Brittany is a large peninsular, bordered at the north by the English Channel and at the west by the Atlantic Ocean. From the beginning of time, this landscape has had to resist the ravages of nature and history. Along the channel coast, the land is cut into fjords, which the Bretons call Abers. The powerful waves of the Atlantic crash along Brittany’s southern beaches. “Fish speak Breton”, said the American writer Jack Kerouac, who had Breton origins.
So, Brittany definitely is a landscape forged by the sea. Certain older citizens also know it as “the end of the earth” or Pen ar Bed in Breton. You have to remember that the sea was a mysterious place for our ancestors, and that this was the last piece of land before the great unknown. Populated by exiles from Wales who fled the Anglo-Saxons, the coasts and forests of Brittany have always kept their Celtic legends. The heart of Brittany is covered with the Brocéliande forest, home of Merlin and the legend of Arthur.
Rich in local history, Brittany is proud of its ageless megaliths, its stone houses with slate roofs, its medieval wayside crosses, its tiny chapels which shelter the memory of numerous generations of sailors. We find at the heart of these tiny villages a strong hint of how life was when Brittany was separated from the rest of the country by impregnable forest, and the Bretons did not speak any French.
Very close to their Welsh, Irish, and Cornwall cousins, the Bretons make the distinction between their own character and that of the rest of France (more Latin and German). Initially rather brusque, they open up as the conversation progresses, and are in fact very hospitable, cultured people. They are sailors and thus travellers, and so are quite open to meeting strangers. The Breton language is a Celt – Gaelic language, very close to Gaul, and is avidly learned by younger generations today.
