Pontivy is distinctly Breton in every aspect; its manners, customs, and above all its costumes. Decidedly one’s itinerary in Brittany should be made to include it.
Rostrenen is a delightful old town banked high upon a hillside some six hundred feet above the valley. The old-time collegiate church is a thirteenth-century foundation, which, though restored in our day, has all the loveliness of the era of its foundation well preserved.
Like the church at Josselin it is called Our Lady of the Blackberry-bush, from a miraculous Virgin found beneath a blackberry-bush. The great day of pilgrimage to this shrine is the fifteenth of August.
Carhaix is a little Breton town now all but shorn of its former importance, though its breed of cattle is prized above all others in Brittany,—as if that were enough to keep its memory alive. Anciently Carhaix was the capital of the Vorganium, whose peoples took an active part in the wars against Cæsar. Seven Roman ways centred here, and there are yet to be seen the remains of an ancient Roman aqueduct.
Vorganium ultimately lost its rank, and was made a part of the realm of Cornouaille founded by King Grollo, who gave Carhaix its present name—then Ker-Ahès.
Carhaix is the birthplace of La Tour d’Auvergne, “the first Grenadier of France.” His career was almost legendary, and after his famous infernal column which went up against the Spaniards in the Pyrenees, he retired to the city of his birth, and took up the study of the Celtic tongue. In 1796, when the Terror broke out, at the age of fifty-two, he took the haversack and cartridge-box of a simple soldier, to replace the son of an old friend who had been drawn by conscription. He would never advance a single grade, but remained in the ranks from this time forward, and was killed at the battle of Oberhausen in Bavaria. His heart is enshrined in the Hôtel des Invalides at Paris, having been brought there and buried with great pomp in 1904.
Carhaix has a real novelty in its horse-market, held before the Church of St. Trémeur. There is nothing actually profane or sacrilegious about this perhaps; but yet again, perhaps there is. Certainly it is incongruous to see a long string of horses tethered to the very church door-knob itself, with the breeders seated back against the church wall smoking tobacco and eating and drinking.
Huelgoat is in the very heart of Finistère. It is as typical in the manners and customs of these parts as is Pont l’Abbé in Cornouaille or Auray in Morbihan. It has one of the finest sites given to a town in all Brittany, and abounds in quaintness and beauty.
There are various ecclesiastical monuments and religious shrines in and near the town, of which the guide-books tell, and all are well worth visiting.
The market-place of Huelgoat does not differ greatly from other market-places in Brittany. The costumes are brilliant in magpie colours,—if white coifs flashing in the sunlight can be said to make colour,—and the little life and the little affairs of the peasant people scintillate and fluctuate from day to day as if they were the most serious and momentous things in all the world.