The Inland Sea

Morbihan means, in Breton, the little sea. The Gulf is the geographic feature after which the department of Morbihan, the most southerly of the departments comprising the old Duchy and province of Brittany, is named.

The entrance to the Gulf, which is only a kilometre wide, is orientated north–south. Behind the entrance, the Gulf extends some 18 kilometres to the east, as well as having major inlets leading to 2 towns located at the historic lowest bridging points, north, north west to Auray and north east to Vannes.

I can enthusiastically recommend a visit to, and sea kayak around, the unique and enigmatically beautiful Gulf. Living in Jersey, it is a convenient choice for a long weekend away and one we have returned to again and again.

The time to go is in April or March, October or November. In summer there are too many tourists and the speed of the ferries plying between the islands, and the yachts struggling against the currents in the constricted waters, mean that it is too dangerous and busy to be enjoyable. Summer is anyway the time to be out on those exposed headlands and outer reefs, leaving for off season Morbihan’s inland sea, when the tranquilty and lower light enhances its Turneresque skies and patterns of sea channels, mud banks and oyster beds. As might be imagined, the Gulf supports a rich variety of bird life. We didn’t expect however to see an imperial ibis, whose usual range is restricted to Egypt and Iraq. On enquiry, it proved to be part of a feral flock, flourishing on the Morbihan wetlands.

Visits should be planned for neap tides. A feature common to Brittany and the Channel Islands is that high tides are around midday on neap tides. This means that on neaps you can enter the Gulf for a day’s paddle on the rising tide and exit on the falling tide. Furthermore much of the Gulf dries out at low tide which means, particularly on springs, it is very easy to be forced into long detours or long waits before being able to refloat.

The tidal currents flooding and draining the Gulf run at 9 knots on springs. They run at 6 knots on neaps in streams like saltwater rivers, which bend around the islands. You can thus surf the standing waves and recirculate in the eddies for more.

Sacred Landscapes

Morbihan’s Gulf and ecosystem are sufficient attractions in themselves to justify a journey but, that they are found together with the finest assemblage of prehistoric sites in Western Europe which makes the Gulf a quite unique and stunning destination. The sites were established over a period from approximately 4,700 to 2,700 BC, which mean they predate the pyramids and that, rather than being influenced by diffusion from the cradle of civilisation in the Middle East, they represent local developments of structure and belief.

There are equivalent monuments throughout Brittany and the Channel Islands suggesting that the value systems which motivated the megalithic builders, were shared within a wider cultural area. However, they reach a complexity and intensity of elaboration around the Gulf which is unparalleled elsewhere.

Starting at Locmariaquer, a small fishing port, just within the south east entrance to the Gulf, which we recommend as a base, there is a site which includes Le Menhir Brisé (French, shattered) and the Table de Marchands. The Grand Menhir would have been the largest standing stone in Brittany and weighing some 348 tonnes and having to be dragged some 4 kilometres from its source must have represented a colossal communal effort. The Table de Marchands is an oval tumulus comprising 2 flat topped stages like slices of a cake. It is built around a quite magnificent passage grave decorated with crooks, spirals and “U” carvings.

The evidence suggests that the earliest sacred landscape comprised long mounds and decorated menhirs. This was replaced by landscapes whose principal features were passage graves. Many of the decorated menhirs seem to have been broken and then reused within passage graves, an event presumably of great significance possibly representing the replacement of one social and religious system by another. This happened at the Table de Marchands. It also happened at Le Petit Mont, a site looking out to sea on the outside of the Arzon peninsular and thus a short paddle from Locmariaquer. At Le Petit Mont, the passage grave, which is built over a long mound, is decorated with chevrons, meanders, cupmarks and the soles of a pair of feet, toes upwards. One slab is carved with a figure resting on a long upcurved line, which has been interpreted, not unreasonably for a grave looking over the sea, as a boat for transporting the souls of the dead.

Les Pierres Plats also faces out to sea and is beyond the mouth to the Gulf, this time to the west and is found by a parking and launching place either for a paddle into the Gulf or along the coast. Les Pierres Plats is now partly buried in sand dunes. The entrance is indicated by a single upright marker stone. The structure itself is an unusual allee coudee (French, bent) and consists of a long capped grave, with a side chamber, and notable bend a third of the way in and which widens from its entrance to the final chamber. The side stones are carved with anthropomorphic forms, some decorated with two, three or four pairs of breasts suggestive of the earth (or here sea?) mother.

Within the Gulf there are two even more wonderful adjoining sites, Gavr’inis and Er Lannic. The first is on a small island (Breton, Goat Island) the second on a partially submerged islet. However, when the tumulus was built, Gavr’inis would have been on a low hill above a marshy coastal plain, which has been submerged by the subsequent post glacial rise in sea levels to form the present Gulf of Morbihan. Gavr’inis comprises a chamber accessed by a passage some 12 metres long within a tumulus, faced like Le Hougue Bie in Jersey, with dry stone walling, and built in four tiers like an early pyramid. Gavr’inis is the longest passage grave in Brittany and the most elaborately carved megalithic structure in Europe. Twenty three of its twenty nine stones are carved in the most unrestrained way with whorls, zigzags and elongated triangular axes. It has been suggested they reflect entopic images, created in an altered state by hallucination, sleep deprivation or trance associated with religious rites.

Whilst it is possible to land by kayak on the slip at Gavr’inis, access to the passage grave is restricted and is only available by catching the ferry on a guided tour from the small port of Larmor Baden, worth visiting for its own sake, as the village butcher is the champion sausage maker of all France.

Er Lannic consists of two circles of standing stones, the most southerly of them now fully submerged, the northerly stone circle partly submerged. The tidal stream shoots SW/NE in the gap between Gavr’inis and Er Lannic. Ferry gliding and surfing on a standing wave, with arguably Europe’s finest passage grave on one side and a partially submerged stone circle on the other, just has to be one of sea kayaking’s great experiences. It just doesn’t get much better than this.

Peter Hargreaves

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