The blustery, untamed corner of France that is the nation's answer to Cornwall
Phare Ar-Men took 15 years to build (1867-1881) and was instantly known as l’enfer des enfers (hell of hells) by its courageous keepers. The lighthouse remains a powerful testimony to the guts and determination – sheer lunacy some might say – of Breton craftsmen and fishermen who went through hell and high water to construct it, on a rock in the treacherous Iroise Sea, on the west coast of Brittany. Herculean currents and swells dictated when it was safe to brave reefs separating the lighthouse from le continent, and shipwrecks pepper maritime logbooks here.
As cataclysmic waves dwarf the historic stone beacon, I am immediately reminded of the 130 recorded shipwrecks around England’s own Land’s End where a trio of lighthouses light up the waters cradling the over-touristed Cornish cape.
My gaze shifts from the toy-like lighthouse to the rugged coastline fingering Pointe du Raz – a soul-stirring sweep of vertiginous granite rockfaces chiselled to serrated perfection over the centuries by the elements. Tufts of sea thrift sprout like summer daises atop the cliff edge and a dolly mixture sprinkling of spiny wild gorse and bell heather blazes gold and purple across the wind-brushed heath.
Bar two walkers in straw sunhats gorging on the big blue views, I cut a solitary figure on the clifftop coastal path around Cap Sizun. The absence of crowds exploring this headland of serene natural beauty in Brittany is a stark reminder that, despite the hallucinatory tricks my homeland-starved mind is playing on me, I am far from over-subscribed Cornwall – a happy place from my childhood 40 years ago, where old-fashioned, bucket-and-spade summer holidays were spent at a thatched cottage in Prussia Cove, on the southwest Cornish coast.
I am in fact on the other side of the Channel motoring, in my rented Fiat 500, around quaint cottage-fishing villages, small towns and golden-sand coves in southern Finistère. This wild and windy, lesser-known corner of seafaring Brittany is rapidly proving to be the Gallic answer to my beloved Cornwall, minus the crowds that are set to inhabit the southwest this summer.
Admittedly it lacks the feisty Cornish pasties and clotted-cream teas, but there are buckets of fresh oysters and shellfish to scoff, dreamy coastal trails and sandy beaches with heavenly vistas in spades, and even Brittany’s capricious weather delivers.
“My grandfather always told me to expect four seasons in a day,” salt-of-the-earth Breton boatman Yoann Prigent tells me with impish delight a few days later as he ferries me across the bay from Pointe du Castel Ac’h, near Plouguerneau, to Île Vierge, in his weather-beaten mono-hull Porz-Malo.
Only the wave-lashed stump of Phare de l’Île Vierge – the oldest freestone lighthouse in the world, in service since 1902 and 270ft tall – is visible on the uninhabited island, so thick is the pea-soup mist. Back on the mainland, devouring half a dozen No 3s and a slab of buttery kouign-amann (Breton shortbread cake) at Maison Legris’ oyster bar, on Lilia’s empty seafront, swiftly warms the cockles – not a pasty in sight.
The historic connection between Cornwall and southern Finistère is no great secret. Celtic Britons from Cornwall migrated here in the sixth and seventh centuries and the area was known as Cornouaille until after the French Revolution when the diocese was renamed Finistère.
In the fishing port of Doëlan, I observe crabbers and gillnetters creeping into port at the end of the afternoon – seagulls crooning overhead. In the 18th century smugglers from Cornwall sailed into headland-hidden coves just like this to load their ships with French brandy and wine to trade back home. Notorious Cornish smuggler John Carter ran his contraband operations out of Cornwall’s Pisky’s, Bessy’s and King’s Coves – enchanting Enid Blyton-esque inlets with turquoise water that make up Prussia Cove, where I bounced between rockpools as a child.
Curious to dip my toes into traditional Breton culture, I head to Quimper, the capital of Finistère with a Gothic cathedral, handsome smattering of half-timbered houses, a cobbled Old Town, museums stuffed full of Breton costumes, and more creperies flipping buckwheat galettes than you can shake a gwial (that’s Breton for baguette) at.
Another day I mooch the tangle of old-world lanes inside Concarneau’s 13th-century ramparts. In the romantic villages of Pont-Aven, Kercanic and Kerascoët, sun-bleached cottages with abundant flower gardens, that could have been plucked straight out of Cornwall’s own Lost Gardens of Heligan, trigger serious nostalgia for a Cornish era when dryrobes, digital detox and craft gin distilleries simply didn’t exist.
“In Cornouaille we live well, we live slowly,” explains Arnaud Tetard later that evening at Manoir Dalmore, an Arts and Crafts manor house from 1926, overlooking belle époque beach huts and fluffy bunny tails on the sand at Port-Manec’h. The native Breton summered here, every year, as a child and now runs his old family home as a hotel. The faintly eccentric mix of yesteryear simplicity and modern French je ne sais quoi is highly appealing.
My final port of call is Pointe de Corsen, a blustery untamed headland stitched from the sinuous GR34 coastal path, which skirts the entire Breton coast, and a peppering of white-sand coves only accessible by a hairy rocky scramble on foot. This is France’s westernmost tip.
Once again I am alone. A Land’s End-style marker reveals I’m 328 miles (528km) from Paris and a mere 295 miles (475km) from London. As the salty air whips up a storm and waves continue to crash into granite cliffs below, it strikes that I really could not be much closer to the Cornwall of my childhood – geographically and spiritually.
