Rambles in Brittany

by M. F. Mansfield

Chateaulin, situated on the river Aulne, a little beyond the head of the peninsula, is the metropolis of these parts. It owes its name to an ancient hermitage of St. Idunet. Its present name grew from Nin or Castel Nin, then Castelin, and finally Chateaulin. The hermitage, in time, was succeeded by the priory of Locquidunet, and that in its turn became the parish church of the present town.

Hoël, Count of Cornouaille, who became Duke of Brittany, incorporated the town with the ducal domain, from which time on its history was one of partisan strife.

The Revolution elevated it to the rank of a market-town, and changed its name to “Cité sur Aulne” in an attempt to suppress the supposedly aristocratic prefix of Château. Ultimately, it reverted to its former name.

Near by are the Black Mountains, of which Mené Hom is the chief eminence, its summit rising to a height of 330 metres, with other peaks at the height of 299, 272, and 248 metres. The heights are not so very considerable, but their proximity to the sea exaggerates them, and travellers by road—bicycle riders and travellers in motor-cars—will think the process of crossing the Black Mountains, on the way from North to South Finistère, as formidable as the task of Hannibal.

Crozon is a much larger place than Chateaulin, isolated though it is from all direct communication with other parts. It is situated some 250 feet above the sea, on what the French call a wild table-land, and dominates the Bay of Douarnenez from the north. All around Crozon are innumerable grottoes and rock-cut caves and excavations, which always have a certain fascination for some folk, but will hardly interest the devotee to the beauties of landscape.

Camaret, at the very tip of the peninsula, is another safe port for artists. Here are fishing-boats and all the accessories, like those seen at Douarnenez and Concarneau, and with a landscape background and a foreground of blue water that many whose names are great in the world of art have painted and many more will paint. Cottets’s “Fishing-boats at Camaret,” in the Luxembourg Gallery, is perhaps the best known of these pictures, but the composition is always the same. The background never changes,—the tiny chapel with its dwindling spire, the beacon, and the tall, gaunt stone house on the little mole running seaward and protecting the port, group themselves willingly enough into the most charming view in all the town.

The fishing-boats of the foreground change their positions, but kaleidoscopically only, and one may return year after year and see practically the same groupings, with only trifling differences.

One makes his way from Camaret to the great military port and trading town of Brest—if one need to go there at all, which is doubtful—either by boat across the Goulet and the roads of Brest, some sixteen kilometres by a puffy little excursion-boat, which, on a Sunday or a feast-day, is anything but comfortable, or by road by way of Faou, which is a great fruit and vegetable market for Brest, and not much more.

There is a considerable display of costume here on market-days,—which appear to be every day,—and the town is picturesque enough of itself, though, strange to say, it smacks of suburbia,—a place where one gets his news second-hand from some neighbouring city.