Not so tall stories...

A matter of scale

More and more I become aware that the power and attraction of Brittany's landscape is a matter of scale. There are no extremes here, neither of terrain nor temperature, and the degree of comfort and security that confers is a major factor in connectedness. It is often the difference between feeling oneself within a landscape rather looking at it from the outside, which inevitably carries a degree of emotional detachment.

This is partly a matter of age: as we get older we often start to seek peace from our surroundings, a reassurance relevant to our size and powers of endurance, rather than challenge or adventure or otherness. This is not a devaluation of experience, however, as our perception of significance is simply magnified in a smaller sphere. I am at one with my surroundings, in the forest where I live, on the thousand kilometre pilgrimage trail around Brittany I am currently walking, or crossing the open moors of the Monts d’Arrée, my spiritual home.

These ‘mountains’, reaching heights just under 400m, are the highest hills in Brittany, and some may think hardly warrant the title. But 330 million years ago they were on a par with the Alps, at the western end of the Armorican massif. Gradually exposed to a battering by Atlantic weather patterns, they are diminished in stature, stripped of granite, down to toothy crests of schist and quartzite with sandstone underfoot on the rocky paths. And yet…

The famous folklorist Anatole Le Braz memorably described their intense character: no longer mountains, they remember what they were. Essence of mountain now distilled over moor and peat bog, the latter known as the Yeun Elez, cradle of Breton legend and entrance to the Celtic underworld. A neolithic alignment runs across a plateau of heath below the height of Menez Mikael with its landmark chapel on the top, an intermediary layer between the peak and the morass below, maybe marking a three part layering of new Stone Age cosmology. This was a special place from the time of man’s first settlement on the land.

The Monts d’Arrée are often given the adjectives of separation from desirable experience: bleak, desolate, empty, a repository of fear and danger. In the 19^th century there was only a single house between Plouneour-Menez to the north and Brasparts to the south. Travel across such wasteland was indeed dangerous then. Wolves were a very real threat: the last one in the area was seen near Loqueffret in 1906 and the Musée du Loup in Le-Cloitre-Saint-Thégonnec has many examples of their menace to life and livelihood. Place-names retain the memory in Breton: Ti Bleiz (Wolf House), Roc’h ar Bleiz (Wolf Rock). Peasant superstition avoided calling a wolf a wolf and nick-names like Guillou (diminutive of William) or Ki noz (dog of the night) were often used instead.

More mysterious beings lurked among the stagnant pools around the Elez stream in the bottom of the vast bowl of hills. The Nocturnal Washerwomen, rinsing their sheets, called out to any hapless passer-by to help with the folding, then twisted their victims inside the fabric, tighter and tighter until their bones were crushed and their life spirit leaked out onto the marsh. Les Lavandières de la Nuit is not a story specific to the Monts d’Arrée, but it fits their eerie landscape and terrifying atmosphere, as configured in a painting of 1861 by Yann d’Argent, now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Quimper. These poor women are variously portrayed as wicked sinners, lost souls and infanticides, destined to the punishment of eternal exile from society.

The Korrigans, a misanthropic bunch of little people inhabiting ancient burial grounds and underground spaces here, liked to dance in the round on the moor at night. If disturbed by a traveller, they invited him to join them, linking hands in the circle. And they continued dancing until the stranger dropped dead of exhaustion. There are many versions of gnomes, imps, elves and fairies in Brittany with localised names and identities. The curmudgeonly, unpredictable and unwelcoming image of the korrigans is not so far from the reputation of inhabitants of the Monts d’Arrée, notoriously closed and stubborn, an insularity born of distinctive geography and environment. Seventeenth century missionaries regarded the area as a godless place, outside the bounds of the civilising hand of Christianity.

The strange sights and noises of the nocturnal marshes gave rise to many tales of other-worldly beings like the feux-follets, flickering coloured lights said to be souls in torment by the church, but in reality probably the result of chemical processes in the decomposition of material in the peat-bog. Harbingers of death are another hazard of the Monts d’Arrée’s singular night world. Seeing a black dog on the marsh was such an omen, or hearing the spine-chilling sound of the clanking wheels of Ankou’s cart. The Breton Grim Reaper, skeletal under his dark cloak, favoured the rough tracks around the Yeun Elez for seeking souls to harvest with his scythe. From this designation, there was no escape.

These legends of jeopardy, risk and fatality reflect the very real hazards of crossing such a landscape, where physical threat arose naturally from the environment. Getting lost, sinking into the bog, falling prey to robbers and murderers so far from any source of help: all these were easily explicable, but the extraordinary atmosphere of these little hills has magnified the dangers into stories of a wild world beyond the bounds of normality. The otherness of the Monts d’Arrée is an echo of their former physical selves, those huge mountains out of all proportion to human beings. Their stories have long shadows, and that arcane landscape gets the legends it deserves.

Mountains worldwide have often been regarded as homes of the gods in local culture, reflecting their inaccessibility, mystery and a sense of awe determined by extreme size. The Monts d’Arrée have no such story. Their tales are grounded in human reality, the challenging physical barrier they presented between the rich, commercially developed north of the department of Finistère and the capital city of Quimper in the poorer south. Politics, business, trade and administration required journeys over their lonely tracks and wolf-paths. Their scale may be small but their image, pregnant with the past, loomed mightily in the consciousness of the inhabitants. Approaching from the north, they present a veritable bastion.

Mountains 400m high, the most towering cliffs near Plouha barely 100m above the sea. These are the modest extremes of Brittany. But these bald figures are quite irrelevant to impressiveness of the scenery, which is determined by context not comparison. These are marvellous settings in which to place ourselves. So we can be ‘on top of the world’ on Menez Mikael or Menez Hom or ‘at the end of the earth’ at the Pointe de Corsen, the westernmost point of France, or the Pointe du Raz sticking out into the Atlantic, without becoming mountaineers or endurance hikers. And there we can feel our surroundings spectacular in a proportionate way to our own existence in the same world. We are not cut down to size but embraced and supported by our surroundings.