Stone buildings in Brittany

On my third annual visit to Brittany, where I’ve always admired the stonework, I’ve noticed a feature for the first time, though it turns out to be common. The front wall of many houses is finished with a course of dressed stone that curves up and out to form a ledge. This then supports the bottom row of slates, creating an overhang that stops rainwater running down the wall.

This stone is granite and I wonder about its working in the days before powered machinery. How many hours labour did one of those curved stones represent? Or the stones with dressed surfaces in churches? And what tools were tough enough to shape granite? Was iron harder than granite and able to split it, chip it or grind it?

I know nothing about this and will look for a book that tells it all. It’s one aspect of that huge deficiency in all our educations in Britain: there’s no subject about the made world, how humanity has got from piling loose stones and using what lay around to mining, smelting, forging, baking: pottery, metallurgy, chemical technologies with ceramic and metal, etc etc. We get physics and chemistry if we’re lucky but not technology (in its basic sense of how materials are worked to make things).

Gateposts in Brittany

(More pics that I thought were lost.)

Architects use the term 'characters' for building elements that have an individual presence and are experienced as entities in themselves as well as for the part in the building as a whole. The gateposts of farms in Brittany are plausibly regarded as characters; you almost feel you should shake hands with them as you enter.

Partly it's their obvious human form: upright, freestanding, with distinguishable body and head (or at least separate top components; it doesn't do to push the analogy to the point of saying it's the ball or the entire upper thing that's the head. One could argue, equally, that the whole top is a body and a head, and the main column below just a plinth). Gateposts, I suppose, are columns, which on Greek temples had been sculptures and before that, in one theory, actual captives. (I've been meaning for years to read -- or at least look at -- Joseph Rykwert's classic, The Dancing Column.)

As they stand there confident in their unmistakeable form they seem to have a secret. They read as enigmas, as signs of something. They know something we don't. (Some gateposts in a London park in a photograph in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory give me the same feeling.)

Irrespective on any heraldic significance the motifs may have (rope, ball), the number and configuration of the layers of the complex top clearly conform to some model of propriety. There would be a right way of doing it. Behind the shaping of the gatepost is some social order that knows what it's doing.

Clothing and hair styles in modern urban subcultures have the same effect. In the '60s Mod the width and shape of lapels, the length of hair on the neck, the size of the tie knot, the presence or absence of a shirt pocket collectively struck one as having a meaning: they were manifestations of some secret of life to which I had no access. Hence the confident self-sufficiency of his bearing.

The gateposts, by the way, are often double like this in Brittany. The gap between the pair of posts was obviously for people to walk through when the gate (now long gone -- these aren't working farms any more) was closed, but we never found out what that strange sill was for that you see in the top photo. It wouldn't keep cattle out or dogs or foxes or rats. Snakes, perhaps, adders being a problem in those parts?

Topographical universals

People must have written about this but I can't think of any examples, though Gaston Bachelard would be a likely person.

I'm aware that for me there are topographical universals, recurrent environmental or landscape conditions that have perennial phenomenological significance. They are recurrent themes that I feel I recognise in the specifics of particular locations and views. The most poetic incorporate hills.

One such universal would be approaching the top of a rise over which the roofs of houses can be seen. (That's the Breton flag.)


Another is entering a village:

-- in this case Plogoff, Brittany.

Another is leaving it (the same way):


The distant view is towards Audierne.

(Some pics that I thought iPhoto had irretrievably destroyed have turned up in another neck of my virtual woods - hence this posting.)

To resume

Now, what was I saying? I've been in Brittany for a month, no internet except occasional sessions with coffee in Bar le Roulis, Esquibien, facing the ocean, the ferry pulling out to Ile de Sein, the vast empty beach with greater black back gulls, hikers on the coast path…

Just in case you find that my ideas have radically changed over that interval, you might need to know about my reading:

Richard Bronk, The Romantic Economist
Muriel Spark, The Abbess of Crewe (hilarious)
Tommy Steele, Bermondsey Boy
Amos Oz, A Song of Love and Darkness
Alan First, Night Soldiers (spies, 1930s, Le Carré-like, good book for long car ferry journeys)
Douglas Dunn, Selected Poems
Seth, George Sprott 1894-1975, a picture novella – big lovely present, thick card covers, 36 x 30 cm
Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, another memoir (like Steele)
For my French, a policier by Joseph Bialot – good for idiomatic dialogue, though I rapidly tire of crime fiction and haven’t bothered to finish it.

I won’t list the ones I took but didn’t read. I might have if it had rained a lot but the weather was either hot and lovely, too hot or just nice and great for walking the coast path, with occasional showers, mainly at night. The Finistere type of landscape is called la lande, translated ‘moor’: gorse, bracken, bramble, broom, heather, honeysuckle, ivy, with deer, rabbits, hawks, meadow pipits and swallows. My ideal house would have swallows to sharpen my sense of the onset of spring and winter because they are wonderful birds to watch.

The books that most unexpectedly impressed me was Tommy Steele’s autobiography. I read it because my research into the history of Walworth or Mina Road School relates to Bermondsey and Southwark at the time Tommy was living there. Bermondsey Boy was well written, funny, interesting and moving – I ended up liking and respecting the guy: he’s decent, talented in pursuits outside show business, intelligent – and literate because he missed a lot of (sec mod) school through illnesses and instead read because there was nothing else to do in hospital, indiscriminately and voraciously, almost like Amos Oz as a kid. Kenneth Allsop in The Angry Decade (1958) thought Tommy Steele was a healthy development after the charts had been dominated by American singers.

Might write more about one or two of the books now I'm back in business and things are quieter, it being late July.

Now I've got all my photos to go through and all those taken by the people who were with me and have posted them on PhotoBox.

Pavements in Plogoff

Here’s a large village in Brittany with, running through it, the main road (not very busy) to the Land’s End of Finistère, Pointe du Raz. The commune was working on the layout of roadway, pavement, kerb, crossings, gutter, parking, and I liked what they were doing. In fact, most of it was finished and the masons were building the short, low, free-standing walls I've mentioned before (post of 28.7.08) that provide a support and anchor for flowering plants, prevent parking, separate pedestrians from traffic and look nice. (Click to enlarge.)

To the right of the wall at the front you see the new strip which will be the edge of the pavement. It’s very slightly raised above the level of the roadway but is distinguished from it by its different colour and texture, which makes the street seem wider.

That’s how crossings are done too:

Notice none of the garish yellow lines, or white equivalents, let alone the double ones, that disfigure English towns and villages as if it goes without saying that the aesthetics of the place can be casually sacrificed to the control of parking.

On country roads most you get an unobtrusive broken white line: you don’t park on the roadway side of the line, though you can on the other side if there’s room. This is on the road into Plogoff:

If they want to prevent parking on the pavement, they use walls if there is room or a blue metal barrier or blue posts:

In fact I never discovered the rules for parking. I got the impression that not much enforcement is needed, or they don’t fuss too much about it: those cars on the road on the right may be out of order. It seems the French, at least in these parts, aren’t prepared to ruin the place with lines and signs: the markings were understated and people were expected to be sensible and responsible. Which mostly they were.

I even liked the gutters. (The opposite pavement clearly hasn’t been redone.)

Windmills in Brittany

My inner jury’s out on the aesthetics of windmills in landscapes. France is the place to see them, where they’re called Eoliennes, after Aeolus, the God of the Winds.

I suspect their impact depends more on the state of the sky than that of the land.

If the scene is a bit boring and not pretty, windmills are a definite enhancement.

Up closer, I love their size. Aptly, a friend commented that they recall Triffids -- but he may have meant those other tripod-like creatures in some other John Christopher novel.

In France’s Cornwall

I've been on holiday for a whole month in a single place, a rented house in Finistère, Brittany, in a region actually called Cornouaille.

For part of the time I was on my own, for part people came and stayed and it worked well. I took my laptop and a writing task, on the principle that it’s no good going somewhere just to visit; you need to be there with something engrossing to do, and get to know the place just incidentally, by virtue of being there, when not working. Next year I'll take that principle more seriously: I'll really tell myself I'm working away from home, with the delights of the place there as a refreshing change for in between times.

A month somewhere is long enough to begin to feel you’re living there. It was long enough to watch an improvement job on the village street almost from start to finish, including the commune masons building low dry-stone walls for utility (to deny parking) and aesthetics (some retained flower beds; all would eventually have flowers like fuschias climbing over them; and they were beautiful things in themselves).

(I might do a separate blog on how they do pavements.)

I started to recognise the same cheese stall on markets in different towns, to meet the man with the dog on the green at the top of the hill several times

to get to talk (as my feeble French allowed) to the man who’d built his house in the next hamlet and was busy making a wall (the local speciality) for his garden. It turned out he was the same age as me, though his life had been rather different: born in the tiny house next door, he’d worn clogs and his grandmother had talked to him in Breton; then he’d been in the navy till he retired. He showed me round. There was one spacious downstairs room with a kitchen separated by a bar where he could sit ‘pour regarder ma femme pendant qu’elle fait la vaiselle’.

Finistère seems as if it’s largely gone back to nature: bracken, gorse, thorn-bushes, broom, ivy, honeysuckle, willow; rabbits, deer. Much of it may always have been that way. They call the terrain les landes which is translated ‘moors’; but moors for me are upland stretches, which these weren’t; coastal, rather, and not a particular higher type of zone but the whole cape.
There’s a coastal path (sentier côtiale) very like Pembrokeshire’s but less frequented and more colourful (heather, broom and lots more) with bird life that wasn’t familiar to me: yellowhammers and choughs, I thought I saw. Ten minutes drive away was a handsome estuary town, Audierne, still a serious fishing port, with old 3-4-storey houses along the quayside.

Ten minutes walk away was Plogoff, a large village that is the centre of the commune; and everywhere, where most of the population must once have lived from the land and fishing, there were hamlets connected by footpaths that were almost roads, wide enough to admit mowers and hedge-trimmers and clearly maintained by the assiduous Plogoff commune (which also provides summer jobs, e.g. as car park attendants, for all young people of 15 and over who want them in the school holiday). These paths provided endless scope for wandering, and each hamlet arrived at offered a fresh combination of stone buildings, blue shutters and a profusion of flowers. Viewed from a distance from high points, the houses were so loosely clustered into settlements than they looked more like scattered crofts in the Hebrides than organised hamlets.

Wandering up every day to the disused sailors’ chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Voyage, whose 19-year-old summer warden, Gleran (a Breton name, like that of his brother, Gwen) again on a commune work scheme, told me about getting the results of his bac and how les jeunes know at any time where all four of the cape’s gendarmes are; and then along the path through the bracken and gorse down to to join the coast path along the top of the cliffs was a restful daily routine. I found myself paying more attention to rocks, plants and birds and also to the music on my iPod, and in the third week when I drove to the département capital of Quimper the art I saw there--the cathedral and its glass, the Pont Aven School and other Breton paintings, had a more than usual impact on me, as if I'd built up a thirst.

I wish I'd taken more photographs. I was put off by looking at my early ones on the laptop, which gave me the impression they were no good. Now I look at them on my 21” monitor back home some don’t look so bad.

I'd like to have been on the internet, not for email--no way--but for looking things up (e.g. birdsong) and for the British news. And next time I'll take a radio that can get Radio 4 long wave. (I did not develop a taste for French broadcasting, even when I could understand it; or for their pop music.)