Roscoff and the Pink Granite Coast

3rd -11th August

Roscoff - official smuggler town back in the day; now port of entry from Plymouth and full of travellers at this time of the year. The streets were bursting with people, with cars travelling slowly in between them all. We stayed overnight and walked around the waterfront and main commerce areas but weren’t enticed to stay longer. 

Our hotel is on the left

Roscoff waterfront

We managed to get to Lannion by rail, with two quite long stops, as the bike route was said to be along a busy road. Reports may have been wrong but this is a busy time of the year and we were due for a rest day anyhow. Lannion has a lovely camping ground beside a river which is a short bike ride from the station and even shorter from a supermarket. Space to plug in the computer at a table and have wifi, so that I could finish the blog update. Rest day except for a walk around the town, which is very pretty with many old and attractive houses. Lannion is close to the pink-granite coast, which is the main attraction for tourists. There is a walking path right around the coast, but it is not a bike path. There is a bike route marked by arrows.

Lannion

We followed the arrowed route, which is called the coastal route (la Littorale) but actually follows the arable land above the coast where there are lots of small roads with little traffic that make a do-able route. 

Hills abound but also lovely market gardens - artichokes at three different stages of growth, newly-planted cabbages or similar, dairy and beef farms, glass houses (not necessarily made of glass), one sheep sighted…, chicken farms detected by smell, ditto indoor stock, though the cows also have outside access. Maize and straw bales, still. Beaches, sea views, small islands. 

There are access tracks, arrowed routes and small roads for access to the sea but we by no means checked them all out. There are also towns within easy reach of the bike track but we only went to towns and villages if we needed something. At this time of the years they can be as busy as Paris in rush-hour, though smaller…

We were lucky enough to catch another free concert, at Trébeurden, with local food for sale at modest prices. We had delicious moules-frites (the mussels are very small, especially at this time of year, and very tasty.) 

Olivier, who shared our table, with his moules-frites

Also barbecued Breton sausages, very tasty and a good texture. There was a ‘warm-up’ brass quintet which played nearly all the time people were arriving and getting their food - about two hours before the actual concert, which started at 9pm. The concert itself had four instruments and a singer of local songs who somehow managed to sing strongly for nearly the whole two hours and kept us all entertained. There was dancing from the beginning and this time I participated, at least for the first few numbers. It’s a lot of fun. 

Best of all was meeting up with the people who shared our table. From Clemont-Ferrand, they were on a a trip to Brittany, carrying bikes on their vehicle, a converted VW van. We talked about lots of things all evening and agreed to meet them at their beach-side campsite the following day. A municipal site, it is very reasonably priced, with none of the unwanted extras we hate paying for, and 50m from the beach. We shared lunch, biked to Trégastel with them, went to the supermarket on the way back, and went for a swim in what I consider rather cold water. Cristelle's daughter, 13, was busily occupied all day with the friends she made at the camping ground. We dried out our wet tent and repacked it having decided to stay the night on the site, and as they had a spare tent we didn’t need to use our nicely-dried one. It was also fun trying out a different tent. Worked well, though is bulkier ad heavier than ours when it comes to carrying. With a van you can carry lots of stuff!

Cristelle and Olivier

Trégastel

Our campsite for the night, with one of Cristelle and Olivier's tents

Sunset at Landrellec

Trégastel is one of the more dramatic places on the Pink Granite Coast. There are many houses (including their fences) built of pink granite and there are large, not to say enormous, outcrops of pink granite all over the place. Some looked like beached whales, one was a balancing rock, others made up part of a person’s section or garden. The tides often cover up quite a few of the rocks. 

Granite all over the place!

Pink granite house and fence

This region of France has metres and metres of difference (say, at least 8) between high and low tide. The tide has been harnessed since at least the the 9th century to drive mills for grinding grain and there were about a thousand of them along this coast at some stage. Water flows into a holding basin when the tide comes in, with gates that are pushed open by the tide but open only one way. When the tide lowers the  water cannot flow out the way it came in and is channelled through waterwheels that turn the grindstones that grind the grain. There are still some left but no longer in working order.

The weather is pretty unstable. A downpour at 3pm one day sent us flying past a camping ground near a beach to a bar/hotel up the hill a few kilometres on. Not much in the village but the room was fine, especially for 36€, the people were nice, the charcutier/traiteur (who sells pre-cooked delicious stuff) was excellent and the boulangerie also. (for bread). 

The next day the route seemed less steep, possibly because part of it was a train line once but we stopped for the day at a point where there is a combination of the old (based on religious establishments) at the top of the hill, and the new, based on pleasure boats, at the bottom. The camping ground was not even on the local map, being in a different commune so we took a room opposite the cathedral, for the same modest price as the previous night. 

Our modest room in Tréguier

Steps to our room!

We were able to not only explore the town (what used to be a Saint-Augustine monastery, several huge places that used to be bishop’s palaces, a well-preserved 15th C cloister, cathedral with a Romanesque tower still as part of the building, lots of buildings dating from previous centuries and a square with a range of eating houses where we had a great salad for 6€50 - bargain when the nearest supermarket is somewhere near the camping ground, out of town. On our way past the cathedral about 9.30pm we heard the rumblings of an organ and were able to take in the last twenty minutes or so of an organ recital. Some fantastic Bach and the cathedral was able to do everything it needed with the sound! 

Cloisters at Tréguier

Where's Rodney? He has a black jacket and is towards the right, back to us. We had cider.

The new adaptations at Tréguier - pleasure boats

The Pink Granite seems to end somewhere about Paimpol [Robin - there is a steam train excursion from here for one of these days…] but we didn’t stay to have a look, as we can always catch a train up this way if we want to and we had already been soaked by the black clouds that caught up with us halfway to Paimpol from our starting place of Tréguier. Fortunately we were able to shelter in the garage of a person whose place we were passing but the rain was very heavy and we didn’t get to the garage before we’s experienced the rain in full flight. We got to the other side of Paimpol to the Abbaye of Beaufort before the next cloud decided it was time to drop its load, and this time there were only trees to shelter under - not terribly effective. 

Beauport Abbey (13th C), Breton start of a Compostella route

The best thing to do was just keep going and indeed the sun came out again. The weather has been very patchy - rain, heavy rain, a bit of sun and then another downpour. The hills are still a pull. At least 2 at 15% (one up and one down!) and several long ones where I ran out of gears (I have 18). For the techy bikers out there, a guy we met the other day changed his smallest chain wheel from a 26 to a 22 so that he could do the Breton hills. And had to change the derailleur too,. (I’m not sure if that was on his ordinary bike or the tandem but the message was that these Breton hills are demanding.) 

From here it was down to the beach below, then up again...

By 4pm we were looking for a place to stop - those black clouds again! We got the tent up just as the rain started and were able to shelter from the worst. This camping ground (Lanloup) had a bar which sells snacks, a games room and a ‘heated’ swimming pool under cover, which is great for all the littlies and parents. At 26€ for the camp site, the difference between a cheaper hotel room and a dearer campsite is not much. And the comfort is, in patchy weather!

Oh, and one day we passed a menhir too! It had stood unmolested for centuries (5000-4000BC estimated age) until a churchman Christianised it in the 17th century!)

Menhir 5000-4000BC

After Paimpol and the Abbey