulhan, a remarkable revival after the Germans blew it up in 1942 as an obstruction to their view of the coast. It was still possible to excavate in the mid 1980s and turn up weapons, tools and jewellery showing usage as a burial site from 6000BC onwards.

As if this wasn't enough, below the Pointe du Souc'h a paleolithic cave-dwelling from 465,000BC is today carefully protected by a coating of metal plates, its roof having long since collapsed. Here evidence of created hearths, the oldest in Europe, has been found. I was fortunate to be there today at the moment when a team of helmeted workers began uncovering the site, perhaps in preparation for events taking place this week as part of Rencontres Prehistoriques de Bretagne.

I first visited Menez Dregan many years ago alone, and again in 2007 with the departmental archaeologist Michel Le Goffic explaining the excavations in great detail. Since those times much has changed, from reconstruction work to a smart new visitor centre, large information panels and landscape gardening. There's not much left to the imagination these days and no room at all for any sense of awe. I certainly had that when it was just a load of stones on a headland. Maybe a question of can't see the stones for the words.

River

St Mawes castle

I've been in Cornwall, thinking about rivers and enjoying some trips on the Fal, downriver from Truro and up river from Falmouth, the latter thanks to Alison and John and their little yellow boat. I wanted to see some of the territory from Philip Payton's Rising Ground on the spirit of place, but the book never really came alive for me as it seems more about people than place, apart from a few memorable straight descriptions. I think there is still a significant gap between landscape history and accessing a spirit of place.

Nantes, the siren city

Working in Nantes at the weekend, in sweltering heat. Managed to take a look at some of the Voyage art installations that I've missed in previous visits and as ever enjoyed the sheer blooming vitality of this ever-changing city. It is a place of the present, and light in atmosphere, despite a weighty and dubious historical heritage of wealth based on the slave trade. It would be very hard to be miserable in Nantes...

Wit and ideas, an irresistible combination, which makes walking the city streets a real experience and brings the urban landscape into a sharper focus than when it stands alone. There's an infinity more to Nantes than the famous big mechanical Elephant on the Ile de Nantes, perhaps the difference between tourism and enhancement.

Devil always in the detail

Recently spent a few days walking near the south coast of Finistere, checking routes for the new book. My first stop in a grey early morning was at the Roches du Diable near Locunolé. These rocks form a granite chaos in the bed of the Ellé through a low wooded gorge. After passing along the bank on a level with the spectacle, I followed a long circuit to arrive high up on the opposite bank looking down.
There is of course a legend. The Devil was jealous of the success of St Guenolé in converting the locals and determined to be rid of his rival. As the saint walked by the river in contemplation, rocks rained down on his head, but, by the grace of God, fell harmlessly into the water. A great hand to hand fight then ensued between the two adversaries and Guenolé hauled the Devil down into the river where to this day a bottomless hole lies beneath the waters.
So the landscape was claimed by the church, here as so often elsewhere. The legend does more than trumpet a moral victory over evil: it is a statement of power and possession, the superiority of God to the powers of nature once worshipped by man, an ever-lasting reminder before the eyes of the locals of the supposed might that backs up the earthly dominion of the church.

On top of the world

Recently enjoyed some solitary splendour on Karreg an Tan, the Rock of Fire, where a beacon warning against Viking raids up the Aulne once flared in response to a signal from Menez Hom. A real nugget of imaginative history. By contrast the 'neolithic dolmen' on the summit was put up in 1963 by the Quimper Scouts.

Maen glas: a green and blue day

Walking around Locquirec today. I started in the very early morning at Moulin de la Rive, where some of the oldest rocks in France, a form of granitic gneiss, can be found at the western end of the beach. Continuing along the coast towards the town, the path around the Pointe du Chateau passes former quarries of Locquirec stone, a bluey-green schist (hence its Breton name maen glas) heavily exploited as a building material from the 17th to 20th centuries.

Rounding the promontory of Ile Blanche, the Roman baths at Hogolo are visible across the mouth of the Douron, and therefore in Cotes d'Armor. Instead I had a good look at the 17th century manor house which dominates the Finistère bank. This was purchased in 1903 by Eardley Norton, advocate of the Viceroy of India, but he soon tired of his wife's expensive parties and lavishly expansive schemes, and managed to off-load it to a religious order.

The cross-country section of my route, after the highlights of a beautiful country chapel with no access road and a gloriously verdant wooded valley, ran out of path in a large swamp and I was forced to change the plan and take small roads up over a hill before descending steeply on a green path with superb sea views to return to the car. Such a mixture of interest is typical of so many walks in Brittany, yet another reflection of the extraordinary natural and man-made heritage accessible within a relatively small space.

Drivel

Too busy recently to do much writing of any useful sort, occupied by a few translation jobs and some guided tours, including a fabulous day last Monday with a lovely Welsh group from Fishguard (Loctudy twinning event). We mooched about the Monts d'Arrée on a coach and had a very good lunch at Le Poisson Blanc in Pont Coblant, all standing to sing the Welsh national anthem between courses, accompanied by a charming Breton in traditional hat.
Since then I've been in Pays Bigouden researching for the new Finistere walking book, and enjoying some spectcular coastal scenery at Penmarc'h, as well as the many megalithic remains of the area. I stayed in one of my all-time favourite B&Bs at Le Guilvinec (www.cap-ouest.com) where Martine made Breton far for breakfast and I discovered to my shame that the only word of Italian I could manage for my fellow-guests from Sienna was ciao. Similarly, there were people of Polish extraction in the restaurant talking a little in Polish, and I hardly recognised a word. Whatever happened to my language skills? Surely they existed? I spent months in Poland alone, without speaking English, so some meaningful exchanges must have taken place. These days I often forget English words and talk drivel in French. But at least, I'm pretty damn fluent in Dog.

Elez - my life in a river

I'm writing about the Elez for the autumn exhibition on Breton landscape. It's made me think a lot about the comfort and inspiration of a river, something that emerges as far more significant to me than the rhythms of the sea. It's to do with one directional flow, an infinite variation of pace and the coherent trace from source to mouth or confluence.

Looking down on the Yeun Elez

The Elez is intensely interesting for the variety in its short length. Most famous is the Yeun Elez, a vast marshy bowl said to contain the entrance to the Celtic underworld, and the setting of many a Breton legend. Here near the source, the river immediately settles into stagnation and the lazy squelch of bog, its force constrained in a peaty reservoir. The 1930s Lac St-Michel flooded the area to hold a mass of water for producing hydro-electricity, with a barrage at Nestavel, and later serve the 1960s nucelar power station on the lakeside.
Once resolved of such serious responsibility, the Elez can breathe freely and move at a rapid pace, becoming positively light-hearted at the magical Chaos of Mardoul, where it lilts among the granite boulders with playful insistence. Held up again for another functional duty with a lake and barrage at St Herbot, it somehow manages both to fulfil the demands of the artificial channel to the electricity plant and yet retain enough energy to power down spectacular tiered cascades over massive stones near St Herbot.

Mardoul Chaos

Cascade at St Herbot

After the drama, a calm rural meander across eastern Finistère, passing (and occasionally threatening) a friend's mill-house between Collorec and Plouyé, before reaching the Aulne near Penity St-Laurent.
My affinity with this river is, of course, in great part a matter of scale and accessibility. I doubt I'd feel so strongly for the Limpopo. But while the sea remains too vast to grasp, too over-whelming, predictable and unpredictable, diurnal and eternal, the Elez is simply a beautiful river with a beginning and an end to its story, easily analogous to a life's course with all the attendant rises and falls.

Lac de Guerlédan (again) - a narrative

Before... or after

After ... or before

Landscape is the result of human activity on nature. Every anomaly in landscape hints at narrative. The Blavet river's connnection between central Brittany, long devoid of easy communications and commercial development, and the south coast ports of Hennebont and, from the 17th century, Lorient, gave it a vital role as a means of passage and transport. It was later to be transformed by canalisation into an essential part of the Breton waterway system in the early 19th century, forming a section of the Nantes-Brest route north and west of Pontivy, and taking 28 locks to the south direct to Hennebont, sixty kilometres away.
The next stage of the Blavet's story came a hundred years later, as scientific advance created surging demand for electricity. It was decided to flood a twelve kilometre stretch of the valley between Locks 119 and 137 to create a reservoir and barrage to feed the new hydro-electic station, a progress outlined in the little Musée de l'Electricité at nearby St Aignan. Four hundred hectacres of woodland, as well as many locks and houses, were engulfed by the project. The resulting lake was to become a focus of tourism and watersports, an economic spin-off for the locality, a new phase of the river's life.
At rare intervals the lake has been drained for inspection and repair of the barrage. 2015 may be the last time, as robotic machines should be up to the job in the future. The empty lake on show this summer is an extraordinary spectacle by any criteria, its walls and bed stripped naked for human assessment. Skeletons of trees submerged for eighty-five years still stand upright from the mud. Locks with their uselss weirs and chutes still exist intact, accompanied by the ruins of their workers' houses, walls withstanding the pressure of the waters where roofs have disappeared. Layers of narrative are fully exposed.
But there is movement in the bottom of this gigantic emptiness. The Blavet continues to flow. Nature continues to hold its place under the weight of all that landscape.

Full of emptiness - Lac de Guerlédan

Abbaye de Bon Repos

Wonderful day, full of interest and excitement. First a visit to the Abbaye de Bon Repos for a meeting about possible exhibition project for next year (on mapping and lines of communication), followed by a good look at the current offering on canals in France (and Brittany in particular). I gave permission for a radio interview I did about the Barrage de Guerlédan to be used in this exhibition via headphones and a listening post: quite a strange and not altogether pleasant experience to hear myself as others hear me.
Decided to take advantage of being in central Brittany to go and see the extraordinary spectacle of Lac de Guerlédan emptied of water for the barrage to be closely inspected and repaired. The ghostly skeletons of former locks and lock-houses are revealed by the drainage, but the most surprising impact is the sheer depth and volume of the Blavet valley at this point.

Lac de Guerlédan

 I actually like the area better without the lake and wish it could stay like that - not a popular opinion, I suspect.

Emotional landscapes

We bring our emotions to nature for many reasons which we consciously acknowledge: looking for beauty to balance pain; for neutrality of context to wrestle with problems, for soothing colours and sounds to alleviate weariness; for a change of scene to give a new perspective; for a situation which relaxes by demanding nothing. In identifying being in landscape as a kind of emotional mirror that offers a supportive reflection, we are not in danger of tumbling headlong into the bog of pathetic fallacy. There is no truer instinct than to respond to the fundamental connection between us and nature – the condition of being alive.

We’re not being taken out of ourselves, not operating as observer, admirer or physical activist, but participating in the greatest whole that exists. Nature is not an external entity. By placing our individual happiness, misery, grief and irresolution into a wider context, we are plugging into shared roots and deriving relief, succour or repose from universal energy. Our private energies are recharged by this merging of life and landscape. The fact is that when the heart is too full for talking to people, places can absorb our positive and negative emotions. Not transference, but osmosis, the flexing of membrane. When ties to other people and our local community fail us, nature offers a different kind of common bond. This one is constant.

Spring in the forest

A good day's work

Rade de Brest

I spent today checking out and writing up a walk for the new volume of Walking in Finistere (out in spring 2016). When I saw the weather forecast, this public holiday was immediately earmarked for a working day in pleasant surroundings. No amount of poring over maps and researching interesting points along the way can guarantee that a walk will turn out to be suitable for the book, and many days of trial and error are to be expected. Good but not good enough on the ground is a common problem. Today I was lucky. Despite one or two tricky points and some short alternatives needing to be mapped for the highest tides, this one is definitely going in the book.
I deliberately chose a peninsula which has no coastal path, and therefore is inevitably far less walked than the many others on offer in Finistere. It also had a merit of a culminating point in the Rade de Brest which is inaccessible by road - indeed the complete absence of cars and mechnical noise was a major advantage of the whole circuit. Apart from a few family walkers in the hamlets, I saw no-one else on the route. It was three and a half hours of blissful peace and spectacular views. I still feel excited about it now, sitting at my desk in the calm of the evening.

Falling in love again

I

I've been in Rennes all week. Little leisure time, but did manage to spend a few minutes gazing at one of my favourite constructions in the world, Les Horizons. It's such a happy building, I have to smile every time I look at it.

And it always smiles back...

Moor thoughts

I returned today after a six month absence to my old haunts on the moors and was instantly overwhelmed by a deluge of familiar sensations. It was as if the first pressure of my foot on the stony track activated a certain pattern of thought, despite the many changes in my life and perceptions in the interim. But is the trigger in the landscape or in me and my own wild, open inner terrain? Do I react so because I am on a moor or because the moor is in me?
I can trace my deep connection with the moor to early journeys over the Brecon Beacons. My poor exiled Welsh parents, miserable in manicured and over-managed Gloucestershire countryside, often made the return to their homelands - Swansea, Mumbles, Gower - with four children in tow. It was part of my father's hopeless quest for identity and part of my own very early passionate attachment to landscape. The passing of the beloved object on the way to another destination has also had its legacy, and later made travel more valued than arrival in almost every aspect of my life.
There was no more to this early love than that the sight of the moors made me happy. To a childish imagination they represented endless, boundless freedom and apparent simplicity. Other landscapes were psychologically more complex to me even then as a small child: the sea with its tides, the endless movements of a river, the uncertainties of woodland, hills lost to the unsettling exploitation of farming. But those long, high rounded slopes, empty of life and difficulty, solid and unchanging, gave me both a powerful sense of permanence and an invitation to endless possibilities, to the open heart and mind that seemed so perplexingly elusive in the constraints and compromises of the everyday world. I came to learn that there was far less isolation and considerably more connection for me in the wilderness of moor than in family life.

Death in the forest

Working on my text about death in the forest this morning, which involved both writing and a long walk to review the relevant sites. Death comes easy and hard in the normal order of forest, with its acceptance and exploitation of the cycle of decay and regeneration in nature and the practice of hunting. But there is also murder and accidental death (or possibly suicide) to consider in my forest. 

Long after the war was over, the bodies of three young men, executed by the Germans, were found on the hillside above the Argent river. They represent the great number who, with all the desperate nonchalance of youth, took action to resist enemy occupation until such bitter ends as a blanket of dirt and leaves on a wooded slope. A stele marks the fate of Pierre Ruelen, Jean Volant and Emile Bérthou. Whenever I hear the explosion of a hunter’s gun echoing through the trees, I think of falling limbs with human faces.

In May 1919, the body of Victor Ségalen was found by his wife among the beech trees on top of a high granite outcrop, once the site of a medieval motte. He was apparently sitting propped against a tree with an open copy of Hamlet, having bled to death from a wound in his heel. This curiously staged scene – and his hurried burial avoiding an autopsy – has led many to think he took own life to put an end to the nervous depression and mysterious physical malady that had taken hold of his life.

Born in Brest in 1878, the profession of medical doctor took Ségalen on journeys that went far beyond the practical fact of travel. It was China that came to shape his remarkable inner life: he conducted archaeological digs there and became a Chinese language specialist, before returning to France. The cultural landscape of his experiences was manifested in poetry and texts (such as Stèles, published in 1914). He was in Huelgoat for his health, ironically, walking daily in the forest with a book and notebook, experiencing the profound sense of containment and aloneness offered by this special place. For a man who lived on the borderlands between reality and imagination, he chose a good place to die.

La Belle Vie

Liz and her work

At the opening last night of my friend Liz Ridgway's fine exhibition in Brest, where a crowd of art-lovers were wowed by her reflective images of women in landscape. Good fun, happy people, promising sales. It's on until March 28th at the Espace Exposition, Saint-Marc.
www.artitudebrest.com             www.lizridgway.artweb.com
Liz's work will feature in my exhibition on landscape at L'Autre Rive in Huelgoat in October.