Stone love
Chris Rundle takes a closer look at the Valley of the Saints in Brittany
ST Piran got a stony-faced welcome when he arrived in the centre of Brittany at the end of July. Not much of a reception, you might have thought, after enduring a sea crossing from Cornwall and being paraded in saintly progress halfway around the Armorican peninsula on an assortment of rustic conveyances. But that’s only part of the story: St Piran’s granite effigy arrived close to the town of Carnoet amid great ceremony and rejoicing from the people behind one of France’s newest and most exciting tourist attractions. The stony faces, on the other hand, were displayed by the company St Piran joined: the 99 other giant statues already staring with unseeing eyes out across the Breton countryside. This is the Vallée des Saints, a breathtaking project which celebrates Brittany’s religious and cultural heritage in the most spectacular way imaginable, with an array of beautifully carved figures representing the dozens of ‘saints’ whose names are littered across the region’s map, from St Malo to the numerous St Pols. Most were not premier division Catholic saints at all: merely an assortment of hermits and holy men. But in former centuries they would have been credited with various acts verging (in the eyes of simple peasants) on the miraculous – a bit of healing here and there, or the casting out of serpents, that sort of thing. And although there was probably a lot of smoke and mirrors involved (bearing in mind that many relied on alms for their daily food) saints they became, and as saints they are remembered. And ten years ago Philippe Abjean, a philosophy professor and stout, almost militant defender of the Breton culture, thought it would be a good idea to provide them with a collective memorial. So with the aid of bank official Sebastien Minguy, he set up an association to get the ball rolling on a project which would soon assume literally gigantic proportions. The site chosen was a broad, southfacing valley side which already had some religious significance: the land is surmounted by a tumulus which later did duty as a Roman watch tower. And it was there the association set about creating a sculpture park which, when completed, will be every bit as impressive (if not more so) than the world-famous prehistoric stone alignments at Carnac, far to the south – and will enable Brittany to boast that it has more to offer the tourist than beaches and pancakes. Seventeen highly gifted sculptors and their assistants have already started to populate the valley sides with figures carved in a variety of styles but to the same general set of rules, as association spokesman Sofiane Belhoul explains. “We insist that they are all made from Brittany granite, that they must be at least three metres high, that they just be representational rather than abstract, and that they must be completed within a month,” he said. Within those constraints there is, however, plenty of room for ingenuity. St Goustan, for instance, holds a huge fish symbolising the one reputed to have sustained him: he carved a slice off it each day only for the creature to reappear whole in the morning. St Trifin holds her severed head and St Herve, who was blind, has his name inscribed in braille on one of his huge hands. All the figures are oriented to face the locations bearing their names. St Piran, therefore, has been installed to face north towards Cornwall – or as the Bretons, having their own Cornouailles region, call it, les Cornouailles Britanniques – where his name is commemorated in numerous locations. Bestknown of these is Perranporth, where he is said to have fetched up after being thrown into the sea by Irish pagans – a journey all the more notable since they had thoughtfully tied a millstone around his neck by way of a buoyancy aid. The 11-tonne statue was carved in one of Cornwall’s remaining traditional
granite quarries by sculptors David Paton from Cornwall, and Stephane Rouget from Brittany, and has an inscription on its base reading: “Oh my god, my boat is so small and the ocean so big,” from the Breton fisherman’s prayer. It was carried across the Channel on an old Breton fishing boat and lifted ashore at Paimpol, before being paraded around various significant locations before arriving in Carnoet. St Piran’s is the only one of the statues to have been carved outside Brittany: normally they are fashioned on site – an added attraction for visitors who can watch faces, hands and feet slowly emerging from the stone. Each one comes in at a cost of 15,000 euros, which covers the cost of the stone, its transport, erection on site, and the sculptor’s fee. But such has been the enthusiastic reception for the project that there has never been any problem raising the funds. Support has come from more than 4,000 patrons, ranging from individuals to insurance companies, commercial dairies and even supermarkets. That enthusiasm has been mirrored by the number of tourists heading for this relatively remote corner of central Brittany where the attraction is already promising to deliver better times for a region where agriculture – possibly the most depressed economic sector in France – is otherwise the only activity. More than a million have already made the pilgrimage here since work began and the figures have outstripped all the forecasts. This is partly accounted for by the fact that Bretons – who still largely regard themselves as a race apart from the French - delight in anything which perpetuates their unique culture and that the French as a whole go mad over anything vaguely ‘touristique’: this is after all, a country where you can book a two-day tour just to go and look at the Millau viaduct. The experience for the visitor is extraordinarily moving: even at this relatively early stage in the project the statues lend an air of majestic grandeur to their sublime setting with its views over undulating woods and pasture. Sofiane Belhoul says work is still in progress not merely on the statues but on the infrastructure of the site. “We had 300,000 visitors last year and our eventual aim is to get that up to a million annually, so clearly we have to provide facilities,” he said. “We’ve been working out of portable buildings so far but now we’re completing the first real visitor centre, shop and restaurant so that visitors will at least have somewhere to shelter when it rains, which it does rather a lot in Brittany.” If the site is impressive already it will be even more so by the time, several decades on, when the 1,000th statue is craned into place. At which point it would hardly be exaggerating to say France will have acquired a tourist destination to rival other mega-sites such as the Pont du Gard, or Mont St Michel, both now, sadly, demonstrating that mass tourism can erode the special qualities that make such places attractive. The Vallée des Saints, however, promises to retain its unique character partly because it is so deeply rooted in the tradition of erecting stone monuments which is an essential element of the Breton culture. “The difference is that you can go to a place like Carnac and see all the menhirs and the standing stones and not have the faintest idea why they were put up or by whom,” says Sofiane. “But people will be able to come here and understand precisely how it was done, by whom it was done – and why.”