Malestroit to Rohan

20 August: Another beautiful day for biking, though we started closer to midday, having explored Malestroit with its beautiful medieval buildings and the church of St Gilles with Romanesque statues and recently discovered frescoes. The town (population less than 3000) is over a thousand years old. 

The canal flows through the centre and the last barge up from Redon was as late as 1977.

Continuing along the Oust, we had the most beautiful scenery, especially where the river opens out. The weirs with their flowing waterfalls and the lock and floodgate tucked on the side were very pretty as we climbed upstream. Because the Nantes-Brest Canal uses river systems that have been artificially linked with canals, the water flow changes, so that you go up and down the canal all the time. It's quite weird at first but you get  used to it and enjoy the freedom of the downhill run after the climb up - at least until the high point of the canal, anyway.

Another interesting thing about this day was crossing the Voie Verte 3 several times. It is not a parallel cycle path but it has some points in common. We could have taken the VV3 from just out of Malestroit but decided to keep going on the canal route. 

We stopped for quite a while at Josselin, which has a magnificent medieval fortress with Oust at its feet and some wonderful medieval buildings still standing in the central area. The viewing of the castle is a guided tour only and we didn't have time to do it that day, having a rendez-vous further along, so it is on the list for another year. We found Brittany very pretty and welcoming and could easily spend more time on its waterways and greenways (seems to be the English word for Voies Vertes).

To get to Rohan by a reasonable hour we had to skip the sightseeing further on of both an abbey and a forge - such are the daily decisions. But I will come back to that later. Rohan is the name of the family who were very influential in this area, the viscounts, dukes and princes, builders of fortresses and castles, lasting from the 11th to 17th centuries, so it was a surprise to find Rohan, the birthplace of the first Rohan, relatively small and with few remains of the early castle. The campsite was accessible from the bike path (pity we didn't know that when we arrived…) and we set up camp just in time to meet Alexandra, who had brought the girls, Ambre and Fleur, to meet us. It was lovely to see them again and we spent the evening in a crêperie beside the river, a very short distance from the camp. Well, it IS Brittany!