Today I am leaving Normandy - last call Mont St Michel – and crossing into Brittany. And after a day of not following the young TE Lawrence’s trail, the ‘Mont’ is where I will re-join it (he visited at least twice in 1906 and again in 1907). After that it’s along the coast to St Malo.
St Malo was a rather functional place for him: it was his arrival and departure point on the cross-channel ferry in 1906 and somewhere to collect mail at a post restante. More relevant really is Dinard, the town across the Rance estuary, which he used as a base for his travels. Interestingly, he had actually lived in Dinard as a small boy, between the ages of three and six (1891-94) and he stayed with a family that his parents had known at that time, the Chaignons.
One of the great things about pedalling long distances is that I can default to the behaviour of a young man. It has taken years to change my ways - to grow up? – but now, working hard physically instead of sitting at a desk, I have licence to eat myself stupid (I have never had Lawrence’s ascetic view on life). This means Nutella, something that I love but haven’t eaten for years. This morning I luxuriate in it, savaging the little plastic packets and slathering it all over sections of baguette. And I gorge on pain au chocolat. I have become fond of Ducey in my 14 hours there, so as I set off across the bridge I make sure to look back at the Auberge.
Before long I am back on the cycle route, the voie verte, which is safe but a little dull, as it passes through the ‘prés’, the marshy littoral pastures known for their lamb. Mont St Michel slides left and right on the horizon. When I reach the car park I am surprised to encounter two pilgrims, she carrying an outsize rucksack, he pushing a wheelbarrow. Blimey. Do they travel everywhere like that? I wonder how far they have come.
The young Lawrence of Arabia visited Mont St Michel at least three times and had mixed views of the place – the abbey tower was a little stumpy for him. See two articles comparing the site today with his impressions on visiting in 1906 and 1907, including a visit to Mère Poulard for an omelette (something he rather archly decided to forego).
As I leave the Mont I pass into Brittany, where the ‘prés’ turn to arable land: cabbages and cauliflowers in exact lines stretching far into the distance, like some exercise in perspective. They point to rather sad, beaten-looking buildings. The estuary flatlands around Mont St Michel feel a bit desolate – so unlike the plain of central Normandy, with its gradual slopes and kempt greenery, and – as I will discover - the land in Brittany, which is more like a turbulent green sea – the land rolls and rucks up into ridges like an explosively fertile carpet. The building style has already turned from timber frame to hefty, mid-brown stone.
So much for physical differences between the two régions. What of the people? Are they as different from one another as well? Yes, as it turns out.
The two have radically different origins. The Normans, literally ‘men of the north’, are descended from Viking invaders. Starting in around 800 AD, these Norsemen grabbed land, pillaged and ransomed their way to dominance along the Seine basin. Gradually though, they decided they liked the life here, so much that they allowed themselves to become entangled into treaties with the Franks – and ended up guarding the approaches to Paris along rather than ransacking them. Before long they were French.
Unlike their garrulous Gallic neighbours, the Normans are known for being a little silent, for not giving much away, perhaps because, so the theory runs, they can never make up their minds – a local expression has it: "P'têt ben que oui, p'têt ben que non" (“Maybe yes… but then maybe no…”). More charitably perhaps, they like to consider things carefully and come up with a definitive answer. They do have an affinity for the British apparently. Well, besides welcoming thousands of Britons to the D Day celebrations each year, they were our last successful invaders, in 1066, and over the following 300 years they certainly left their stamp on our royal court, institutions, ways of life and manners…
Not least in Norman arches... As they were caught up in Franksih religion they became great church builders, and of course castle builders, developing a romanesque style that was taken off to England and elsewhere on their travels and crusades. Norman keeps survive all over England, including in the Tower of London.
The Bretons have a different origin, though they too have their connections with Britain, not least in the name, which rattles down the linguistic chain from the Latin word for the British Isles, Britannia. The Bretons are Celts, who arrived in waves on the Breton peninsular between 400 and 800 AD, refugees from the western fringes of the British Isles, from where they had been pushed out by the invading Angles and Saxons. By the 1500s they had been subdued by the Franks, but even so the Bretons have maintained a more coherent identity than most regional minorities in France, principally through their language (spoken by around 250,000 people, it’s related to Cornish and Welsh). Despite being great emigraters and trading travellers., their reputation at home is as a little, well, er… insular.
For further national tropes you might try Asterix and Obelix: the two doughty fighters came from Brittany, from the last Gaulish village to hold out against the Romans, and a deft bit of time-travel enabled them to meet Viking invaders - in Asterix and the Normans – and for that matter the English, in Asterix in Britain.
For all of their differences, the two régions share some things - cider (both have the relevant apples and pears, though doubtless they’ll argue the count on whose apples are the finer) and its liqueur, Calvados – though this name originates in Normandy. And of course they dispute who owns Mont St Michel. From the map you might assume that the Mont would be in Brittany, which for a short while until 933 AD, the time of the Norse invasions, it was. But since then it has been in Normandy.
The surface of the cycle path is slightly rougher than before; my tyres crunch and crinkle in thicker gravel. For a while it clambers onto an embankment, lined with poplars – but it feels odd… the bank is not solid enough for a railway embankment. I realise it is a dyke, presumably to protect the land from flooding by the sea.
At a seafront settlement the cycle lane runs out, or at least it runs below the road on a sandy track, giving onto grassy islands a bit like the Norfolk Broads. Soon enough I am back on the main road, where I come to a series of windmills. They appear periodically, arms held aloft in exclamatory poses - like a leitmotif in semaphore. A headwind howls. Aaah, I understand: ideal for windmills; not quite so good for cyclists heading west. My progress is reduced to a remorseless grind on the pedals.
The wind abates only in the lee of a small climb onto a headland. I expect it to resume at the crest of the slope, but no, it is open and breezy up there. And then, after negotiating some sub-urban roundabouts, I am free-wheeling, heading downhill into St Malo, heading for the walled section of the town next to the harbour.
