Exploring Brittany
19 September 2010 | Le Mont St-Michel, Saint-Malo, Tréhorenteuc
Sunny, 20C
Photo: the girls at Le Mont St-Michel.
Today we took leave of our friends in St-Agnan and headed east, first to Le Mont St-Michel, and then to Saint-Malo. As this weekend marks "Les Jours de Patrimoine" (Heritage Days), all museums are free, and so both towns were fairly bustling with tourists from far and near. At Saint-Malo, we saw the arrival of the Norweigan tall ship "Sorlandet", which has been chartered by my former school, West Island College, for its "Class Afloat" programme. The "Sorlandet" replaces the "Concordia", which sank last year off Brazil, fortunately with no loss of life. We managed to exchange a few words with the students, including a Nova Scotian at the "Sorlandet's" helm, and found they had just completed their inaugural passage from Norway.
After we left Saint-Malo, we headed south-east and wound up spending the night at a "gîte" in Tréhorenteuc, on the edge of "la fôret Brocéliande". En route, we saw a sign advertising a "festive dinner", and since we were just a little to the left of starving, we decided to check it out. When we arrived at the dinner site, we found a deserted courtyard inside a very old manoir. However, the owner soon materialised to explain that we had unfortunately missed the big dinner as it had been held the day before, and it was evident from the décor still hanging inside the courtyard that it had been quite the affair, with medieval banners on display and enough tables and benches for nearly two hundred. After introductions and a brief explanation of our predicament (no dinner, no place to stay), the owner (Alain) and his family and friends who were still cleaning up the leftovers from the night before promptly offered (a) a beer, (b) to call around and find a place for us to stay, and (c) a tour of the manoir. The original manoir was built by nobility in the 1400's, and the "modern" part of the manoir was built in the mid-1700's. We left with directions to a place to stay and wanting to come back for next year's medieval dinner. We also found out that the Brocéliande Forest is the site of many of the Arthurian Legends, such as Merlin's Tomb, the Valley of No Return, and the home of the knights Lancelot, Gawaine, and Morgana la Fey.