PhilPaine.com

A maze of mists and shadows.

It’s easy to under­stand why it was so hard for the Romans, and then the French, to con­quer Brit­tany. The land resem­bles, as I said yes­ter­day, the Ozarks or West Vir­ginia in its basic sur­face struc­ture. Brit­tany shares the same North Atlantic winds and cur­rents that turn Eng­land into a sog­gy mess. There are creeks every­where. Every tree and rock is slimy with moss. The ground cov­er is thick. There are climb­ing vines cling­ing to every decid­u­ous tree. Except where the ground is lev­el, it’s slip­pery foot­ing — and it’s sel­dom lev­el. This for­est con­tains an amaz­ing vari­ety of trees. Call­ing it “mixed for­est” is an under­state­ment. Oaks are every­where, and so are an odd-look­ing sil­ver birch. There are also spruce and the occa­sion­al pine. One large stand of spruce I passed through was par­tic­u­lar­ly creepy, a con­fus­ing maze of mist and shad­ows. Every­thing about this for­est makes for slow going, and the under­growth quick­ly swal­low up any foot­path that isn’t con­stant­ly used.

That was the case of the trail I fol­lowed in search of a lit­tle-known clus­ter of Neolith­ic men­hirs. I start­ed out on a clear­ly marked trail, but before long I was in trou­ble. The trail turned faint, then vague, then van­ished alto­geth­er. Pro­ceed­ing by dead reck­on­ing was dif­fi­cult. With alter­na­tive­ly clear and cloudy skies, and the dense cov­er break­ing up the light, there was lit­tle help to be got­ten from the sun. For­tu­nate­ly, there was an ancient wall buried in the for­est. It was no dif­fer­ent from the hun­dreds of walls I had seen form­ing field bound­aries on farms, except that it was nowhere near any fields and it had four-hun­dred year old oaks grow­ing on it. What­ev­er farm it for­mer­ly demarked had van­ished long ago. Nev­er­the­less, it served well as a fixed line to ori­ent me. In the end, I found what I was look­ing for.

Mor­bi­han has thou­sands of men­hirs and oth­er mega­lith­ic struc­tures. Scat­tered ones, like this minor clus­ter, which obvi­ous­ly attract­ed lit­tle inter­est from any­one, as well as the vast align­ments of stand­ing stones at Carnac, 50km to the south.

As I stum­bled through this leafy labyrinth, I imag­ined what it must have been like for some grum­bling Roman sol­dier try­ing to make his way through this stuff in pur­suit of native Celts who were not too keen on the bless­ings of Roman Civ­i­liza­tion. Slip­pery trac­tion, con­stant rain, and a poten­tial angry woad-paint­ed Celt behind every tree. This was clas­sic ter­ri­to­ry for guer­ril­la resis­tance. In fact, the Romans only defeat­ed the local tribe, the Veneti, when they got lucky in a naval bat­tle. The Veneti had bet­ter ships and were bet­ter sailors. But the Romans caught them off guard and destroyed their fleet in the Gulf of Mor­bi­han. Then, petu­lant as always, they cap­tured all the land forts and then slaugh­tered almost the entire pop­u­la­tion, save for the few who made it into the hills. Oth­er, more docile peas­ants from Roman Gaul were import­ed to replace them.

All of which calls to mind anoth­er hilly coun­try­side I once knew well, long ago, and anoth­er slaugh­ter of inno­cents. But I’m due to attend an evening of tra­di­tion­al Bre­ton dance and music, so I’ll get to that later.