Another day, another walled city ... and prehistory

On Friday I went to Concarneau for the Friday morning market and to visit its Ville Close - a medieval walled city on an island. Sound familiar? The Bretons fighting the French who are fighting the British. It is all sounding very familiar to me. They fought wars all over Brittany for a period of centuries. The Ville Close is a very small, easily walkable island with a lot of its original walls and towers. 

Back to Fort La Latte yesterday … La Latte has not one, not two, but three drawbridges. In between the first and second is a courtyard which they called a “barbican.” If invaders got past the first gate, they were sitting ducks in the barbican from the defenders on the walls around them. The third drawbridge was to the castle where the lord and his family lived.

The Ville Close in Concarneau also has an area between the first and second gates, but here they called it a “ravelin.”  I don’t speak French, but the English translations are no help to me.

In the afternoon, I visited Carnac, home to the largest collection of neolithic stone monuments in the world.  At the main site in Carnac, there are 3,000 stones placed upright in long parallel lines.  Why?  No one knows, but they date from 5,000 to 3,000 BCE.  Stones placed upright like this are called menhirs, and if they have another stone across the top, they are called dolmens.  I am learning so many new English words in France.

These sections of menhirs are called alignments, and while there are 3,000 in the three sections in Carnac, there are over 10,000 in Normandy.  There are a lot in Great Britain and some in most of the countries of Europe.  Who knew?

They know what the menhirs are not.  This is not a burial ground, and the lines in different sections are at different angles, so not likely to be related to astronomy or solstices.  Religious?  Unlikely since they are so spread out and in so many widely disparate locations.  Dropped and placed by ET’s?  These rocks are granite.  They are heavy.  So why, over a 2,000 year period, did Neolithic people place them so carefully in rows?  This is one of the mysteries of life that is unlikely to ever be solved since the timing predates writing.

Carnac also has a small, but interesting Museum of Prehistory. Neolithic man nay not have been able to write, but he made and used stone tools as well as decorative items such as jewelry. Another mystery of life: in one of the burial cairns they found gemstones from northern Italy and southern Spain. How did they get to Brittany? Did neolithic man travel that far? Engage in primitive trade? Did the leaders receive tribute? It is surprising how interesting these rocks turned out to be.

I have stayed the last two nights on the outskirts of Quimper, and finally made it into the city on my way out. Good timing, too, as Saturday turns out to be market day in Quimper, and this market was even bigger than the huge one yesterday in Concarneau. This market was also clearly for the locals. Besides large sections of produce and food, they sell a lot of clothes and even beds. I could tell the Quimper market was for locals because no one carried the "traditional Breton shirts that every tourist shop has. They sell clothes that people wear.

Quimper has a small museum of Breton history and another small museum of faience - the local style of ceramics. Three companies coexisted in Quimper for centuries, creating a distinctive style of not just plates and vases, but ceramic sculptures as well. They are truly works of art.

I visited one last chateau on my way to Rennes:  the Josselin Chateau.  Like the Loire Valley chateaus, it was built in the fourteenth century, but unlike most of the other chateaus, Josselin was owned, lived in, and renovated by a single family, except for a period of confiscation during the Revolution.