EXPLAINER - This Brittany Journal tells the story of a trip to follow the tracks of the young TE Lawrence, later of Arabia, who cycled through northern France in 1906 and 1907 in his summer holidays. It is a continuation of a journal and cycle trip made in 2019 (see previous entries about Normandy in France Cycle Journal 2019).
In 1906 the young Lawrence spent the best part of a month exploring the area with a friend – CFC Beeson, who was nicknamed ‘Scroggs’ - visiting the medieval castles and abbeys and other sites. This was a year before they left school and on 16th August the young Lawrence turned 17. The following year the young Lawrence arrived via Normandy and the Loire, on a trip that started in the company of his father (who left him after a week to join the rest of the family on holiday in the Channel Islands). On the 1907 trip the young Lawrence was carrying his father’s camera strapped to his bicycle in order to photograph many of the castles he had seen in 1906, particularly if he could find no good postcards. See more about the Young TE Lawrence’s photography.
On both occasions he based himself in Dinard, where the Lawrence family had lived 15 years before and still had some friends, including the Chaignons, with whom the young Lawrence stayed (they had hosted Lawrence’s older brother on a cycling trip in 1905). See more about the Lawrence family and their story.
In addition to following the young Lawrence’s tracks in the area (researched through the letters he wrote home to his parents), I was writing a travel article about a cycling holiday for the Telegraph newspaper, about travel company Headwater’s Backroads of Brittany tour. The route followed a very similar route to that ridden by the young Lawrence.
On their Brittany trip in 1906, the two young men set off to explore. First they headed south for Dinan, then west via Lamballe into the heartland of Brittany. As did I. Well, in fact I didn’t, because I set off from St Malo rather than Dinard, and I headed down the eastern side of the Rance estuary, which is probably the prettier route…
The Brittany Journal
St Malo is neatly hemmed by its ring-road and once I find my way beneath this I am instantly into countryside. I arrive in the Val Riant, which my rusty knowledge of French helps me to translate as Laughing Valley: perhaps there’s a chuckling brook around here somewhere. It is surprisingly rural and extremely pretty, so unpeopled that grass grows down the centre of the roads. And there’s something magical about seeing a chateau through a set of gates and a gun-barrel of trees... Who knows what secrets it holds?
Moments later, pinched by the estuary, I am pushed into a small town – really a suburb of the city, I suppose – but just as quickly I am back into countryside. I stop to watch a man turning hay on a tractor: a machine so ancient that it might almost date from the young Lawrence’s time.
With the Headwater holiday, comes an app on my mobile phone, so my progress is now accompanied by a cheery woman’s voice, giving me instructions. From my previous experience with gps (earlier in this trip it even managed an existential crisis…) I just know that I will disappoint her… But for now she guides me reliably to my first recommended stop, a riverfront village called St Suliac.
I may have been on the road only for an hour, but moving at tourist speed means I can happily justify a stop to look around the village, which has been described to me as one of the prettiest in the region. As I arrive I glide past stone cottages festooned with blooms and come to the promenade, at the end of which is a café in a little shed. Ideal. I make my way across and hover for a couple of minutes, but the lovely ladies are deep into an order for crepes and coffee and don’t even look up. The queue is moving so slowly that I decide I’ll be here all day...
To the Bistro, where my still stuttering, tortured, over-polite French is not up to the job. Might be possible, I enquire, on such a sunny day as this, if the patron pleases… to have a simple coffee…?
“Pas du tout, Msieu” (Certainly not!), he expostulates, laying bare my unacceptable, nay impudent, and most likely wilful misunderstanding of prandial decorum – Pah! Asking a bistro owner for coffee… Whatever next ?! Waftily, he indicates the good ladies in their shed.
“The café, Msieu… is down there…”
So back I go and wait; they’re still sorting the same three crepes, and have gathered another couple of customers in the meantime. Oh, well. I have entered a vortex of holiday time: I can just hang around for a while and tell myself it’s my job, being a tourist, not a man on a hurry on a bicycle. When it arrives, the coffee isn’t even luke warm.
And St Suliac manages to confound me at every turn. Despite being a very pretty village, I can’t catch a single passable photograph of the place. The angle and strength of the sun and the narrow streets of dark stone prevent it. Most of the facades are in shade and any east facing streets have cars parked, snug to the walls. I console myself by buying lunch, which I will eat on the other side of the estuary. I choose a ‘ceck’, a cake, de saumon, salmon. It’s a delicious-looking, loaf-shaped roll.
As I leave the town, the local artist waves from his deck chiar. He has been sitting in the sun outside his studio reading the paper, idly engaged by my confusion.
I have decided on lunch on the riverfront, at a place called Langrolay. The young Lawrence wrote of it in a letter in 1907:
“Toby and I went to Langrolay, a great beauty spot on the Rance, half-way to Dinan: the chestnut woods were exquisite. Toby is very fond of the place.”
It’s a bit out of my way (to the inevitable disappointment of the woman on my gps) but it’ll be interesting to see how it has developed since his day. Perhaps there’s a small resort there now.
I pass through a very dozy village and roll down to the waterfront to find… well, nothing, pretty at all. I dig out my ceck and choose a rock on which to sit. A few moments later a dog appears, a lean but slightly shabby looking animal with a visible strut: evidently I am straying on its territory. A car rolls down the hill; a couple - presumably looking for somewhere to canoodle away their lunch-break - but on seeing me they turn around immediately and head back uphill. Or was it that they spotted, before I did, the man who appears? He is acting strangely, and has a - it that a slightly feral air? - straw hair and weasely eyes. His dog runs back and forth, first to him and next to glare at me, while the man himself keeps appearing and retreating into the undergrowth, as though unable to decide whether to fetch something… his rifle, possibly? If my French didn’t impress a bistro owner, I don’t fancy my fluency in a confrontation… Time to leave. By the time he makes his way towards me, I am half way back up the hill. I finish off my ceck in the forecourt of the dozy village church.
A lunch deserves a coffee… So half an hour later I stop in a tabac, the only place that’s even vaguely open as I pass through a village at 2pm. I enter to a hush: three old lags are glued to the horse-racing. I can’t work out if the lack of energy is just early afternoon inertia - it’s so hot that the chairs and tables are almost wilting - or if they follow some gruff, unspoken code in which nobody even turns their head, tabac-publican included. Eventually I aquire a coffee and a glass of water and sit quietly in a corner. When the race finishes one of the men stands, pronounces in a perfect English accent, “Je swee derziem”, and leaves. Nobody else even shifts in their seat.
So it’s a bit of a relief to reach the lock, where the sailboats and lightweight human activity speak of summer jolliness. It’s green and attractive and cool in the shade of the riverbank trees. The young Lawrence was enchanted by the place. He wrote to his mother:
With Dinan and the Rance I am entirely in love. … With its bathing, (excellent they tell me), its boating (they have some of Salter's boats) and its beauty, I think it should suit the entire family. Suppose we transport ourselves thither some Autumn?
And here’s the guy turning hay on his ancient tractor -