Safe Return Doubtful

Saint-Auvent was an ideal place for a typical March weekend of thundery rain showers. It has an excellent ‘aire’, one of the best I have stayed at.

There are only places for three visiting vans, with the individual sites set in the forest at the back of the town’s sports facilities, which are pretty good themselves, an indoor sports hall and a large grass pitch. It’s a kilometre or so into the village which has a very pleasant Auberge which Roja and I visited on Friday in the early evening for a beer, and an outdoor bread and bakery depot that sets up in the town square for an hour twice a day.

We left on Monday morning after a third wander on the paths in the Gorre river valley, and broke the journey to the Atlantic coast at the village of Campbon, not far from Vannes.

Currently I am at the Pointe du Raz on the west coast of Brittany, not quite the most westward point of France, but very close to it, and much more spectacular than the Pointe de Corsen, 42 kilometres north, and close to the city of Brest. 

Tourists flock here, but less so at this time of year. The name ‘Raz’ comes from the Raz de Sein, the dangerous stretch of water between the Pointe, and the Island of Sein, a place often of wild seas, strong winds and crashing waves, but calm this afternoon when I arrived. The La Veille lighthouse lies just a hundred metres from the Pointe. The ‘old lady’ has stood on the rock called Gorlebella since 1887. The lighthouse achieved notoriety in the 1920s when two disabled war veterans were stranded there for weeks by storms, their health deteriorating. They were employed under a new law reserving the job of lighthouse keeper to those who had served in the war. When they were eventually rescued, after four weeks, the law was suspended. It was the penultimate French lighthouse to become automated in 1995, a process delayed due to the keepers on-site staging a protest against their removal, which lasted six months. 

I plan to be around this peninsula for a few days; there is good hiking on the coastal path and others, and the weather is calm, though I do enjoy seeing the waves crashing into the headland. 

There is a huge car park here, something like at Land’s End or North Cape, indicating the amount of visitors they are used to receiving in the summer. There is a parking charge for a campervan is 8 euros for the day, plus 15 euros for the night, but they do not come into force until the season starts, on 1st April. There is a mall of souvenir shops and cafes, but all but two are closed. It’s actually a good time to visit..