Within an easy stroll from Auray is the Chapel de Ste. Avoye. Here, according to legend, the Saint, who is the same as the Cornish S. Ewe, arrived in a stone boat from Britain. The chapel is surrounded by a few farmhouses and trees. It is a renaissance structure. The W. tower consists of only three sides, two bold buttresses carried up a great height, with a back, sustaining a pent-house roof, which in turn supports a spirelet of slate. The arrangement is probably unique. There was a porch below, but it has fallen. The tracery has been removed from the windows, and some good stained glass sold. Within is a fine but late screen with the twelve apostles on one side and cardinal virtues and other allegorical figures on the other. In the nave is a piece of the so-called "boat of S. Avoye," in which she is supposed to have come over. Actually it is, probably, a large grinder for corn polished within. On it are cut three symbols, one a cross, one like a T, and the third like I. Children that are delicate are placed in the "Boat" to recover strength. Over the altar is a painting representing S. Avoye in prison fed by the B. V. Mary. There are two Pardons, the principal on the 1st S. in May, the second on the 3rd S. in September. Outside the chapel are stone benches along the wall. In Breton the Saint is Santez Avé.
Ste. Anne d'Auray is a great pilgrimage resort, with a pretentious modern church in nondescript style intended for renaissance, 1866-75, with bad glass. In 1623 a peasant dug up an image, probably of one of the Deæ Matres of Gallo-Roman times, so common in Brittany, at a place called Ker-anna. He jumped to the conclusion that it represented the mother of the B. Virgin. The Carmelites heard of it and resolved on making capital out of it; they ran it with great success and built a convent and church on the spot in 1645. The statue was destroyed in 1790, but the cult continues unabated. The Pardon is on the Sunday after July 26, and attracts vast crowds. In front of the church is a Santa Scala copied from that at Rome, and indulgenced with nine years for every step ascended by pilgrims on their knees. A large tank receives the miraculous spring of S. Anne, and is dominated by her statue. The pilgrims sing lustily the cantique of Ste. Anne d'Auray to this air:—
There is here a statue of the Duc de Chambord (1891) in bronze, flanked by those of Bayard, Du Guesclin, Ste. Geneviève, and Joan of Arc.
STE. ANNE D'AURAY
The Chartreuse near the Auray railway station is now a deaf and dumb asylum. It occupies the site of the battle in which, in 1364, Jean de Monfort defeated and killed Charles de Blois. He founded the monastery, but only a small portion of the old structure remains. Here is the chapel, on the N. side of the church, in which rest the bodies of the royalists who had been landed from English transports at Quiberon, and whom Hoche and his republican soldiers shot down in cold blood to the number of 952 between 1st and 25th August 1795. The butchery took place not far from the Chartreuse, and the bodies were buried on the spot since called le Champ des Martyrs. In 1814 they were transferred to this chapel erected to contain them. It was completed in 1829. In the midst of the chapel is the mausoleum of white marble.
The chapelle expiatoire is situated at a quarter of an hour's walk from the Chartreuse and is in the Greek style, and is on the site of the massacre. Near by is a cross commemorative of Montfort's victory over Charles de Blois.
Plougoumelin. The parish church modern and bad. The Chapel of N.D. de Becquerel has a fine west porch of the Breton commingling of flamboyant and renaissance. An unfailing spring issues from under the wall of the apse. The water is thought to cure diseases of the mouth. Several lechs are in the parish. One called the Pierre du Serment is about 4 ft. 6 in. long, is in the churchyard and lies prostrate. Another is between the parsonage and the cemetery, and a third, round, with three hollows sunk in it, is at the presbytère. A tumulus by the river of Auray at Le Rocher covers an allée couverte. There are six others, smaller, in a line with it running from S.W. to N.E. They have yielded copper vessels and flint weapons, and belong to the intermediate age, before alloy was introduced for the formation of bronze.