PROLOGUE

There’s a reason the inhabitants of the Poitou-Charentes are affectionately known as cagouilles – snails. It’s rare to see anybody moving faster than a cautious walking pace. Only mad foreigners jog. A common denominator in the obituaries is the great age of the departed – mid to late 90s is pretty much the norm. Some of our French neighbours have never been more than 30 miles from the village where they were born. Their needs and wants can generally be found in small local towns; why should they go further afield?

The same indolence affects us. With quaint villages, traffic-free lanes, limitless acres of fields, forests and rivers, long hot summers, sufficient hostelries to cater for our tastes, and the pure pleasure of sitting in the garden surrounded by our animals, listening to the birds, we live in our own little heaven.

But in this paradise there is a sly serpent, and its name is Wanderlust. When it whispers I feel a craving to be on the move.

“Shall we take Tally,” (our dog) “and a tent, and drive all round France? Just drive around and see what we can discover?” I suggested one autumn day while we were collecting chestnuts.

“When?” Terry asked.

“Late spring, early summer?”

“How long for?”

“About six weeks?”

“All right. Find somebody to come and look after the animals, and we’ll go.”

What could be simpler? All we needed was a house-pet-sitter and a tent.

I contacted our lovely American friend, Jennifer Shields who had taken care of our animals and house some years previously when I had walked across France. She’d be delighted to come back, so that was one thing ticked off our list.

“Do you think,” I asked, “that Tally will get bored being in the car for so long? Should we get a small companion for him?”

Yes, we agreed, that would be a good idea. And so we collected a small black puppy of unknown origin who looked like the kind of small black puppy who would grow to be a small black dog. His huge ears, instant devotion and tireless efforts to please reminded me of Dobby the house-elf in Harry Potter, and so that’s what we called him.

Two months before our departure date, things began to go awry.

Firstly Jennifer badly injured her leg and had to cancel her visit.

Secondly, Dobby grew, and grew, and grew. In no time at all he was the size of a new-born calf. He wasn’t going to fit in our car with Tally, all our camping gear, and us. We were going to have to buy a far larger vehicle. One that we couldn’t afford.

In a serendipitous stroke of fate, my old schoolfriend from Kenya, Vivien Prince, won a raffle prize – an open-ended return flight from Kenya to Paris. She enthusiastically volunteered to step into Jennifer’s shoes.

Buying a vehicle large enough to accommodate our equipment and canine entourage, and that was within our means, was more difficult. With Vivien already here, and only six days before our departure date, we still hadn’t found anything we could afford. At the eleventh hour, somebody introduced us to an ageing Talbot van converted to a campervan. She was beautifully fitted with hand-made oak cabinets and seemed mechanically sound. She cost more than twice what we had budgeted for, but she was our only option. We were ready to roll.

 CHAPTER ONE: NORTHERN BRITTANY

http://goo.gl/NKb6z1

Ille et Vilaine

We are starting our trip from Cancale on the Brittany coast, and will travel 6,000 miles anti-clockwise around the perimeter of France until we arrive back where we began.

On a chilly day in May we wave farewell to Vivien and head north from our home in south-west France. It is 250 miles to Cancale, and we reach a campsite near there late at night after a pleasant and uneventful journey, apart from Terry finding that the clutch is rather stiff. We quietly park Tinkerbelle, drink cups of instant soup, wrap the dogs and ourselves in duvets, and fall asleep.

The first morning of our trip is off to a sublime start. At 8.00am the sun is already hot. From a gentle incline on the Pointe du Grouin north of Cancale, we overlook the sapphire waters of the bay of Mont-Saint-Michel to the east and the gulf of St Malo to the west. Just offshore a babbling mass of gulls and cormorants flap and hop about on the Île des Landes.

I join a queue of cheerful French folk in dressing gowns and slippers as we wait to wash our dishes in the communal facilities. There is a single topic of conversation – the glorious weather. A small, nut-brown man wearing a striped blue-and-white jumper and tiny white shorts pronounces with an air of authority that we are witnessing the beginning of a long hot summer. We all gaze at him with the reverence that the faithful in St Peter’s Square might regard the Pope.

Although the inside of Tinkerbelle, as we have named the campervan, is a muddled mess, we will sort it out later. First things first: this is a holiday. We take the dogs to walk along the cliff top. They are astonished by their first sight of the sea, undecided whether to rush back and forth on the path or scale the cliffs down to the water that lies below, as flat and still as a blue sheet of glass. This is the Brittany coastline at its most docile and beguiling, bearing no resemblance to the familiar postcard scenes of titanic waves engulfing lighthouses and ships.

With the dogs sprawling comfortably on our bed in the back of the van, we point Tinkerbelle towards St Malo. On the way we stop at a perfect sandy beach where the only other occupants are a couple with a small child and a golden retriever. Tally rushes over to play, but Dobby is entranced by his first introduction to the sea. He lies down in it and gulps mouthfuls of salt water for several minutes before joining the two dogs racing around the rocks and kicking up the sand. Half an hour later the quantity of sea-water he’s drunk have a predictably unsettling effect upon his digestion.

After he’s recovered we continue on our way, until we notice a sign to ‘Les Rochers Sculptés’ at Rothéneuf. We pick our way down a twisty, stony path to a colony of monsters, smugglers and corsairs sprawling in the sun on a windy hillside overlooking the ragged Emerald Coast. These strange creatures are the work of a 19^th century local priest. For 25 years this lonely man passed his spare time here sculpting from the granite several hundred intricate figures, based upon the legend of a powerful 16^th century Rothéneuf family of pirates and smugglers. There are sea-calves, serpents, stern watchmen, and figures eroded past recognition. My favourite is a rectangular tableau showing what looks like a couple of dwarves against a background of palm trees. The male dwarf appears to be simultaneously pulling off the lady’s headdress and kicking her up the backside.

Old photographic postcards show the Abbé’s handiwork in its heyday, before time and tide and the tramp of feet had taken their toll. I wonder what he’d been thinking as he chipped away for all those years, and how long his lonely labour of love will last before the elements obliterate it.

The cobbled streets and battlements of St Malo are crammed with vehicles and holidaymakers. Flags swoon limply in the still heat. We will not stay here overnight; it’s too busy. We are looking for somewhere remote and quiet, where the dogs can run free. Tinkerbelle’s gears are making a horrible grinding noise, and there is a loud rattling coming from somewhere beneath the bodywork.

Côtes d’Armor

Until 1959 the département in which we are now was called the Côtes-du-Nord – the northern coast. Bretons felt it was misleading and damaging to tourism, which after agriculture is their main source of revenue. ‘Nord’ suggested cold, but the Bretons regard their climate as mild; and whilst it is indisputable that Brittany is in the northern region of France, it does lie to the west. And so the Côtes-du-Nord became the more seductive Côtes-d’Armor. Pale blue sky, pink stones, bleached white sands. Yachts clinking and jingling on their moorings. Collections of quaint stone cottages nestling in clumps of rhododendrons and semi-tropical vegetation. The tide is far out, and gulls poke about for morsels in an inlet of glossy mud.

Every turn in the road reveals another glorious beach of pristine sand tickled by a silky turquoise sea. Beside the lighthouse at Cap Fréhel we are nearly blown off our feet and the edge of the cliff by the ferocity of a wind that arrives from nowhere, and which is not only ferocious but also freezing, but Tally and Dobby are oblivious as they gallop around through the beautiful moorland heather and wild flowers.

We pass the small town of Minihy-Tréguier where St Yves, patron saint of lawyers, was born into a noble family. After training as a priest he studied law and devoted himself to helping the underprivileged. Defending a poor man sued for having the impudence to stand outside a kitchen enjoying the cooking smells, for which the smells’ owner felt he was entitled to payment, Yves rattled a coin. The noise, he said, paid for the smell. I like that!

It is almost 7.00pm when we reach Ploumanac’h, where there are, according to an apparently reliable directory, three open campsites. The first two are closed. Terry is tired and irritable after wrestling all day with Tinkerbelle’s gearbox which is becoming exceedingly temperamental and will no longer engage reverse, and we are both hungry. We’ve driven several times up and down and round and round in Ploumanac’h and are barely speaking by the time we eventually stumble upon the third campsite. Terry finds the traffic too slow, the signs useless and the other drivers idiots, and apparently it’s entirely my fault. While we set up the awning, feed and walk the dogs I maintain a righteous frosty silence until Terry invites me to a meal at Trégastel-Plage.

Terry enjoys oysters followed by moules and frites, while my prawns, salmon and chilled rosé perfectly match the pink blush of the boulders squatting on the beach in the final rays of the sun. The Pink Granite Coast is at its very pinkest, and its rosy beauty melts away our irritability. It’s a perfect evening.

The following morning we discover that during the night Dobby has eaten Tally’s collar. A cold wind (it is definitely cold despite the mild Breton climate) lashes an improbably green sea into curly white-tipped waves, on which a lone yacht rocks and bobs. We cross the départementale boundary into Finistère, literally ‘the end of the earth’.

Finistère

According to an article in the Brittany Tourist Board’s magazine, the town of Morlaix prides itself on being the home of possibly the oldest chili palm in Europe, even the world, standing 65 ft. tall and bearing 12 ft. long leaves. We imagine the palm rearing up over the town like a vast parasol, but there is no sign of it. We go to ask about it at the Tourist Office, which closes for lunch as we arrive at its door.

There’s a small créperie in a sheltered sunny square facing a row of tall houses, where gulls dance among the self-sown plants on saggy slate roofs. After lunching on Breton galettes and golden Breton cider, we wander down a quaint cobbled alley and into l’Echoppe Artisanale, a hat shop of extraordinary beauty. Confections of straw and ribbons, chiffon and silk, flowers, artificial fruits and jewels, so light, so colourful, so luscious that they’d be at home in a Parisian patisserie. If you want a beautiful hat, try this shop first.

At 2.00pm we head back to the Tourist Office.

“We’d like to see your famous chili palm,” I explain to the girl at the counter. “Could you tell us where to find it, please?”

“Ah yes, there are many chili palms. You can see them in Roscoff.”

“We’d like to see the one in Morlaix – the one mentioned in your brochure.” I show her the magazine article from the Comité Départemental du Tourisme du Finistère mentioning the great palm. She reads it, looking nonplussed.

“Well, I don’t know where that palm is,” she says, “so it’s probably privately owned and not open to the public.”

“Are you sure? Could you possibly find out whether we can go and see it?”

“No, I’m afraid not.” She turns her attention to a pile of booklets on a shelf behind her.

“We’ve come quite a long way especially to see the tree. Perhaps you could suggest how we can find out how to view it?”

“Yes,” she replies. “Go to Roscoff.”

Back in Tinkerbelle, the traffic lights turn red as we approach.  Terry brakes, and Tinkerbelle gives a despairing shudder and makes a very bad clunking sound.

“Oh, hell,” I say. “Has somebody hit us, or have we burst a tyre?”

Terry climbs out and walks round to the back, where he stands looking perplexed. In the rear-view mirror I see the driver of the car behind us waving to him, and pointing. Terry lies down in the road and vanishes under Tinkerbelle, shortly reappearing with a length of exhaust pipe. The lights change to green and cars behind hoot, their drivers smiling and waving as they pass.

My heart sinks. On the second day of our trip, there is already a gearbox problem, a clutch problem and now a broken exhaust. We have bought a mechanical wreck! Is the entire vehicle going to fall to bits? The unexpected need to buy a camping car because of the small black puppy has already eaten up nearly all the funds we had put aside for our journey. There is no margin for major emergencies.

“Don’t worry, it’s no problem,” Terry reassures me in his characteristically positive way. “We’ll just keep going for now, and as soon as we find a breaker’s  yard we’ll pick up a used part.”

Off we drive, noisily. The lush vegetation, narrow winding lanes, pretty stone cottages and Celtic road signs are reminiscent of Cornwall. To our right the inshore waters of the beautiful bay of Morlaix are palest turquoise, darkening by shades into the distance to a deep aquamarine.

Local place names beginning with Plou-, Tré-, and Lan- reflect the fact that the Breton language is a sister to Welsh and Cornish. Between the 5^th and 7^th centuries Christians fleeing Anglo-Saxon persecution in England came to Armorique, the land of the sea. They called their new home Brittany, or Little Britain. That’s why England, Scotland and Wales became known, in the 17^th century, as Great Britain.

Terry mentions that Tinkerbelle’s gearbox seems to have eased up. However, he adds casually, the brakes aren’t quite as effective as they should be. He says I shouldn’t worry, so I try not to. We drive past fields of artichokes and potatoes stretching right to the horizon, and to the horizon beyond that.

Roscoff is quaint and picturesque, touristy but charming, the harbour front lined with slate-roofed stone cottages. People drift around in the sunshine through narrow streets, and a bridge disappears into the sea. We drive around looking in vain for giant chili palms, before giving up and driving to Sainte-Marguerite on the Coast of Legends, where we find a stunningly beautiful location in the dunes of the Abers. Gulls float overhead, and a single red-sailed fishing boat skirts the rocks. We drop anchor for the night and take the dogs down to the beach, where patches of seaweed as red as the sail form a playground for legions of sand hoppers. 

A black Labrador on a lead watches wistfully as Tally and Dobby race across the sand and rocks, while we collect smooth, tactile pebbles in subtle colours. But we don’t take them away, because I always feel that stones removed from their natural environment lose their soul, and never look as perfect anywhere else.

As dusk falls and the dogs have run until they can’t run any more we make our way back from the beach. A well-camouflaged green and buff-coloured toad tuts indignantly as it scrambles clumsily out of our way on the sandy path.

Our morning and evening ritual is labour-intensive. During the day, while we are travelling the dogs stay in the back of the van, sitting on what at night will become our bed. It’s two benches facing each other, with a table between. The table collapses on request, and with some rearranging the cushions form a mattress that we cover with a thick blanket for the dogs. At night, they sleep in the cab. Once they are removed from the back, we can cook a meal, eat at the table, and then drag out from various drawers our bed linen and such other things as are necessary for our comfort. From whichever part of the van they are occupying we have to remove everything chewable: camera, maps, guide books, pens, mobile phones, ropes are all grist to Dobby’s insatiable mill. It is an immutable fact that if it’s within his reach he will eat it, despite the fact that we have brought with us sufficient dog toys to stock a small shop. In the three days since we left home he has devoured amongst other things a washing up bowl and sponge, a pair of socks and a plastic container screwed to the wall, as well as chewing Tally’s collar into four sections. Each morning we stow away everything in the back, make up the bed with the dogs’ blanket and their toys and put their water bowl down. They are happy to wrestle and snooze until the next opportunity for a run.

The night is still and silent, the darkness pierced by the white light of Europe’s tallest lighthouse, the Phare de l’Île de la Vierge.

CHAPTER TWO: WEST AND SOUTHERN BRITTANY

http://goo.gl/gjBW85

Finistère

Next morning is heralded not by the song of the larks, but by the persistent rapping of a woodpecker. The dogs leap from the cab, full of joie de vivre and hurtle straight into a neighbouring campervan that arrived during the night. A small angry poodle shocks them and sends them racing down to the beach. They spend the next hour chasing each other over the sands and through the dunes while we breakfast. They are like children in their delight at this new experience, running back to us every few minutes to make sure we are still here, and to tell us how much fun they are having. We rub off as much wet sand as we can before they jump back onto the bed and we set off for another day.

We’ve no plan other than to wander along the coast and see what we find. The villages have comic-book names – Ar Stonk, Kroaz Konk. Around every curve is a new paradise, the beaches of dreams, the beaches of childhood memories. No busy promenades, ice-cream vendors or deckchairs. Just pepper-fine silver sands patterned with birds’ footprints and sprinkled with small, delicate shells, lapped by clearest waters beneath cloudless skies.

Bedding flutters from windows, taking advantage of the sunshine and nippy breeze. There’s a hairdressing salon named Marine Hair, where the mermaids go when they need a new style. Platoons of cyclists in bright-coloured tight clothing whirr past as we chug for several miles down narrow lanes behind a tractor loaded with new potatoes and fragrant cattle-shed cleanout, a rural scent that I love, while appreciating that it’s not for everyone.

We stop for coffee at a smart beach-side restaurant. The ladies’ room is down some steep stairs in a narrow basement. A large lady on crutches is struggling to negotiate the steps, so another lady and I take her by the elbows and manoeuvre her to the bottom. While waiting for her to emerge, the other lady and I discuss the superb weather, wondering if it is too good to be true (it is), and whether it will last through the summer (it won’t). All the time we are standing there the chef in his whites is hopping up and down the stairs collecting boxes of oysters from an open storage area next to the loo. Sometimes it’s better not to see behind the scenes in restaurants.

Across the sea to our right lies the Île d’Ouessant, a haven for lighthouses and home to one with an interesting history, La Jument. In March of 1904 M. Charles Eugene Potron, who had survived a shipwreck, bequeathed a large sum of money for the erection of a lighthouse. It was to be of the highest quality and fitted with the finest equipment, and built on a rock in some of the most dangerous waters of the Atlantic coastline, off the Île d’Ouessant. M. Potron’s Will stipulated that if the lighthouse wasn’t completed within seven years, the legacy would become void and would pass instead to the Central Society for the Shipwrecked.

The site chosen for the new lighthouse was an area of one hundred square yards of rock, only accessible during calm weather and at low tide. Construction began in May 1904 in diabolical conditions, and during the first year only 51 hours of work were accomplished. The La Jument lighthouse was finally completed just before the seven year deadline. Twenty years later somebody noticed that it wasn’t anchored to the rock, but simply perched on top and maintained in place by its own weight. Since then it has been secured by four high-tension cables.

It’s market day in picturesque le Conquet, or if you prefer its funny Breton name, Konk Leon. The town is throbbing with holidaymakers and strutting dogs. Tinkerbelle splutters and farts through the crowded streets, startling shoppers at stalls selling strawberries, pillows, fish, cheeses and vegetables, fabrics and jewellery, and bread in every possible shape. Once she is tucked into a car park we take the dogs to explore the port where the morning’s catch had been unloaded and despatched in the early morning. A few fishermen are picking out tiny crabs and small useless fish who have died needlessly in the awful nylon nets that have replaced traditional linen and cotton.

From Denis Lunven’s boulangerie in Rue Clemenceau we buy two glossy slabs of kuign aman – literally ‘butter cake’, a Breton speciality made with lashings of butter, heaps of sugar and a teeny sprinkling of flour just sufficient to bind it together. We also buy a cake with a layer of seaweed in it. We like new tastes. Close by is a café/bar where we sit in the sun at a table on the pavement. Terry is drinking his coffee and I am sipping cider as we munch our way through the cakes. Seeing a small, self-important dog swaggering about bringing the traffic to frequent abrupt halts, heedless of its own safety and the irritation of drivers,  Dobby makes a sudden lunge in a frenzied attempt to join in the fun, almost dragging us and our table into the middle of the road.

Saturated with buttery cakes we drive to St Mathieu’s Point, where there’s a ruined abbey, a lighthouse and a monument to sailors who have given their lives for France. Built by Benedictine monks, and facing Jerusalem in accordance with tradition, the abbey is dedicated to St Matthew, patron saint of tax collectors and accountants. Breton sailors brought a piece of his skull here from Ethiopia, where he either died naturally or was martyred in the course of squeezing taxes out of people. Nobody knows how he met his end. If you examine a set of apostle spoons you’ll see that each of the apostles holds something in his hand. St Matthew holds an axe. Don’t you think that’s a strange tool for a tax collector?

Elegant arches stand in the broken walls of the abbey, and granite pillars reach up searching for a roof that is no longer there. Even in its skeletal state the abbey retains a suggestion of its lost grandeur. Now pigeons nest in the dark and dank mossy walls of the dormitory. There’s nobody here on this wild headland except us, and the air carries the haunting sadness of a once mighty place reduced to lonely emptiness. In a walled field where once the monks grew vegetables and fruit, medicinal plants and fodder for their animals, a blackbird feeds her fluttering baby amongst the buttercups.

50,000 ships pass here each year, through one of the world’s busiest maritime crossroads. From the extreme edge of the cliffs and tucked up tight against the abbey, Saint Mathieu’s lighthouse peers down, incongruously, through the open roof space. Nearby is the stone chapel of Notre Dame du Bout du Monde – Our Lady of the End of the World – a simple building with a high vaulted ceiling, plain stone walls, and pots of agapanthus and arum lilies on the altar before a statue of the Madonna. 

As we meander along we see a sign to a strawberry museum at Plougastel-Daoulas. I am intrigued to learn how a whole museum can be centred on a strawberry, but Terry drives past, apparently deaf to my suggestion. He’s alternately pumping the clutch and brakes up and down. 

The spectacular bay of Douarnenez is the site of the legendary city of Ys, built by the king of Cornouailles for his evil daughter Dahut. Every night Dahut took a new lover whom she forced to wear a silken mask. At daybreak the mask turned into a horrible clawed creature that killed its wearer, whose body was thrown into the sea. Fittingly, Dahut died as a result of her treachery when she opened the gates of Ys and flooded the city. It’s said that in March, when the tides reach their nadir, the ruins of palaces can be seen in the sands, and on a quiet night you may hear the city’s bells tolling.

Heading towards Plogoff we find a simple campsite – just a small field behind the house – belonging to a dear old lady who keeps a public bar in her tiny front room. As well as alcohol she sells packets of biscuits, jars of coffee, tins of vegetables, and very old postcards. We have a glass of cider with two locals who ask if we are going to visit the Pointe du Raz. We ask how far it is to walk, and the two customers and landlady all point in conflicting directions and give distances ranging from a quarter of a mile to six miles, and times ranging from ten minutes to four hours. We decide to postpone our visit until tomorrow, and to drive there, because we don’t actually know exactly where we are, and if we leave on foot we might never find our way back. There is no road sign at either end of the hamlet, and when we ask its name they all talk at once and give different answers, and it sounds as if they are saying that the place doesn’t actually have a name.

Apart from a young couple in a tent who look suspiciously like a pair of schoolchildren enjoying an illicit weekend together when their parents think they are studying at a friend’s house, we have the campsite to ourselves. The only sounds are of a blackbird chattering in the hedge, and the methodical munching of cattle in a neighbouring field.

This morning our hostess asks us to walk down the lane to admire the quaint local chapel. It has just been rebuilt from a virtual ruin, she explains, paid for by fund-raising events organised by the local community who are immensely proud of it. It is a charming, simple little building with a smart new timber ceiling and decorated with naïve paintings. If only it had a name on it, we might be able to discover where we are. But it doesn’t, so we are doomed never to know.

We drive about until we find a sign to the Pointe du Van, a site of unbelievable, unspoilt beauty carpeted in grasses and herbs, heathers and wild flowers. Granite boulders pierce clumps of pink scabious that perfectly complement the blues of the sea and sky. No words or photographs can capture the essence of its magical beauty. The sky and the sea are linked by a dozen shades of blue. Standing at the cliff’s edge looking out at the Atlantic Ocean, on a perfect early summer day when the sea is calm and there’s not another human being in sight, and the only sound is of lazy waves tickling the rocks, you’ll believe you can fly.

Instead of their usual wild gallop the dogs move slowly, sniffing the air and staring around them in wonderment as we trace the path to the chapel of St They, which stands perilously close to the clifftops. This is mainland France’s most westerly place of worship. Outside on a granite pillar two characters stand back to back, but the inscription has been worn away by time. Lizards scuttle round the stone window openings and over the lichen-covered slates of the roof. From its Gothic belfry the bell is said to toll by itself to warn boats in danger. According to legend, long ago the French fleet was being pursued and the bell of St They rang out to guide the ships to safety; but when the enemy fleet followed a strong current appeared, dashing many of their boats on to the rocks and dispersing the rest out to sea.

St They’s plain exterior gives no hint of its interior of ornate gilded columns and pillars and colourful plaster saints, one of them pointing to a nasty wound above his poor knee. This most maritime little church’s turquoise arched wooden ceiling is reminiscent of an upturned boat; model boats stand in front of the two altars, and there’s a lifebelt washed up from a shipwreck.

Cradled between the Pointe du Van and Pointe du Raz lies the Baie des Trépassés – the Bay of the Dead. Despite its forbidding name and macabre legends all to do with death, it’s a glorious sandy beach where dead Druids were launched to the gateway to the other world on the Île de Sein. It’s easy to see why they chose this as their final point of departure from the temporal world, because it would be difficult to find anywhere more naturally splendid. It’s so beautiful that it hurts. In the 6^th century Saint Guénolé built a bridge of ice to link the Île de Sein to the mainland. But the Devil walked over it and melted it with his hot little cloven feet. To this day there is no bridge, and the island can only be reached by sea.

Satiated with scenery, we go in search of lunch, following the coast until the village of Kérity. The ‘le Doris’ restaurant serves an excellent meal of succulent salmon with a generous selection of fresh vegetables, and not the customary uninspiring little castle of boiled rice that is so often plopped onto the plate. I’m addicted to watching people, and fascinated by an English couple at the next table. They nod to us when we arrive, and say “Hello.” Then they eat their way through a five-course menu as if they are expecting to take an exam on it later. They savour each mouthful reverently, staring at it on their forks, inhaling its aroma, and smacking their lips; but during the entire meal they do not exchange a single word.

Afterwards we walk beside the bobbing flock of sailing boats in the small harbour, stopping to read a plaque on the wall:

‘From this harbour, on 23 and 24 June 1940, in response to a call from General de Gaulle, our following compatriots sailed to England aboard Notre Dame de Bon Conseil to join French forces, and fought on all seas and all fronts for the honour of France and her liberty.’

There are eight names listed, and we wonder how many had returned safely to Kérity after the war.

We pass a lady cyclist with a small dog perched in a basket on her handlebars. She waves to stall-holders selling lacework and hot dogs, and seabirds poke around in puddles on the rocky beach.

Something rather awful happened in Saint Guénolé, where we arrive in mid-afternoon. In October 1870 the wife and daughter of Finistère’s préfet, together with a friend, were swept off the rocks and drowned at the place known as the Hell Hole, or the Victims’ Rock. Whatever was the préfet doing allowing his wife and child to put themselves into such a perilous situation? It does make you wonder if he was fit for purpose. A superfluous notice warns that this is a dangerous place. Anybody can see that. Even on this calm day the waves are heaving and crashing violently on the rocks. There’s a sturdy iron rail designed to prevent people falling into the sea. Unbelievably, incredibly, ankle-deep in swirling foam on a small, wet, round rock stands a fisherman. He seems oblivious to the waters churning round him and sometimes over him as he calmly casts his line. When a couple of young men climb out of a car and into wetsuits and prepare to plunge into the sinister waters I drag Terry away before he has any crazy ideas.

After the last few days of doddling around deserted beaches and dozy villages, Concarneau comes as a shock. The streets are crowded, traffic almost stationary, and in oven-like heat the all-pervasive odour from France’s third largest fishing port wafts into Tinkerbelle through every crevice and cranny. There’s a funfair and shoals of squealing children swimming and splashing each other in the bay. Tally is astonished by the sudden change in our environment and climbs on top of the fridge for a better view. We continue to Pont-Aven where we drive round in circles looking for somewhere to park, past art galleries featuring seascapes and nudes, and more seascapes and nudes, until I suspect it is because of the multitudes of nude paintings that we are driving around, and not because we are lost.

Luckily we find a breakers’ yard in Pont-Aven where we might be able to find a replacement exhaust system to stifle Tinkerbelle’s roars. Unluckily it closes just as we arrive at the gates. Never mind, we’ll be back tomorrow.

By sheer chance and great good fortune we arrive at a small, pretty car park in a grove of trees just a few metres from the beach at nearby Port-Manec’h. A friendly French couple come over to tell us that campervans are allowed to park here overnight. They have been here four days, but are now leaving. We must be very careful, they warn, because two nights ago a gang of drunken youths had attacked them. No damage was done, mais quand même …..

On the beach two dozen blue and white bathing huts stand like sentry boxes in a row. A few of them seem tired and are leaning on their neighbours. There are a couple of yachts anchored in the aquamarine water. It’s easy to imagine Gauguin and his friends at their easels here, catching their pipe smoke with the brims of their straw hats, and dabbing idly at their canvasses.

When the dogs have had a run I put a couple of salmon steaks in the oven, and Terry and I stroll along a footpath through a copse leading to a cumbersome stone building standing on a small headland. A lean, lanky man appears wearing a checked shirt and faded blue jeans halfway down his snake-thin hips. Large spectacles magnify his bright-blue eyes, and an unlit aromatic pipe juts from beneath a walrusy moustache.

What are we doing, he asks. Without waiting for a reply he offers us a glass of wine and some oysters. We haven’t any money with us, and I don’t eat oysters if I can possibly avoid them, so we decline politely. He introduces himself – his name is Hervé – and vanishes inside the building. When he returns he’s carrying two glasses of wine, a fistful of oysters and a sharp knife with which he points us to a table. A deafening noise is blasting from the building – I think it’s the Ride of the Valkyries playing at thunderous volume on a radio that isn’t precisely tuned to the station. Hervé won’t have a drink himself, but expertly stabs open an oyster and holds it out to me. I hide my reluctance behind a gracious mask, and gulp down the vile thing. Terry finishes the rest. Hervé and his pipe sit between us. Quite what he is talking about we aren’t sure, because all his tales taper off before reaching their finale. He is much given to elbow digging and long meaningful stares whose meaning we cannot grasp, and all the while the Valkyries are galloping more frenziedly through the radio’s static crackling.

I begin to worry about the salmon in the oven and make getting-up-to-go moves; but Hervé signals me with his sharp knife to sit down while he regales us with a story featuring Admiral Donitz, some English submarines, and the barbarity of the Ukrainian soldiers who’d massacred the Port-Manec’h locals.

“When the Resistance – you know about the Resistance, don’t you?” he jabs me with his elbow, and I nod – “When the Resistance caught the Ukrainians, you know what they did to them?”

“Killed them? Shot them?”

He puts his wide blue eyes close to my face, and says slowly and clearly:

“They cut out their tongues and dug out their eyes, and filled the holes with wire netting!”

“Why?”

“And you know why oysters are so expensive in England, don’t you?”

No, I don’t. I’m still waiting to learn about the wire netting. At the same time Terry is trying to keep up with the conversation in his minimal French, while I fill in the parts he can’t get, without really understanding them myself.

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Hervé stares silently at me for several minutes, and I stare back like a rabbit hypnotised by a snake. I am seriously worried in case the salmon catches fire and burns the van down with the dogs in it.

“You want some more oysters, don’t you?”  

No, I say, thank you very much, we really don’t want any more oysters. I don’t add that if I never ate another oyster for the rest of my life I’d be perfectly happy. We do not know what our relationship with Hervé is, if we are his guests, or his customers and are going to be presented with a bill that we don’t have the means to pay. Ignoring our refusal, he goes away and returns with another fistful of oysters and puts them in front of Terry, who raises his hands in a gesture that says “No thank you.” Hervé pushes them at him forcefully. Terry opens and eats them.

Now Hervé wants to arm-wrestle with Terry.

“Well, what a pity we must leave,” I say. “We have a long way to go.”

This is of course untrue. Hervé is a delightful man, but I am worried that if he knows we are staying in the nearby car park he might spend all night, to the accompaniment of the furious Valkyries, telling us stories that don’t end and we can’t understand, and forcing upon us oysters I don’t want and we don’t have the wherewithal to pay for. We all stand up, and Hervé kisses me six times; Terry receives one kiss and another arm-wrestle. Hervé writes his and my name on a piece of paper, and gives me six more kisses. Terry asks him how we can pay for the oysters. Hervé casually indicates a battered box on his table, and Terry empties into it all the loose change from his pocket, which didn’t amount to very much at all.

We never learn why oysters are so cheap in France and so expensive in England, nor why the dead Ukrainians were filled with wire netting.

By the time we get back to Tinkerbelle the salmon steaks are almost but not quite beyond redemption. In the late evening we sit reading and watching a melange of blue tits, robins and chaffinches hoovering up the charred remains of our meal. A small green caterpillar humps itself ticklishly up my leg. The night passes peacefully; we are not attacked by intoxicated adolescents, but merely assailed by the pervading odour of burnt fish.

From now on, we agree, we will just have a cup of coffee in the morning rather than a proper breakfast, because by the time we’ve cooked, eaten, cleared up and organised the dogs in the back of the van half the morning has gone.

We set off early for the breaker’s yard at Pont Aven to find an exhaust for Tinkerbelle. The industrial estate is strangely deserted. The factories are all closed and the only sign of life comes from two noisy German shepherds hurling themselves at the fence. After several moments of bewilderment and indignation, we realise that today is the third of four public holidays in France during May this year. We rattle away to our next destination.

The countryside becomes tamer, more sophisticated; grander houses in tropical gardens replace the chocolate-box cottages of northern Brittany.

Morbihan

In Guidel the church bells are ringing merrily, the market is lively, and there’s a show-jumping competition on the beach. Licking ice-creams, we watch horses bouncing over obstacles, and occasionally knocking them down like spillikins. Then we take the dogs to the beach where riders are cooling their sweating mounts. Seeing a creature similar in size to himself, Dobby joyfully bounds towards a horse and rider already teetering on the edge of control. The horse almost turns a somersault at the sight of the slathering black creature with a foot-long floppy tongue galloping towards it through the waves.

Next stop Lorient, where Terry is looking forward to visiting the submarine base, but there are no guided tours today because of the public holiday. However, a friendly young man at the gate says we are free to wander around and explore.

I find it a profoundly horrible place, a conglomeration of submarine pens, sinister concrete buildings with walls several yards thick. Even the few weeds struggling for life out of cracks in the concrete have a hopeless air. From here German U-boats crept out to attack Allied shipping in the Atlantic during the WWII. I break out in a sweat when I think of men locked inescapably in the ghastly vessels.

A single submarine sits at the dockside, a shiny black capsule reeking of stealth, death and claustrophobia. I want to escape from this awful place, but Terry is in his element, fascinated, ready to clamber into a submarine, submerge and sail off in it if he gets the chance. Then something else attracts his attention: a man working on a trimaran up on a trestle. He commands me to ask the man to invite him aboard, which I obediently do mentioning that Terry is an experienced ocean racer who navigated a winning British Admiral’s Cup team yacht.

Soon Terry is up on deck with a charming and handsome Portuguese gentleman called Miguel, who speaks fluent English. He tells Terry the trimaran once belonged to France’s greatest yachtsman, Eric Tabarly, who sadly fell overboard and disappeared at sea in 1998. Tabarly’s boats were usually named Pen Duick, but this trimaran is called Côte d’Or II because she was sponsored by the chocolate manufacturers. She has an unfortunate history, having been dismasted and overturned twice. Miguel has rescued her and been working to rebuild her for the last year, whilst living in a container at the submarine base.

Terry is completely enraptured, while I’m stranded on the cracked and sweltering tarmac with the weeds and the horrible submarine, trying to keep the dogs cool. But soon I have a friend, a beautiful Spanish girl wearing a bikini and a huge smile, who rides up on a bicycle. Rosa speaks no English and little French, and I speak virtually no Spanish, but mostly due to her enthusiasm we find a common language. In between bouts of conversation she cycles round and round beside the boat, looking up at Miguel, and I think she’s in love with him. She talks about him a great deal. He’s her friend, and she comes from Spain to visit him several times a year. She stays at another friend’s flat in Lorient. Miguel is in love with his boat, she says.

Rosa is outgoing: she tells me about her mother, who is from Asturia, and her father who is from Galicia. They’re retired now and living in Asturia. She has a sister named Anjelica, who is a talented artist and is looking after Rosa’s golden retriever while Rosa is visiting Miguel. Rosa comes from Corunna, a name that always takes me back to my schooldays when we giggled heartlessly as we recited ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna,’ which at the time had seemed extraordinarily entertaining:

“We buried him darkly at dead of night,

The sods with our bayonets turning,

By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light,

And the lanthorn dimly burning.”

Since the Prestige oil tanker sank and flooded the Galician coast with twenty million gallons of oil, the local tourist industry is in decline, so Rosa is currently jobless. She doesn’t mind, because she hates working in an office anyway.

Terry and Miguel are talking obsessively about sailing, and Rosa is cycling round in her bikini with her beautiful, tanned, slim body, gazing up at Miguel. She looks eighteen. She wants to take the dogs for a walk. She loves dogs, she says. We get them out of the van and they tow us around for fifteen minutes; then they’re gasping so Rosa cycles off and brings back a bucket of water for them. I ask how old she is, and she astonishes me by replying that she’s 33. I laugh and shake my head, and on a piece of paper write down 23? No, she laughs, writing down 33. Then she tells me about her boyfriend, who lives in Madrid and used to be an engineer, but now he has become an actor, which pleases her because it’s a far more interesting career than engineering.

Is Miguel married, I ask tentatively, because he wears a wedding ring. Yes, she beams, his very beautiful wife is at home in Portugal, expecting their second baby in December. They’re both very happy and she is happy for them.

She produces a digital camera and takes a photo of the two of us with our arms around each other. Finally I tear Terry away from Miguel and Côte d’Or II, and Rosa gives me a great hug, and I give her my bracelet. I’m totally charmed by this lovely girl who is content to spend weeks cycling around this strange area while Miguel works on his boat, her boyfriend is acting in Madrid, and Miguel and his wonderful wife are joyfully expecting another baby in Portugal.

Terry is very excited; he hopes Miguel will launch the boat in July. He has invited Terry to sail with him, possibly across the Atlantic. Mentally Terry is already packing his ditty bag.

The Quiberon peninsula is one long stationary stream of traffic stretching into the distance, so we head for Carnac to visit the church of St Cornely, patron saint of Carnac and horned animals. Also we want to see the ranks of megaliths said to be legions of soldiers petrified by Cornely to stop them chasing him. But there is no parking space to be had. Everybody and his wife are here today taking advantage of the unseasonably hot weather. We decide to go to Vannes for the night, via the Gulf of Morbihan, where the inland sea, says legend, was created by the tears of the fairies driven from Merlin’s enchanted forest, Brocéliande. They tossed into it garlands of flowers which became the islands of Houat, the duck, Hoédic, the duckling, and Belle-Île, the Isle of Beauty.

The largest island in the gulf is the Île aux Moines (Monks’ Island), half a mile from the second largest, the Île d’Arz (Bear Island). According to local legend (Brittany is very strong on legends!) the two islets were once linked by a narrow causeway, but the two communities hated each other. One were sailors who considered themselves superior to the others who were mere fishermen. When a boy from the Île aux Moines fell in love with a girl from the Île d’Arz, his parents imprisoned him with the monks. Every day the lovesick Arz girl crossed the causeway to sing beneath the walls of the monastery. The girl was so beautiful that she literally took away the breath from the inhabitants of the Île aux Moines. Believing this the Devil’s work, the Prior called upon God’s help. His prayer was answered: the sea rose and submerged the causeway. The girl was drowned and the two isles were separated for ever. Most of the legends in Brittany seem to end tragically.

Vannes has some sensationally pretty timbered buildings and a quaint old-fashioned cinema with a fading fascia bedecked with plaster roses. While the municipal campsite has a spacious lawned area for tents and caravans, campervans are restricted to a bleak and crowded tarmac patch. Our neighbours are a friendly Dutch couple who kindly lend Terry a bike so he can pedal to the nearest shop to buy something for us to eat.

I greatly admire the Dutch lady. She is strong-willed, and knows exactly what she does and does not like. She most particularly doesn’t like cooking, so she doesn’t cook. Ever. No ifs. No buts. Fortunately her partner loves cooking, so while she sits and relaxes he happily takes care of the catering department. When I raise the subject with Terry he just grunts.

Next morning we stop to let the dogs run at an unusually unpleasant beach of pebbles and coarse sand. Several giant beige-tinted jellyfish lie dead upon the beach, like transparent bowler hats. Dobby tries to eat one, but its size and resilient texture defeat him. After a while he gives up and joins Tally who is making inroads into a dead seagull.

For our breakfast we go to the historic Viking town of la Roche-Bernard in the Vilaine estuary. In the quiet square a life-sized silhouette of a kneeling man awaits the guillotine blade that will decapitate him. It’s a reminder of the bloody Vendée rebellion when the revolting peasants and Chouans engaged in civil war against the Republicans. Nowadays la Roche-Bernard is a peaceful and lovely small town of cobbled streets, medieval buildings with brightly coloured shutters, and stone walls sprouting clumps of poppies and wild flowers. A most pleasant place to visit on a summery morning. Yachts relax in orderly ranks in the river, overlooked by two rusting cannons pointing at a row of beehives in a field of cornflowers. The guns are from the great 17^th century warship La Couronne, a reminder that the town was once an important naval shipyard.