Mont St. Michel and Brittany

Margie and I parted at the train station in Tours as she was going on to Paris and then home.  I continued to Mont St. Michel, where I had a tour scheduled for 4:45, but I decided I had time to stop at the Chateau in Fougeres.  Good choice.  More a fortress than a palace, the Fougeres Chateau figured heavily in the fighting between France and England.  Bretagne (Brittany in English) is a peninsula in the farthest west portion of France, has its own language, and is closer to England than to Paris.  That was especially so in the Middle Ages when travel by sea was much faster than overland travel.  The early kingdoms of England included Brittany (hence, the name) as well as portions of Normandy and the Loire Valley at times.  In fact, a third of William the Conqueror’s troops at Hastings in 1066 were Bretons.  During the Hundred Year War (which lasted longer than 100 years), the French and British fought periodically over land and the succession to the French crown.  Brittany fought on the side of the British, and eventually achieved independence, although it was later conquered by the French after the British were finally defeated.  Very confusing.  In the Fougeres Chateau with its moat and many towers, you could practically see the medieval battles that took place there.

Then I continued to Mont St. Michel which is as dramatic as I expected.  It is an abbey (I would say a cathedral but there is some technical distinction between the two) on top of a mountain on a small island in a bay between Normandy and Brittany.  In the past, the island was only reachable at low tide, but there is now a short causeway.  Cars are not allowed on the island, so you have to park a couple of miles away and take a bus.

Mont St. Michel is the second or third most visited place in France and is crowded.  The guidebooks recommend arriving early, but I opted for the opposite approach.  There are a few hotels on the island, and I had booked one.  So I arrived at 3:00 and stayed overnight.  There is just one very crowded street that winds around the mountain to the abbey on top.  Unlike St. Malo where I am going next, Mont St. Michel was not bombed in WWII, so the abbey is intact except for structural damage over the years.  How do you build a church on a steep, pointing mountain?  Only the middle is on the mountain top, and the rest is supported by massive columns in the crypts that sit on the sides of the mountain.

In later years, the abbey housed a prison.  How do you get food and other supplies to the top of the mountain?  Men (prisoners) walked in a giant hamster wheel that turned a winch that pulled a sledge up the steep slope of the mountain.

The area around Mont St. Michel is full of salt flats.  The traditional dish they serve here is pre-salted lamb, since the sheep take in salt when they eat.  Also, the hotel I stayed in, La Mere Poulard, developed another specialty to attract people to eat there.  They make incredibly fluffy omelettes in cast iron pans over an open fire.  I’m not sure what they put in with the eggs, but they taste more like souffles than omelettes.

I got to enjoy the island in the evening as the sun went down and most of the tourists left.  When I left late the next morning, there were long lines for the buses to the island.  I left Mont St. Michel and headed for Dinan, a walled medieval city, but stopped first at Cancale, the oyster capital of the world.

Booths along the harbor sell plates of oysters, and people sit on the steps overlooking the oyster farm eating them.  Then they throw the shell onto the beach.  I had mine sitting down in a restaurant.

I stayed in Dinan, the medieval walled city, for two nights but the real destination was St. Malo and Dinard.  The former has become a bit famous as the setting for All the Light We Cannot See, but was already popular with the French.  Across the bay from St. Malo is Dinard, a beach resort with a casino.  I went to Dinard first and walked along the shore.  Cliffs rise straight up with fabulous mansions all along them.  Unlike the mansions of the Gilded Age in Newport, Rhode Island, these houses are on normal sized lots.  But they are definitely mansions.

Then I took a quick boat ride across the bay to St. Malo, and joined the throngs of tourists walking through the city and on the ramparts.  Unfortunately, St. Malo was pretty much destroyed by the Allies during the Normandy invasion, but the town was rebuilt in the original style.  It felt like an old walled city, even though I knew it wasn’t quite so.

Finally, on Thursday I headed into the heart of Brittany.  It is known for its rugged coastline and I pictured Big Sur with a coastal highway overlooking spectacular views.  Not so.  The rugged coastline is also ragged with many mini-peninsulas and “fingers.”  The road is inland with smaller roads going to each point.  So you really cannot go along the coast.  I chose to make only two forays to the coast.

First I went to Fort La Latte, another medieval castle on one of the promontories.  It commands a view in all directions and was an important site when the enemy came by sea.  It was used as late as the Napoleonic wars, but became unnecessary when the enemies came from the east by land.

A real battering ram with a ram's head

Then I stopped at Ploumanac’h to see (finally) the rugged coastline with its red granite boulders that look like they were dropped there by a giant.