‘Flash past farms and games of boule’
James Henderson takes to two wheels for a gratifyingly Gallic tour of Brittany, where TE Lawrence cycled in his student days before the First World War
Another corner, another heartstoppingly pretty scene. At every turn in Brittany you find yourself faced with a stone farmhouse festooned in pink and red flowers, a half-timbered town-house, a small chateau down a tree-lined drive or the ancient walls of castles and fortifications. Brittany’s rosetinted and ruddy granite is everywhere.
Headwater’s St Malo to Mont St Michel self-guided, cycle tour links the seaside resorts and coastal sights between St Malo and the famous Mont, which lies just over the border in Normandy, but on the return, it dives into the Breton hinterland, visiting stone villages, walled towns, river valleys and, of course, restaurants.
The region makes excellent cycling country. It is developed but not overrun and is relatively flat, so it won’t be heartstopping in another sense (though Headwater offers e-bikes if you’re concerned). Distances are about 28 miles each day.
As I rode through the area I was also tracking the young TE Lawrence, later of Arabia, who cycled all around here just over a century ago, searching out the castles he visited, comparing them with comments in his Sunday letters home and re-creating his photographs. As a child in the 1890s, he lived in the resort town of Dinard across the estuary from St Malo and would come across on the ferry for gymnastics lessons.
Perhaps a day of inactivity at your hotel would be more fitting. Soon enough a premonition of the physical endeavour to come breezes in: Headwater’s man on the ground, Steve, delivers bicycles, briefs you on the route and highlights sites and restaurants to visit. He’s a mine of information, happy to help with special requests like mine, and ever-present in the background, relaying suitcases and checking that all is OK.
Headwater’s rationale for its cycle tours is that a good breakfast and a good dinner are both reward and fortification for the physical endeavour, so it chooses hotels with good dining rooms. And, of course, this is France, so there’s the best of local produce: seafood to start, plucked from right offshore – Cancale is famous for its oysters, and mussel beds can be seen all along the coastline – with a fillet of ultra-fresh john dory to follow, or a medallion of monkfish, or perhaps herb-crusted leg of local lamb from the salty shoreside meadows, all served with an asparagus mousseline or a julienne of local vegetables. Brittany is superb apple and pear country, too, so there is tarte Tatin and clafoutis.
A certain leitmotif accompanies you on the rides: the burble of Headwater’s GPS app on your phone. It guides you on the route, meandering on minor roads, rolling by orchards and cornfields flecked scarlet with poppies, flashing past farmhouses or a game of boules (Breton boules, played with wooden balls, is a little different from pétanque). Just once, I took cheeky delight in striking back at the tech: “Ping! In 150metres… at the roundabout… take the first exit…” Well, no, it’s time for an ice cream, down on the beach. You could be forgiven for thinking that Brittany feels a bit like England. The landscape has the rich, green fertility of, say, Devon, dewy fields sewn together by wooded stream-beds and voluminous hedges, and the buildings have the stone self-containment of Yorkshire. Clearly France has the same issues as we do: village life is evaporating as people flock to town. But, like Devon, this is also holiday territory, so the cottages are kept up and are being restored. There are many more walled towns there than in the UK. The penultimate night of the tour is spent in Dinan. You approach via the river Rance and the town’s “port”, a cluster of riverside restaurants, artists’ studios and pleasure boats. Then you look up to see the town itself hovering 200ft above you, all massive defensive walls. Within, Dinan is a network of cobbled alleys and half-timbered houses reaching out over pavements. Walking the city walls, I stumbled across a fashion parade: a troop of 18-year-olds in ball gowns and dinner jackets, heading for their end of year prom, presumably: a far cry from the machicoulis and murder holes for which these walls were designed. The tour packs good variety into five days, but the highlight can only be “the Mont”. It really is a spectacular sight, a cluster of houses, shops, churches and defensive walls swarming the rock and clambering up to the monastery and castle, as captivating now as it was for the 19-year-old Lawrence, who rode here from St Malo in 1906. “Dear Mother,” he wrote, “Here I am at last about to spend a night at the Mont. The dream of years is fulfilled. It is a perfect evening… the stars are out most beautifully, and the moon is, they say, just about to rise…”