Northward

We transferred our base to Roscoff, on the English Channel, earlier this week. Somewhere between picking some spots out on the map and stumbling over others, we found more than enough along the way to spend a whole day on a two and a half hour drive.

Right off, we had to stop to study freshly rolled straw in the fields.

We stopped at a little church in Kernascleden for another art fix.

It features some colorful if faded frescoes in the vaulting.

Another Visitation (Mary and Elizabeth in conversation) -- I love this theme, two women being so human:

Maybe worn from how much attention is has gotten, this fresco in an alcove shows the goings-on in Hell, cauldrons of people being boiled, for example.

We looked for more art at St-Fiacre.

We were well rewarded with, among other features, this carved wooden screen:

The details are worth studying; for example, the sin of theft is portrayed by someone stealing apples (I'm not clear what's up with the boy hanging from the bottom).

Our guide book says this is drunkenness, vomiting a fox:

This is apparently laziness, playing music; that he could be putting his time to better use seems like a cultural change to me:

And of course there are animals, and here they hold the crossbeams snug, too.

We thought we'd grab lunch and get rolling, but we spent another few hours in a little town barely mentioned in our guide books, Le Faouet, where we found a wonderful market hall.

The Musee des Beaux Arts nearby had an absorbing exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints, posters, and even porcelain dishes documenting WWI, when the French government had various arrangements with artists to capture their impressions and experiences. Then we followed signs, a bit skeptically, to The Living Bee and the City of Ants. This turned out to be a small museum in a farmhouse, very worth a detour.

The City of Ants has novel displays: in one, a case is stocked with shredded leaves and petals; the ants can work on growing their fungus for food at one end of the case or take what they want back to another case through their own tube along the wall.

In another display, the landscape is set up so that the ants pick out some leaf or petal shred at one end and carry it aong the road (the yellow line) to their nest at the other end of the case.

Outside is an enormous nest of pine needles or the like, big ants all over it, with tunnels underneath for kids to crawl through and check things out from below. A gangway lets the ants head out into the forest for their foraging.

The bee area displayed traditional hives, which we have only seen otherwise in pictures: baskets, boxes, tubes of woven rush or something, with a manure and mud coating, hollowed out logs...

There are also several hive frames set up you can watch the bees in their comb, coming and going through portholes through the eaves of the house to the outside. 

What I particularly loved about this was going outside to see the bees on their beelines straight into the building.

We finally got out of Le Faouet late in the afternoon and had to make a beeline of our own to Roscoff, but we did stop at a high point in the middle of the Breton peninsula to check out the wide views all around. You could sense that the sea was at the limit of the horizon, the way it drops away. 

On to Roscoff. Be careful not to drive your car off the end of the pier when you get there.