A guide-conférencier of the Pays d’art et d’histoire Auray Quiberon Terre Atlantique opens this chapel once the light has gone. The decoration is picked out of the dark in the faisceau de la lampe torche, leaving the rest unlit. Notre-Dame de Locmaria is listed as a Monument Historique, and its polychrome roof frame and paintings are exceptional for their rarity. Les Incontournables open megaliths and chapels nearby the same way.
Tag: heritage-sites
Il était une nuit: night visit to the Prieuré Saint-Etienne
Night settles over the Prieuré Saint-Etienne and the site opens for an unusual guided visit. Visitors are led through the priory after dark, a moment outside time between imagination and the waking of the senses. The building at its heart is the oldest chapel in Morbihan, a listed Historic Monument raised in the tenth and eleventh centuries above the Oyon valley. Around it lie Gallo-Roman remains, polychrome wooden statues and wall paintings.
Visites du Petit Théâtre – La Passerelle, en famille
La Passerelle keeps a small théâtre à l’italienne, one of the 170 historic houses of that form counted in France. The guided visit takes families into the room: the parterre, the baignoires, the balcony and the boxes of the two upper floors, and the poulailler above them, also called le paradis. Two age groups go round separately. The house is listed, and its 250 places have carried jazz, classical and current music.
Les clés de la Ville-Close, walled Concarneau
A guide from Concarneau’s own heritage service walks the Ville-Close, the historic heart of the town. The route traces its maritime history, then its civil and its military past, so that the medieval walled town is read closely instead of simply crossed. The service that leads it carries the Ville d’Art et Histoire label, and the Maison du Patrimoine takes the bookings. The visit takes thirty-five people at most.
Visite gratuite du Grand Cairn de Barnénez
The Grand Cairn de Barnénez is opened to visitors without a ticket, and it is considered the oldest mausoleum in Europe, raised some six thousand years ago. Its facade runs 72 metres long, 28 metres wide and nearly eight high, and eleven passage burial chambers give it its rhythm. Some tombs still carry engraved messages nobody has read. Guided visits are offered, and the cairn stands on a promontory above the bay of Morlaix.
Visite guidée de la Maison à Pondalez, Morlaix
The Maison à Pondalez is a timber-framed house of the early sixteenth century, a piece of Morlaix civil architecture. Its plan is the style « à lanterne »: one tall central space open through several floors, a monumental wooden vis staircase, and the suspended walkways, the pondalez, linking the storeys. A guide of the Musée de Morlaix leads the visit through rooms holding its flax collections. The house is classée Monument Historique.
Contes et histoires du pays at the Ferme d’Antan
Angélique leads her listeners from one end of the Écomusée de la Ferme d’antan to the other, telling the contes et légendes du pays. The figures she summons are the korrigans, the lavandières de la nuit and the croquemitaine. The telling moves on foot through the farm village at Le Saint Esprit des Bois, in Plédéliac. It is one evening of the fifth Minutes Bleues, the Côtes-d’Armor festival staged in the blue light of dawn and dusk.
Les Croc’Archi: the Carnac yacht-club base
Les Croc’Archi is the short-visit format of the Pays d’art et d’histoire Auray Quiberon Terre Atlantique, and it stops here at the Carnac yacht-club’s nautical base. A guide-conferencier of its Culture and Heritage service sets out why it counts: it came with the sports architecture that followed the spread of leisure. The agence Yves Guillou built it, and its sixtieth year is the occasion. The group forms at the little train’s departure point.
L’enceinte carolingienne de Paner, Saint-Tugdual
Guides walk visitors over the Paner enclosure at Saint-Tugdual, where the archaeology service has just closed a second consecutive summer of excavation. What they set out has not been published anywhere: the findings of that season, taken trench by trench. N. Coustet-Larroque and J-P Eludut lead the visit, which leaves from the Place de la mairie. The Carolingian enclosure itself is the subject, and the reading of it is the part that has changed.
Points de vue sur le château de Dinan
The château de Dinan opens for a sensory visit that works on perception instead of chronology. Optical illusions unsettle the eye, hidden places are opened, and exceptional panoramas are reached. Visitors read the château through the eyes of those who crossed it, moving from one point of view to the next. It belongs to Les Minutes Bleues, the Côtes-d’Armor programme that opens the département’s patrimoine in the blue light of dusk.