The beginning is magical. I stand on the sacred summit of Mont-Saint-Michel-de-Brasparts, topped by a hardy little chapel. Sweeping views range across the crests of the Monts d’Arrée, highest hills in Brittany, and the Yeun Elez below, a boggy expanse that houses the entrance to the Celtic underworld. Here beats the very heart of Breton legend, enshrining ghostly figures like mysterious black dogs, dangerous nocturnal washerwomen and dodgy gnomes. My starting point has been chosen carefully, a site whose tradition long predates Christianity, a crucible for pagan forces like worship of the Sun God and Druidic rites, and, long before that, considering the wavy alignment of stones that runs across a plateau below my vantage point, neolithic significance. It is also home territory to me, a terrain that draws me endlessly onto the craggy skin of the moors with its far-reaching vistas over history and geology.
Today I am embarking on the Tro Breiz, that elusive medieval pilgrimage, and my own personal journey around Brittany. It is to be the culmination of twenty-five years work exploring the bottomless well of the region’s eventful culture. I am neither Catholic nor Christian, but pilgrimage today, especially post-pandemic, is more fluidly regarded with many motives behind individual quests along the route. Many of the sacred sites along the way were honoured and valued thousands of years before the birth of Jesus Christ. But those Dark Age Breton saints who brought Christianity to the west of the Armorican peninsula hold a stirring imaginative pull, given their combination of ambivalent callings, all too human weaknesses, semi-magical workings and a formative role in the establishment of what would later become Brittany. They are also still a vibrant cast in contemporary culture, characters on the cusp of legend and history whose flimsy origins have proved no barrier to providing a fixed point of reference for Bretons even today. They are, in a certain fashion, the opening lines of a wonderful story.
Because of its circular form, pilgrims committing to this particular journey probably set out from home towards the first religious landmark on the circuit. The spot I have chosen to begin is half-way between two of the seven cathedrals covered in the full route: Quimper to the south and Saint-Pol-de-Léon to the north where I am heading. The top of Mont-Saint-Michel de Brasparts or Menez Mikael to give its Breton name, is a suitably dramatic natural setting to nail my commitment. The traditional Catholic saint is a late-comer to this spot, which was once called Motte de Cronon, presumably in common with other distinctive summits a place for worship of the Sun God. It is one of the seven sacred hills of Brittany. From here I can see right around a ring of crests and right across the vast marsh in the sunken middle. The TV antenna to the right of lumpy Roc’h Trévézel is a landmark symbolic of more modern preoccupations. Just to the right of that is a small protuberance called Roc’h Ruz, the Red Rock, which technically is the topmost point of Brittany. Straight ahead is a decommissioned nuclear power station, founded soon after the whole area was declared a regional park for its bleak beauty in the 1960s.
The Monts d’Arrée are a place of many conflicting energies. The heights seem very much the realm of Air, with the huge skies and competing winds, an outdoor cathedral for more elemental forms of religion than the churches and chapels that highlight the Tro Breiz pilgrimage. It is also the landscape that makes me feel at home. More than that. The moment my foot treads on those rough skittering moorland paths, I am most myself, fitting naturally into a skein of earth and atmosphere that can sustain my spirit like nothing and nowhere else. Here I shed the restrictive layers of imposed identity - a foreigner, a woman, an ill-fitting loner - and enter a simplicity of being that is my element. For me, the open air has always meant more than any man-made structure or a peopled environment. Natural outsider I may be, but here I have found my place and I knew it from the first moment of acquaintance with the Monts d’Arrée, a profound epiphany on my very first journey to Brittany. The stony scrambles and sunken ways of this wild land are my spiritual paths. Not desolation but inspiration.
Before me now, this eerie landscape has been rendered doubly so by the results of last year’s awful summer fires, leaving a sea of bleached quartzite gleaming like some lonely moonscape against the dark shadow of biblical scorched earth. It lies naked, stripped of proper clothes, a skinned animal. Splotches of bright moss and grass stalks show regeneration but there are no leaves on the branches of stunted heathland trees, and much of the traditional flora of the landes like gorse and broom is nothing but a tangle of blackened stems. There is still a whiff of smoke in the air after all this time. It is a sight both heart-breaking and fearfully thrilling. Some new elemental identity rises from the destruction of the familiar old, the unseen substructure forced shockingly into the limelight. But the unmistakable character of the landscape - these little hills are the last stand of what were once huge mountains like the Alps - remains deep, harsh and mystical.
Love this Wendy. Pilgrimages have been part of my rhythms -- less so no but my daughter walked the Camino before Covid and has done other long trails so the tradition continues.
I love the energy in this piece, Wendy, and its embrace of humility - a bold and gentle combination.