George East's Blog

Walking on Water

Sunday 12th October:

Summer arrived in Finistere this morning.  In a very French way, it was rather more than politely late, but so much more the welcome.  Autumn will  doubtless  return tomorrow, so  it was important to make the most of it and yomp the next stretch of the Nantes to Brest canal. It is our ambition to walk the whole length, but as with a superb meal or the last glass of a particularly fine glass of wine we are making it last and savouring every moment. In truth, the savouring bit is also a good excuse to keep the daily mileage down to a manageable level. 

This most unusual collection of waterways takes more than 360 kilometres to get from the old capital of Brittany at the bottom right of the region  to the north-western seaport of Brest, though the distance must be less than half that if it were to follow the  straight line canals usually adopt. 

Work on joining these two important towns started at the beginning  of the 19th century after, again in a very French way, the authorities had been talking  about it for around four hundred years. Problems with bad or non-existent  roads  and latterly  the  British raids on Breton ports were  spurs to come up with a way of moving goods more efficiently and safely across the region. What makes this canal so unusual and attractive- if you are in no particular hurry- is that only around a fifth of the distance is made up of man-made cuts; the rest of the journey meanders alongside eight rivers on their eccentric  way from the Edre  at Nantes to the Aulne estuary at Brest.  Because of the undulating countryside, it took more than 200 locks to even-out the watery  highway, and  what would be a formidable engineering task  in any era was forty years in the making.

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Dusk falls slowly over the glittering course of the canal as we break open another bottle of modest red. More savouring  of the moment needs to be done, and there is still a smidgeon of saucisson to be paid due attention to. Interestingly, this almost addictive chopped meat dry sausage gets it name from a primitive explosive fuse of the same shape  which was used to set off small bombs like the petards employed to blow up castle gates during a siege. Sometimes when too much wine had been taken by the bombardier, he would set the fuse wrongly and be blown up together with the fortifications under attack. Thus, he had been hoist by his own petard. I bet you always wondered where that expression came from, and so did I.

Today we have covered the best part of ten miles and met some interesting fellow travellers, as well as some bracing encounters with cyclists and a whole pony club. The fishermen we meet always smile and say hello and are pleased to have a chat about  what they are not going to catch that day; many of the cyclists and horse riders look down their noses at pedestrians as if we were some inferior species. In my experience, there is nobody more courteous, considerate and friendly than a polite French man or woman, and nobody more pig ignorant that a rude one. 

There was also the chance to stop for a drink and chat in our native language, as nearly all the former lock-keepers’ cottages along this stretch of the canal seem owned by Brits. Small, almost painfully  quaint and even twee and in a perfect location for lovers of nature and tranquility, they make perfect  second homes. I think the preponderence of Brit ownership also signifies something  about our two races. As the relative price of river, lake, canal and coastal properties in Britain shows, we all love to live near water. Although it is a huge generality, Bretons seem to be broadly divided into two types in this regard. There are those on the coast of the  Armor ( 'Land of the Sea') who work on the sea or love to live by it and will pay fortunes in property prices to do so. Then there are the inland Bretons of the Argoat ( Land of the Trees). They have the good earth in their genes as well as often under their fingernails, and are not fussed about living near any sort of expanse or course of water. In extreme cases, they dislike or even fear it.

Of course, more cynical observers might say that it is only Britons who would pay such outrageous asking prices to own a tiny, damp and liable-to-flooding cottage just because it is in such a twee location. The other factor is that all properties along the canal come under the control of SMATAH, the official body charged with looking after the canal and preserving its image.  Given the standard level of French bureaucracy and regulations heaped upon  houses in ordinary locations, one can see the problems of living in what amounts to a listed building in France. SMATAH makes the Heritage Trust look almost indulgent. The garden area around the cottages are designated as having the same cultural and historical importance as the environs of a church, which technically  means you cannot even cut the grass without  written permission. We looked at a stunningly attractive ecluse cottage at a reasonable price last week, but there was a major drawback. The unusually  honest agent showed me a letter from SMATAH to the notaire handling the sale, which pointed out that any new owner was specifically forbidden to use a car or any sort of motor vehicle on the towpath to get to and from the nearest access point. Given that the nearest access point was almost a mile away, that would  seem to be a bit of a problem. Especially when you consider that the local fishermen had awarded themselves special dispensation, and would regularly whizz by the home you  would have to walk or cycle to.

For us, it is the end to a perfect day. Mind you, there are plenty of those to be had here in rural Brittany. Or for that matter so many other bits of our adopted country. It is a significant fact that seven times as many Britons visit France on holiday as the other way around. When you know what is on offer here, perhaps  that is not such a surprising statistic...