One would hardly call Brittany mountainous, but its elevations are notable, nevertheless, in that they rise, for the most part, abruptly from the dead level of the ocean. Inland, the topography takes on more of the nature of a rolling moorland, with granite cropping out here and there in the elevations. The following quatrain describes it exactly:
“À MON PAYS
“O ma chère Bretagne,
Que j’aime tes halliers,
Tes verdoyants graniers,
Et ta noire montagne.”
—Corbinais.
The greatest altitudes in Brittany are: The Sillon de Bretagne (near Savenay), eighty-nine metres; La Motte (Montagnes Noires between Quimper and Brest), 289 metres; Menez Hom (Montagnes Noires), 330 metres; Mont St. Michel (Montagne d’Arrée), 391 metres.
The Breton rivers are not great rivers as the waterways of the world go, although they are important indeed to the country which they irrigate. Chief among them are the Vilaine, navigable to Rennes, the Rance, the Odet, the Aulne, and of course the Loire, which flanks the southern boundary of the old province nearly up to its juncture with the Mayenne, and continues its navigable length in Brittany up to, and a trifle beyond, the town of the same name. The Couesnon, flowing northward into the vast Bay of Mont St. Michel, forms the northeastern boundary separating Brittany from Normandy.
The great length of irregular coast-line accounts for the continuation of the generally severe and stern aspect of the interior, the sombre granite cliffs jutting far out into the open, half-enclosing great bays and forming promontories and headlands which are characteristically Breton and nothing else. They might resemble those of the Greek mainland and archipelago were they but environed with the life and languor of the South, but, as it is, they are Breton through and through, and their people have all their hopes and sympathies wrapped up in the occupations of a colder clime.
The old territorial limits of the Province of Brittany embraced a small tract south of the Loire, known as Le Rais, or the Retz country.
Here is Clisson, the feudal castle and estate so constantly recurring in French history. Pornic, Paimbœuf, and the Lac de Grande Lieu also lie southward of the Loire in this old appanage, but, in the main, Breton history was played on the Armorican peninsula north of the Loire.
The height of the tides on the Breton coast varies considerably. All this is caused by the flow of the North Sea and the Straits of Calais meeting the current coming directly from the Atlantic, so that in some instances the flood-tide rises to a height of from fifty to sixty feet above “dead water,” as the French call it.