Returning to the mainland, a call at Locmariaquer is inevitable, if one be a true and genuine traveller, even if it be “out of the world,” which virtually it is, being at the tip end of another peninsula like that of Quiberon.
The town itself owns to fifteen hundred or more souls, and all of them look prosperous and contented. Where all of them get their livelihood, it is difficult to see, for there is not much intercourse with the outside world.
Locmariaquer has not even a railway, as Quiberon has, but lies twenty kilometres or so south of Auray, almost at the mouth of Morbihan Bay. The church of Locmariaquer is a fine twelfth-century work, but the foundation of the little town lies much farther back in antiquity than this. It was the ancient Doriorigum of the Romans.
The Chapel of St. Michel is built up from the Roman remains of a structure known as er c’hastel.
The great celebrities of Locmariaquer are, however, those members of the great family of menhirs, dolmens, and cromlechs with which this part of Morbihan is so thickly strewn. The chief of these are the dolmen known as Mané-Lud, Mountain of Ashes, of vast dimensions and having a grotto beneath it. Not far off is a tumulus and another dolmen known as Dol-er-Groh, an enormous stone table or altar. Another is known as Mané-er-H’roeck, the stone of the fairies; it is quite seventy feet long, or was, for it now lies full length on the ground broken into four pieces. The finest and best preserved of all is the Dol-ar-Marc’hadouiren, the Merchants’ Table. It is hard to see just the significance of the name given to these three huge stones, but they form a wonderfully impressive monument of days gone by, nevertheless.
The most beautiful dolmen known, whatever that description may really mean (the local renter of boats calls it such: “le plus beau dolmen connu”), can be visited only by boat. It is on an island in the gulf, and is known as the Gavr’inis.
La Trinité, “a little village on the very edge of the sea”! This is a description which exactly fits what the natives and the railway powers like to think is a watering-place. It is something like one, to be sure, but the influx of strangers during the summer months has never been so great as to obliterate or even to deaden the local colour. Its little harbour is lively with fishing-boats, and occasionally gay, when the boats are “dressed” for some great festival, but nothing of blatant bands and riotous crowds mars the quietness and sweetness of La Trinité, and accordingly it is a place to be remembered.
Sometimes the sterility of the soil round about causes real distress among the small farming peasants; “one cannot live on fish alone,” they say.
There is a local benefactress who, when crops are poor and meagre, gives the whole of her own harvest gathered from an unusually ample holding to her more distressed neighbours. This is a true and practical charity that does not smack of smugness or pretence as do many acts questionably classed under that head. It is a singularly expressive exemplification of what the French know as “good socialism,” and one hears much of it at La Trinité and in its neighbourhood.
Taking to the road again, on the way to Auray, one passes another of those curious granitic formations. This time it comes down more near our own day, and is called the “St. Tiviro’s hat.” It does not look the least like the saint’s hat, any more than the “devil’s seats” and the “old men of the mountains,” scattered about the world, look like what they are called—but let that pass. Legend connects this rock with a certain St. Tiviro, who one day lost his hat, which ultimately turned to stone. It does not seem plausible, and it is a pointless story indeed, but it gives a small child the opportunity to point it out for a penny, which most folk will not grudge.