Château de Josselin
In the court within the walls is an ancient well surrounded by an elaborate forged iron railing.
One takes the road again, by the way of Locminé and Baud, for Auray, the most dainty and charming of all Breton market-towns, passing through a delightfully picturesque country of rolling hills and deep valleys and fir forests, studded here and there with lakelets.
Locminé, which derives its name from Locmenec’h (monk’s cell), was the site of a monastery founded in the sixth century by St. Colomban. It was burned by the Normans in the ninth century, after the pleasant custom of these invaders, and reëstablished in 1006 by Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, as a priory attached to the Abbey of St. Gildas of Rhuis.
In the present church of Locminé is a chapel dedicated to St. Colomban, containing a painting representing scenes from the life of the saint; others are carried out in the coloured glass of the windows.
One reads the following,—a supplication on behalf of the dangerous madmen who at one time occupied two cells beneath the pavement:
“St. Colomban, patron of Locminé, pray for us!
St. Colomban, help of idiots, pray for us!”
Behind the church is an elaborate ossuary dating from Renaissance times, when these adjuncts to burial-grounds were so plentifully scattered over Brittany.
Baud has an enormous parish church of the time of Louis XIV., with a fine Gothic arcade and a great crucifix standing beside the outer wall. Aside from this, there is not much else here to attract one, unless he be a pilgrim affected with disease of the eye. If he be, and if he bathe in the “Fontaine de la clarté,” and the fates be propitious, and he be not too far gone otherwise, and everything else be as it should, he will be cured forthwith—perhaps.