The Church of Our Lady of Croaz-Baz, with its fine domed tower dating from 1550, is one of the chief ecclesiastical monuments of Brittany.
Roscoff
Among the many quaint and curious houses of the town is one known as the house of Mary Stuart. In its interior court are seven arcades supported by columns, quite like a convent cloister, a disposition of parts which must be purely local, as other examples are to be seen elsewhere in the town. Another memory of the Scottish queen, whose last, long, sad adieu to France is one of the links that never breaks, is the Chapel of St. Ninian, built in 1548 as a souvenir of her landing when she first came to France as the betrothed of the Dauphin. It is a most romantically disposed structure, though with no architectural details of worth except a small turret at an angle jutting over the lapping waves.
Roscoff has a Chapel des Adieux, where the wives and mothers of the fishermen go to pray as the men embark for the fishing.
Offshore, a quarter-hour distant by boat, is the Isle of Batz, separated from Roscoff only by a narrow strait, with a current so swift that the passage is only possible in the best of weather. It does not look so very perilous an undertaking at other times, but the Roscoff sailorman certainly does know how to handle a boat, and when he says “No,” it’s best not to attempt to persuade him to the contrary. He will not mind a wetting himself,—if you pay him a fair price for the undertaking,—but he will probably want, and be entitled to, a good, fat fee for rescuing his passenger from drowning.
The Isle of Batz, like most places in Brittany, has its own legend. It is to the effect that St. Pol, coming in 530 from Britain to this low, gray, melancholy islet, met a dragon, which, having ravaged the neighbouring mainland country, had fled hither in order to escape the fury of the peasant-folk.