After the by now obligatory stop at a Super U on our way south, and with a fresh stash of Beurre Bretonne crisps in the cab, we enjoyed a pleasant drive heading south, stopping at a lovely lakeside Aire at Plouighnou to stretch our legs…
and then, without a single yellow ‘route barée’ sign in sight, we made good progress on the fairly brief onward drive to Carnoët, the largest town near the Valley of the Saints sculpture park Mrs B had spotted earlier in the trip as we compiled our collection of places we’d like to visit in Breizh.
Situated on land that comprises an historical monument, a listed chapel, a feudal motte – and the sculpture park itself, our visit promised to be action packed! Since 2009 sculptors from across the world have spent time here slowly crafting (we are talking taking a chainsaw to granite here…) images that represent (in a wide variety of ways!) the early Breton saints that came to France largely from Wales and Ireland in the middle ages. Averaging 4m in height, the intention is to create, over time, up to 1000 sculptures on this theme. There were about a couple of hundred there when we visited and we could have spent much longer than we did exploring them. The site is fabulously atmospheric.
This is the construction area...
The saints in situ...
The motte...
Two saints for the price of one...
Mrs B's famous headache cure...
No saint - either of them...
The ancient church...
Time to go...
As darkness was not far over the horizon, we headed back to Evie and plotted our route to an Aire that Mrs B had spotted on P4N not far away in the countryside. It is possible to stay overnight in the car park for the sculpture park as it’s included in the fee and in true French style, there were segregated bays for camping cars, but, as they were almost all sloping and the spaces were pretty close to one another, it took very little effort for us to head off to what looked like a much more relaxed option!
Indeed, as we arrived into the small hamlet of Plourac’h, and we pulled into a large open square opposite the busy Marie, there were no other vans in sight and we had the place to ourselves!
Until that is, a lovely old French camping car pulled up almost adjacent to us! It’s a funny thing, parking ‘etiquette’ on Aires. We like to give other campers plenty of space where possible, but others, like our new neighbours, like to get cosy; perhaps it’s a safety in numbers thing? In the colder weather however, when everyone has their windows closed or pulled to and no one is outside, there is usually very little sound, as proved to be the case with our new neighbours. Who, without realising it at the time, we had bumped into as we wandered around the hamlet looking for the bar/tabac and bakery we thought we’d read about! Asking a couple walking a dog whether they knew of the said locations, they explained they were visiting but had been told that the ‘depot de pain’ was closed the next day, and had no idea about the bar. It was only as Mr B was laboriously explaining that we too were visiting, in a camping car, that we learned they were our neighbours and on the same mission!
We spent a very quiet and very dark night there, only to be woken by the local municipal workers arriving the next day in their trucks and vans, but, at a very civilised 0800 hours which suited us, as we needed to plan our route to head back north to Dinard on the coast somewhere we were tempted to visit on our way into Breizh, but had decided to press on further west. With its reputation as a magnet for the wealthy in the 1800s and beyond, and complete with spectacular villas, it promised a very different type of destination to everything we had experienced so far!
S&J
(covering 27th October)
I like that photo of the ancient church.
ReplyDeleteTa - that Breton style is quite something!
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