Lighthouse of Créac’h, Ouessant
Ploudalmézeau is an important town of Lower Léon with a Hôtel Bretagne—as might be expected—also most excellent—also as might be expected—except for its sanitary conveniences, which, to say nothing of not being up to date, are practically non-existent. It is very disconcerting of a rainy autumn morning to have to go down to the back yard puits—as a pump or well is variously known—in order to perform one’s ablutions.
The comparatively modern church is far more magnificent than one would expect to find in so small a town. It contains a curious statue of the Virgin with a Breton coif, and also a fine modern fresco by Yan d’Argent. A thirteenth-century sculptured cross is to be seen in the churchyard.
Folgoët has an important local fair, and is celebrated throughout all Brittany for the pilgrimage to its magnificent shrine of Our Lady of Folgoët, one of the most beautiful ecclesiastical monuments of the province.
Toward the middle of the fourteenth century there lived in the neighbouring forest a poor idiot named Salaun, better known as the forest fool; in Breton, Folgoët. After his death, there appeared written on the leaves of a great white lily, in letters of gold, the admonition to the people to build a great church here to the glory of Our Lady, and this was begun in 1409, and consecrated in 1419; it became a collegiate church in 1423. It has neither transepts nor apse, but is in every other particular a remarkably beautiful work. There are many interior furnishings of great value.
Folgoët is at its best on the great day of the pardon, on the eighth of September.
St. Pol de Léon, Roscoff, and Morlaix call the hurried tourist off to the northward, though why a tourist ever should be hurried is something the true vagabond never can understand.
Roscoff has much to endear it to any one. It has not the loneliness or even the quaintness of some of the daintily set seacoast towns of the South, but its unique attractions are so many and varied that one loves it for itself alone, quite as much as if it were a celebrated artists’ sketching-ground, and far more than one would were it a really “popular” resort.
First of all, it is celebrated for its early vegetables, due principally to the excellence of its soil, and secondly to the mildness of its climate.
Because of its temperate climate, Roscoff might be called the Mentone of the North, though it is not yet overrun by invalids and bath-chairs. Summer and winter, it is a watering-place, with fir-trees replacing the palms of the South. The visitor should remark the enormous fig-tree in the Capuchins’ enclosure, the grounds of an ancient convent (1621), which is now private property, and costs the sum of twenty-five centimes to see.