Church buys controversial statue in nearby Ploërmel

I was amused to read a news article on Connexion France about a dispute over a statue of Pope John Paul II in the town of Ploërmel - which is only 20 miles from our Brittany Gite.

According to the Connexion article, a dispute had arose because the statue of the Pope had a cross on the top - a symbol that broke France’s 1905 law of separation between Church and State.

The town council has agreed to sell the statue to the Catholic Church for €20,000.

By selling the statue and the church moving it from a public carpark to a nearby Catholic private college, the dispute that would have required the cross on the top to be removed appears to have been resolved.

The Brittany folded baguette

Just read an amusing article on the Daily Mail website announcing that a Brittany bakery has invented the folded baguette that fits easier into your shopping bag.  

What do you think, clever idea or not?

     

Cornish culture, the pasty in Brittany

In all the years we have been visiting France and our Brittany Gite in particular we've noticed that despite Europeanisation there are still some definite food cultural differences.

Take the Cornish Pasty for one. It just doesn't seem to exist across the Dover straits.

I'm not exactly obsessed with the Cornish Pasty as a must-eat item, but I do quite like them, and I've noticed that whilst the British supermarket always stocks a reasonable range of pasties, pies, sausage rolls, etc, there just doesn't work seem to be any French equivalents.

When we're working on renovating the Gite a Cornish Pasty, a pork pie or a sausage roll comes in handy as a quick snack food, but since you just can't buy them abroad we end up taking some in the chiller box with us when we go.

But I've just read that an enterprising Cornish company is sending 6000 of the humble pasties across the border to the annual festival intercultural in Lorient.

With so many pasties going they must be a popular item but I wonder what the French really think of such English food?
Unfortunately I'm not going to the festival so I'll have to continue my personal export activity on my next trip.

Brittany's staying the same - no proposed change to her borders

Yesterday French President Hollande put forward proposals to reduce the number of regions in France from 22 down to 14 in order to save an estimated €25 billion in administration costs.

Unfortunately the residents of Brittany won't be happy with the proposed changes as they had been campaigning to return Nantes and the Loire Atlantic department into Brittany, reversing a change made in 1941 when the Pays de La Loire region was created.

Neither Brittany nor Pays de la Loire are proposed to be changed and so no doubt in traditional French style we will see street protests, marches and a strike or two as the population of the affected regions vent their views both for and against the changes.

Whether of course France will ever manage to sack the affected regions civil servants and make the expected savings is of course another matter ...

Postscript
And as I predicted, news of angry reports on France 24 of how the Breton people have reacted to Brittany not being reunified with campaigners calling the decision "revolting", "non-democratic" and "a feudal decision"!
Read more on France 24.

Pizza time - Le Petit Tonneau

Quick post...

Tonight we popped out for a meal at Le Petit Tonneau (the little barrel) in Rohan which is about 15 minutes drive away from our Gite, on the road to Pontivy, and is immediately beside the Nantes / Brest canal that runs through our part of Brittany.

Le Petit Tonneau is a mainly pizza restaurant with both a takeaway and an eat in restaurant service. We've eaten there a few times and once again it was a great meal, very tasty and filling pizzas and tagliatelle cabonara with wine and soft drinks came to a very reasonable €41 all in.

After the main course we were so stuffed, none of us could even manage a desert - even Banana Split was too much to face! Clearly a good meal!

Fête du Pain et des Battages

Weather was a bit variable first thing this morning although it cleared up and was hot and sunny by the later afternoon so we went out from our Gite for the afternoon.

Before I went to Brittany I checked the Points Dechine website that lists many local vide greniers (car boot sales), fêtes and brocantes (antique fairs).

We went to one just the other side of Loudeac, about 20 minutes away, that had a car boot sale and country fair combined. It cost just €3 to enter and we had a great day out, looking at the Breton shire horses, local craft stalls, horse dressage show, hay making, side shows plus the obligatory galette saucisse (buckwheat pancake with sausage filling) for lunch.

Here's a few photos from the day.

(The last picture isn't a medieval torture device, it's a frame to hold a horse whilst it is being shoed. Liz wasn't in favour of it though)

Spring has arrived in Brittany

A couple of lovely photos taken last week of spring flowers at our Gite.

Saturday is Josselin Market Day !

Every Saturday morning the streets of Josselin are closed to traffic and a busy market runs in the heart of this lovely mediaeval "little city of character" down the hill towards the Chateau.

The market runs down the hill and the normally quiet streets are packed with sellers of just about anything - fresh fruit and vegetables, fish, clothing, household wares, pots & pans, hot roast chickens, table clothes, computer games, plants, plastic BB-guns, hand-made jewellery, Breton cider, and much more. There's even a stall selling beds and folding dining room tables right next to another selling fresh chickens!

It can be quite hard walking down through the throngs of people because the residents of Josselin and the surrounds seem to take the event as an opportunity to stop and catch up on all the local gossip as well.

Every time we are over in Brittany we try to go to the market, mainly to browse, to buy a kilo of fresh green French beans and a demi of peaches or plums, the kids buy some XBox games from the English video game seller, and we treat ourselves to a scrummy sausage pancake for just a couple of euros from one of the stalls.

One of the other things we have as a little family tradition when we visit Josselin is we take a family picture. We don't often stop as a family to have a group photo but we now almost always stop in the same little park by the top of the market and I balance my camera on a wall to take the shot.

On my blog photo we have an older one of these family photos, which must have been taken at least 4 years ago, maybe more, because our children look an awful lot younger than they did in the photo taken this year, and I am sure I had much more hair then! I think it's just that I'd had a haircut just before my holiday, well that's the story I'm sticking to anyway ...

As well as the hair and age of the children this photo also has Whitey with us, our second dog who is a little love but does like sleeping in Dexter's bed.

Much more details on the lovely city of Josselin, which is about 15 minutes from our Gite is on our Gite website. We also have details of the times and days of Brittany markets in other towns near to our Gite. Please do come and enjoy Josselin market for yourself, we love it!

Moncontour medieval videos

Following on from my earlier posting from the Moncontour medieval festival, here are two short video's to give some further flavour to the day's entertainment.

I tried more than once to upload these video's from McDonald's when I was in France but just couldn't get enough bandwidth over their free Wifi - so had to send these separately when I got back home to the UK.
(and sorry again to my family for having to sit around in McDonalds, twice, for over an hour whilst I tried !)

The first is of a procession coming up the hill for a "mock religious interrogation:

And the second is of some musicians walking past us:

Very colourful Breton home

[Warning, this is the very first time that I have ever tried the
Mail2Blogger interface of emailing my Blog posting to Blogger, so if the results aren't readable or are badly formatted, blame Blogger not me!]

Across much of our part of Brittany there's a real mixture of properties, the traditional stone-built ex-farmhouses with steeply pitched slates roofs, and the newer block construction properties which are also tiled in slate but are pretty universally rendered and then painted with a near-identical shade of buttermilk or pale-yellow exterior paint.

Most of the Breton population seem to prefer the newer houses than the cost of renovating and maintaining an older property (so us ex-pat's get to buy a lot of them!), and I can kind of understand the logic of wanting to live in a more modern double-glazed and centrally-heated home, but whilst you don't get the "housing estate" effect of rows and rows of identical houses as most new builds are built to order once the owner has bought the land, you still can't get over the uniformity of exterior appearance.

I guess there is no local planning regulations as to what colour to paint your home, it's just convention that causes everyone to stick to buttermilk, but for one house owner we drove past on the way into Loudeac to go to the supermarket for food shopping the other day, the owner is definitely bucking the trend with their brilliant orange home.

We just had to stop and take a few photos:

Moncontour Medieval Festival

After visiting the car boot sale around La Cheze's lake we carried on to the medieval city of Moncontour for their medieval festival.

The Moncontour Medieval Festival is held every 2 years as the clock is turned back on the whole of the town with the streets full of jugglers, magicians, street entertainers, sideshows, knights and armourers, and everyone is turned out in fancy dress - apparently if you arrive in suitable medieval clothes then you don't have to pay to enter but at €20 for the family of four of us it wasn't exactly breaking the bank to pay.

We've only visited Moncontour's fete medieval once before in 2005 as we've managed to take our holidays either just before or just after the festival so we really enjoyed our visit this time, wandering around the streets and seeing the sights and sounds.

Unfortunately 'rain stopped play' prematurely as the heat wave broke and we were treated to a torrential downpour which caused an early retreat back home to the Gite.

And even the rubbish bins were suitably dressed up for the medieval fete:

Windmills on my mind

I find it interesting to see the way that Wind farms and Wind turbines are treated with general antipathy by the British popular press (who presumably reflect the one view of the general UK population) and the way that Wind turbines are appearing with increasing frequency in little communes and towns all across France.

Although France generally has a much higher usage of Nuclear fuel than the UK (see my 2007 blog posting of where does all the French electricity come from) they still face the same sustainability challenges that we have in the UK, and in Brittany in particular the region is a significant net-importer of electricity as there are no major power stations (Nuclear or otherwise) in the region at all.

Over the years that we have been travelling over to France and through Brittany we've seen more little pockets of wind turbines springing up, but since last year there's been a small farm put up about 15km away just outside St Malo-des-Trois-Fontaines (which has to be one of my favourite french placenames - St Malo of the 3 Fountains), and a new farm of 8 turbines is currently being built outside Plumieux which is about 4km from our Gite. In fact when I was out walking the dog one day I first noticed the new poles for the turbines from the top of the hill above our Gite, so next time we were out in the car decided to pop in to go and take a look at them under construction.

It's only when you get up close to the Wind turbine do you realise how absolutely massive they are. From a distance yes they look tall, but when you are standing in the middle of a corn field surrounded by tall cranes and a kit of parts to make the turbine, do you then realise the size and scale. If you look at the pictures of the rotor head and the wind turbine blades that have Jack standing next to them can you see that the blades are about 2m in width where they join onto the rotor head.

The wind turbines were all pre-fabricated in sections, each part then sealed at the end to prevent dust and dirt getting in, and then shipped to site for assembly in what looks like a giant meccano kit. All the sections are basically bolted together, although as you can see from the ends of the windmill blades, there are an awful lot of bolts to do up !

The blades themselves must be 30 or so metres long and what surprised me at the time was how flexible they were. Standing at the end of one of the blades you could literally "twang it" with your hand and the whole blade would flex back and forth. They must be made of some kind of fibre-glass type flexible construction and are not rigid metal I guess so that changes and turbulence on the wind doesn't cause unnecessary stresses and strains. Immensely strong though to take the pressure of a strong wind blowing against them.











Liz of course couldn't resist the "holding the windmill" up picture ...


I took all of the above photos when we were over at the Gite in August and the top-most picture was the most complete windmill. Most of the rest of the 7 were little more than a few sections on the ground. When I was over in Brittany last week in November and took this photo, all bar one of the windmills were complete, turning, and generating electricity for the local commune.

What a day to go driving in France - but had a worthwhile diversion

According to France Magazine that I was reading just before we went on holiday, the weekend of the 7th/8th August this year, and in fact the 7th August is precisely the worst of the "black traffic" days in 2010. The "black days" are those days highlighted by the French department for traffic information (or somesuch similar) as being those days that are particularly likely to busy, difficult to drive on, and prone to delays.

And of course the 7th August was the day that we were had inadvertently chosen to drive down from Calais to our Brittany Gite.

Oh well, we'd already booked and paid for the Eurotunnel crossing so we had to make the best of the journey.
Only 15 minutes after leaving Eurotunnel we ran into a traffic jam on the autoroute just south of Boulogne and I feared that the travel premonitions had come home to roost. Fortunately the delay was just caused by a small section of roadworks and after 5 minutes or so of queueing we were back on the move again.

In fact the motorway drive down through Pas de Calais, the topmost corner of Picardie, Normandy (both Haute Normandy and Basse Normandy) and into Brittany was fairly trouble free; the only other hold up was at the last toll booth on the Autoroute just outside Caen where they are building a new wider toll booth with more lanes and increasing the section of Autoroute to 3 lanes - and of course we got held up in the roadworks there for a little while.

The last section of the route we take down through Brittany is dual carriageway for almost the entire journey but there are 3 small sections where the N176 narrows down to single carriageway. At the first couple of these restrictions there were slight holdups but nothing to write home about (or at least to write a Blog article about), but at the third where the road narrows to a long bridge over the River Rance estuary I could see the traffic slowing down when we were 2km or so from the bridge and so elected to turn off and try to divert round the bridge.

Well the sat-nav tried to valiantly re-route us back back onto the N176 as we hared down country lanes, through villages and cross-country away from the traffic jam on the bridge until eventually it admitted defeat and selected a new bridge route further upstream across the Rance. As we got to the bridge between Lyvet and La Hisse on the D57 we saw it was a swing bridge which had just opened to let a number of tall sailing ships through into the harbour.

10 minutes later all the sailing boats had crossed through into the lock beside the swing bridge, the bridge closed again and we were on our way. No more holdups and we reached the Gite well before dark.

Cleaning out the guttering of leaves and bird nests

If anyone has a sure-fire way of keeping the gutters free of debris then please do leave a comment as I'd love to save myself a job every time I visit our Brittany farmhouse.

Bird's nest in the gutters

In France we've been lucky enough to buy quite a large property with the 3 bedroom section of the house that we rent out, a second three bedroom section that I'm very slowly renovating, a stable and hay-loft section, plus there's a large external barn that used to be the original farmhouse but now stores our bikes and outdoor children's toys.

And with all this property comes an awful lot of guttering of which a fair chunk is underneath a massive 150+ year old oak tree.

Soon after buying the house I bought several rolls of black gutter-guard which is basically a rigid plastic mesh that you unroll down the gutters and then clip it in place with the supplied plastic clips to prevent leaves and other debris falling into the gutters.

I think its fair to say it doesn't really work. On the sections of guttering that are not underneath the oak tree we get a few leaves and twigs landing on the top of the gutter-guard and everything's fine, but for the sections that are underneath the lee of the tree we get so many leaves, twigs and leaf mulch that it not only sets into a solid mat, but it also inexplicably ends up underneath the gutter guard and in the guttering.

So just about every single time I go over to France I end up getting out the ladders and spend half a day climbing up the ladders, removing the rubbish off the top and then removing the black slimy wet mess out from underneath the gutter guard. Of course having the gutter guard in place gives me an additional challenge as I have to unclip it before I can remove the smelly leaf mess, then clip it back into place ready for my next visit to France and the whole cleaning out process to start again.

It's not that I really mind clearing out the gutters but I did hope that the plastic mesh would prevent me having to do this job.

Last August when I was over in France - cleaning out the guttering again - I noticed that one enterprising bird had found that the corner junction of two sets of guttering was the perfect place to build a nest in. The baby birds had long since flown away so the nest it was just one more thing for me to clear out of the gutters whilst up the ladder.

Dinosaurs at 'Parc de Préhistoire de Bretagne'

Plant eating dinosaur

One of the places I took the kids to when we holidayed in Brittany last year was the "Parc de Préhistoire de Bretagne" which is just outside the medieval village of Rochefort-en-Terre, about 45 minutes drive from our holiday Gite.

Rochefort-en-Terre itself is a lovely picturesque Brittany town that's been recognised as a Petite Cité de Caractère (literally 'little city of character') and from the brief look we made looks to be well worth a visit in its own right, so will be somewhere we plan to return to for a proper 'look' on a future visit.

There are about a dozen of the Petite Cités de Caractère across Brittany, several of which are close to our holiday home including Josselin (with its chateau, cobbled streets and medieval buildings), Lizio (full of granite stone buildings and with an Insectarium and museum of 'fantastic machines') and Moncontour (where they hold a Medieval street festival every two years).

Neolithic camp site

The Parc de Préhistoire literally means "Park of the Pre-History of Brittany" and it tells the story of the history of the inhabitants of ancient Brittany from dinosaurs 500,000 years ago up to almost modern day man at 2,000 years BC.

The 25 hectare park is located in a disused set of wooded quarries and as you walk through the forests the journey starts with full-size dinosaur models then progresses through a series of tableau's of how mankind has evolved including Homo-Erectus the first Brittany inhabitants, Neanderthal man, Cro-Magnon man and then the Breton's that built the stone menhirs and megaliths. There are a number of scenes including hunting, fishing, life in the primitive villages, early day music and how the burial mounds were constructed.

Catching a Mammoth

As a family we had a great time exploring the park, looking at the models, trying to count the number of dinosaurs and reading the information boards set beside each little tableau. Each information board is helpfully presented in French, English and German so the kids didn't have to suffer my dodgy French translations!

At the end of the tour there is of course the obligatory gift shop which did have some quite nice stone crystals which the boys liked, and of course there's the snack bar which I enjoyed much more!

Erecting a stone Dolmen

The Parc de PreHistoire website is unfortunately a bit disappointing and doesn't really give all that much details or photos about the park, and the map of the park doesn't really give you a feel of the scale of the place - it probably takes a comfortable 2 hours to walk around although you could easily spend more time if you wanted to.

Anyway, we enjoyed our visit there and I hope that this brief review and my photos wet your appetite to go as well if you're visiting that part of central Brittany.

Hunting for Antelope

Tour de Bretagne - April 2010

Tour de Bretagne

Next month (from April 25th through to April 30th) the Tour de Bretagne is running, and like it's "big brother" the Tour de France it's a hard fought multi-stage race through the villages and towns of rural France.

One thing will be different though, there'll be no "King of the Mountains" (on account of Brittany being somewhat flatter than the Alps!), but this year the race is moving offshore for the first time ever with Jersey hosting the first two days of the Tour.

There's expected to be some 22 teams and 400 cyclists taking part in the race, so if you're over in Jersey (or nudge, nudge, our Brittany holiday Gite - which just happens to be free for that week!) then it looks like a fantastic event to go and see.

When we've been over in Brittany ourselves we often see cyclists taking part in local races or practising along the main roads, and like most rural French events there's a real carnival atmosphere with music, the obligatory bar, and of course the hot crepe's and pancake stall as well - yummy!

One time we were driving in Brittany we managed to take a wrong turn and found ourselves driving down the cycle race course. All the side streets had been closed off with barriers and we had to divert an awful long way before we could get "out" of the race! Fortunately we were a few hours before the race started so the streets were still empty but I'm sure we got a few looks from the locals who wondered why the crazy English were driving round their cycle race.

More details on the Tour de Bretagne on their website, and details of the Tour de Bretagne coming to Jersey on the BBC news website.

Tomato growing on a massive scale in Brittany

I'll say it now, I know very little about growing tomatoes other than they need a lot of water.

But it seems that our Breton cousins know a lot more about tomato growing than I do.

I just came across an article about how Brittany tomato growers are now starting to sell electricity as a by-product of generating heat to grow the greenhouse tomatoes. And it seems as if they chew through an awful lot of heat with one Brittany farm consuming 500 cubic metres of gas an hour to heat 41,000 square metres of greenhouses!

Well I never knew that there were so many tomatoes grown in Brittany.

You learn something new every day ...

Two Brittany news items - Seaweed and Students

A couple of quick Brittany-related news snippets I came across during the last week ...

Firstly the BBC leads off with news of rotting poisonous seaweed on a beach in Brittany is suspected as being the cause of a lorry driver's death.
Each year there's an annual cleanup of the beaches at Binic on the North Brittany coast (fortunately some distance from our Brittany Gite) to remove up to 2,000 tons of rotting seaweed and it seems that this driver collapsed and died after removing three lorry loads of rotting seaweed.

Yuck!

Secondly, and more lucky for this person, the Telegraph reports that a drunken French student who lay down to sleep on the railway line escaped unharmed when a high speed TGV from Paris to Quimper ran over him.
The man passed out between the rails and despite the train driver applying the emergency brakes the train didn't come to a stop until 900m afterwards!

I love the way that the story reports that they were "unable to wake him afterwards" and that "police were hoping for an explanation when he regains conciousness" - a lucky student methinks.

Moncontour medieval festival - 2nd August 2009

Unfortunately we're not going to be over in Brittany on 2nd August 2009 (we arrive a week later) so we're going to miss the Medieval Festival held bi-annually in the picturesque walled city of Moncontour which is about 30 minute drive from our holiday Gite.

We've only managed to get to the festival once, and that was four years ago in 2005. Last time it was on in 2007 we missed the event by one day, and this time we're going to miss it by a week.

If however you are over in Brittany then I can thoroughly recommend a trip there.

Further details of the festival, events, prices and a short video are on the Moncontour Medieval website, and there's some photos of our visit to the 2005 Medieval festival on this Blog.

Oh well, we'll have to wait until 2011 now !!

Moncontour's medieval festival is on tomorrow - 19th August 2007

Medieval Jouster

Every two years the medieval walled town of Moncontour (which is about 30 minutes drive from our holiday Gite) holds a medieval festival, and I've just checked the moncontour medieval festival website and found out that it's on tomorrow.

We go over to France on Monday so will miss it by one day - rats!

Two years ago the festival was in the middle of our holiday and we had a great time watching the jousters, jugglers, magic shows, street entertainers, etc. The whole town is converted into one giant festival, pretty much everyone dresses up, and there's loads to see and do.

Here's some more photos from 2 years ago:

Everyone dresses up!

Street Entertainers

Ready to do battle ...

Jousting

More entertainment