Perigord and pinxtos: A peregrino wander through rural France

We found a quaint town to stop for coffee at Villedieu-des-poeles which seemed devoted to copper and pewter pots only. There was copper in every window. Villedieu was a gift from the King to the Knights Hospitaller some six hundred years earlier so they were the ones who imported copper making skills from the Middle East and set up business in town, making it famous for its metal products, even today.

At Dol-de-Bretagne, on a Saturday, a fabulous market stretched down the longest street for us to explore. We bought chunky home made pate, farm cheese with bite, and a fat long baguette from an artisan boulanger, then drove out to Point du Grouin, looking over the Gulf of Saint Malo, to eat it all. This area of natural beauty is a walker’s paradise: wild, heather-covered, with picture perfect views of the gulf and walker groups were out in force.

At Rotheneuf, we visited a huge area of rock face with individual and massed sculptures carved into the granite sea cliff over a contemplative period of twenty five years by a quiet old hermit, Abbe Foure. He chose to tell the tale, in stone, of a piratical legendary local family, the Rotheneufs, who despotically ruled the coast here in the 16th century. Wonderful to see the faces and figures before it all erodes and is covered by the sea.

Stopping at the elegant old city of Saint Malo we walked the stone ramparts overlooking the Gulf and visited a couple of excellent modern art exhibitions displayed in the brilliantly renovated keeps and towers. We love the atmosphere of Saint Malo and come again and again.

We camped at Jugon Les Lacs, a great summer place, and walked the lake in the evening to birdsong– small twittering robins chattering late at night, and again, early in the morning.

On to Pontivy, a tiny little town that Napoleon called Napoleonville, where we mapped the narrow streets of the old town and drank tea in a toile and shabby-chic tea room draped in a blue fringed fabric canopy over our heads.

Locronan is where St Ronan, on a mission from Irish shores in the 6th century, came to serve at a time when Europe was drifting into the Dark Ages. Ronan was a bit of a hermit as well as a miracle worker, and around him and his miracles, grew this perfect little village. After Anne of Bretagne (who ruled what once was an independent duchy of Brittany until it became part of France, in 1523) made her pilgrimage there to pray to St Ronan, faithful pilgrims flocked to Locronan, thereafter.

Locronan has stayed much as it ever was. A couple of decades ago, Roman Polanski shot his exquisite film, Tess, here. Even then, he felt the need to update the setting for the era in which Hardy wrote the tale. Today the village is still ancient: it is still perfect. Down the Rue Moal we walked to an a crusted musty chapel: Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle–which, despite its name, is frozen perfectly in time, and is likely not much different from when medieval pilgrims visited using the church as a way point on their long crusade.

Lunch was at Pointe de Van on the coast. We have this penchant, at lunchtime, for taking our fresh stick of hot crusty French bread wrapped in hand-paper along with our bought, but home made, cheese and pate. or other market fare, to the nearest viewing point, and this time, Pointe de Van was it. Again, incomparable sea views and calorie-burning walks along well worn tracks similar to the Great Ocean Road outside of Melbourne, were the order of the day. Just gorgeous.

From here we tracked the dead Druids who were sent across to the Ile de Seine, a small island off the coast from where we had lunch, where legend has it that the Devil used his cloven hoofs to melt the causeway of ice for their crossing. Bretagne is thick with myths and legends and we are learning as many as we can as fast as we can.

We tried to catch the Musee des Beaux-arts in Quimper (cam-pear) before closing time, but were too late and as it wasn’t opened on a Tuesday, our next day, to compensate for missing out on the much longed for Gaugin exhibition, we headed off to Pont Aven, where Gaugin spent many a summer--and fell totally in love. We could live here.

Pont Aven is where Gaugin stayed when he did his beautiful Bretonne pieces. Every scene of every dancing Bretonne child, or heavily starched-hatted Bretonne Madonna was done by Gaugin while he was walking and painting here. We walked the town in his footsteps.

I have this love-hate passion for Gaugin. I hate that he left Van Gogh so hurriedly in his specially decorated sunflower room in Auvers. I hate that after he left, Van Gogh became so tormented and in such a fit of despair that he felt impelled to cut off his ear. Such sadness I have for the tragic genius of Van Gogh. But I am beguiled by Gaugin’s colour. I love his energy, his sexiness, his in-your-face boldness, and, next to Van Gogh, he is possibly my favourite painter on the planet.

There are modern art galleries in just about every shop there now and I could have bought something from all of them, tho’ lesser mortals than Gaugin and Van Gogh they clearly are. There was an extraordinary river too, with amazing working water wheels and bridges over which Gaugin walked, mused, and pondered his art and his life; and, oddly, at the side of one bridge is a brilliantly tiled toilette, and in the main Place yet another surprise street market where we bought lunch and dinner that day. More white asparagus. Had we died in Pont Aven we might have suspected we had been whipped off to heaven. It ached to leave there.

On to Carnac and Locmariaquer, and a bit of a time travel into pre-history. Here, the ancient architects of religion, or design (who knows?) lugged giant menhirs into perfect symmetry in precise stylish aligned rows for over 4 kilometres of les megalithic arrangement and construction. This took something like a million days of hard slog.

Why in heaven’s name would anyone choose to do that? The task alone, is quite simply, extraordinary. It is so far beyond our ken that we cannot conceive of why it would be so important, so imperative, to have these massive chunks of granite a la Stonehenge be so placed, in so many precise and perfect rows, for so many kilometres.

Will we ever be enlightened? And how is it that we have so lost touch with our ancestors that we can’t even imagine what they were thinking when they chose to begin this task? And at Locmariaquer, whoever was so important a person that they were to be honoured with a funereal stone of some 20 odd tonnes in size, set in place as reliquary? More than even modern machinery methods can comfortably move? We stand in awe, Ancients. But we would love to know.

Le Gorvello! Ahh! Tucked away inland in lovely grape growing country there is this tiny perfect stone village. We stayed a night here at a brilliant ciderie where we did a long lake walk before dinner and found the most astonishing trees which leaked cotton balls and dripped liquid that smelled putrid if you stayed too long. We have no notion of what they were or what caused this but despite this, the walk was lovely.

This was once a port of call for peregrinos of yore who were enroute to Santiago de Compostela. We are broadly following one of the crusader's routes, headed towards Spain and Saint James’s Cathedral in Santiago so we’re always on the lookout for connections to this famed pilgrimage site. Le Gorvello is all gold stone, somewhat like the Cotswolds. The church there was built by the Templars. So old. So touching.

And tucked away behind the church is a well that bought me to tears. The well is where pilgrims, enroute to Santiago carrying their all in leather sacs over their shoulders, pumped water to break their fast. Beside the well, and it is there to this day, is a specially hollowed-out small stone basin, specially made for the pilgrims to wash their utensils before they packed them away again in their satchels. So they would not pollute the well. Such things make me cry! Le Gorvello is engraved in my memory as special.

Rochefort en Terre came next. A pretty village built on terraces, surrounded by schist escarpments. Noblemen lived at the top of the hill and workers at the bottom. We tasted our first buckwheat galette avec fromage, in the Place de Puit here. Bretagne is famous for these. This village had the most amazing lavoir (a la the Ganges River) at the entrance gates (La Porte de l’Etang) of the old salt route, where all the village ladies would gather to do their clothes washing in days long passed.

La Roche Bernard was an unexpected find. We thought the town square very elegant until we discovered that, here, they used to set up a guillotine to kill off their revolutionaries. And embedded in the corner of the Mairie is a cannon which came from a ship, Inflexible, wrecked in a battle in 1759. A little bloodthirsty their history.

La Baule. What a coastal holiday town. Cry Surfer’s Paradise, cry. This is the most elegant stretch of beachfront we have seen in our lives. It has 12 kilometres of unbroken sand, sea and summer holiday set up. It is all white linen, designer labels and unadulterated style. In our sneakers and jeans we would have been conspicuously casual. I doubt Cannes could be so beautiful. We did not stay long.

La Rochelle: No matter how we tried different routes the Gendarmarie blocked most of the Centre Ville access routes to allow a demonstration march to proceed through town. We did, though, persist long enough to find access to the amazing port where, historically, chains were strung between two stone towers to stop ships entering when they were not wanted. And though the historical part of town was constantly blocked to us, the esplanade was brilliant.

Thaire: Thaire’s eglise was boarded shut, its terraces overgrown, only its Bar-Tabac had any life at all. Times have been better for Thaire.

Brouage: Wonderful! (Thank you, Robin for the recommendation!) We spent most of one morning here, walking the ramparts, imagining it as the vibrant salt exporting port it once was. Its construction reminded us both of Pompeii, had it been upstanding still and built with the streets narrower. Brouage is built on a calcerous plate of earth with marshes surrounding it and used to be the major salt exporting port of Europe. It once sat on a sea channel, vying with La Rochelle for export rights, until nature turned against it and it silted up and became almost the inland village that it is today, yet, for all intents and purposes, still looking like a harbour town with the most amazing battlements, bastions and watchtowers. And around it now there are channels and channels of waterways and men bearing fishing nets instead of sails. And, touchingly, we found a salt factory still in operation. Whispers of ages past.

Between Brouage and Saint Jean D’Angely there were entire fields covered in poppies. It is that time of year.

Saint Jean D’Angely is another immaculate pretty little town, once the home of the Dukes of Aquitaine. During the 100 years war it belonged first to the French, then to the English, then to the French. Today, I think the expat Brits have finally taken hold. Their accents could be heard everywhere, and many of the shop signs were in English. Since time began people keep moving and taking their world with them.

Asnieres La Giraud is tucked away in a more rural and remote section of Poitou-Charentes. We stayed a night in an old abbey complex, here, which is now a very prosperous father and son cognac and pineau production place, where we were invited to a cognac-tasting that ended with us sleeping very well.

Saintes: We spent an entire morning in Saintes, and didn’t want to leave (brilliant suggestions, again, Robin!). Saintes was where Dr Guillotine, who invented the guillotine, was born. This amused Miss Bec. Right in front of the ancient cathedral we found a Saturday morning market, probably the best we’ve yet found. So many oysters, such perfect rows of fruit and vegetables and brioche to kill for: oven-browned hot stew-filled brioche. The long elegant main street of Saintes has perfectly trimmed trees bordering it, all so very beautiful and picturesque, they probably contribute to the traffic jams the town is now memorable for.

Oradour-sur-Glane was one of our tear jerkers in this part of France. It is the village in the Haut Vienne where departing SS troops fired on, and killed, 642 villagers on a vicious June day, at the very end of the war, in 1944. They then torched the bodies and the entire village. Today it stands in its horrific charred state as testament still. Like Port Arthur, this is a place people come in memoriam, but, even so, find it extraordinarily difficult to bear.

Tonight, tucked away in a remote and wrenchingly beautiful part of the Haut Vienne on a tiny Auberge that produces canard gras, but also has day-old baby lambs which are just now being shunted off to an indoor barn for the night, we are sitting on an escarpment with astonishing views over yet unexplored remnants of a medieval castle with big ruined round keeps sprouting small green trees--and a heavily treed mountain farm over to our west. Drinking merlot. With pork steaks from the local charcuterie down the hill caramelizing on the gas.