Quistinic-The Chapel Circuit

From the Middle Ages, the parish of Quistinic developed around the church of Saint-Pierre and the chapel of Saint-Mathurin. The first, built in 1752 and restored at the end of the 19th century, has preserved a crucifix and a Saint Pierre from the original 17th century building. The second was built around 1900 on a 15th century oratory and houses an 18th century statue of Saint Mathurin. Dominating the square, these religious monuments are testimony to how dynamic Quistinic was at the time.  

Over time, the village grew, and new dwellings were built along the roads, particularly between 1850 and 1950. Ternary type houses, with three spans, were very much in fashion at the time. These buildings have the same characteristics. Symmetrical, with one door and two windows on the ground floor, and three on the first floor, they were light and spacious. However, it wasn’t rare for several families to live in them, as each room had a fireplace and was served by the central staircase.

While fields have been combined to facilitate the passage of farm machinery, the bocage of Quistinic has been well preserved. Edged with embankments built by the farmers from the middle ages, the field have changed little. Woodland is everywhere, combining the typical species of the Breton forest with conifers, appreciated for their fast growth and planted from the 19th century. These species form ecological corridors, favourable to the wild animals; roe deer, foxes, squirrel and woodland birds inhabit these areas.

The village of Keryquello is testimony to the development of rural architecture. Added to the 17th and 18th century farmhouses with their irregular windows are the 19th and 20th century houses with their standardised, symmetrical openings. The sober facades accentuate the protruding stones over the doors and windows. This technique meant the walls could be rendered with irregular stone, never completed or removed in recent renovations. On the left-hand side, the buildings are rationally organised. Under the same roof, two separate homes had their own door, window, dormer window and chimney.

Bread ovens became common in the villages in the 18th and 19th centuries, built by the peasants for whom bread was the basis of their diet. In 1843, more than one hundred were listed in the Napoleonic registry for Quistinic. Dome-shaped, the upper part of the stone oven was covered in vegetation, and it had a low, paved vault with an opening. The oven was often used by all the inhabitants of the village; they burned wood to heat the over before introducing the bread to be baked.

A few rare apple trees at the side of the roads are a reminder of the cider production that used to be widespread in Brittany. Before the land reforms, apple trees were everywhere, in orchards or dotted about the crop fields. The region offers a wide variety of eating and cider apples. More than 450 of them have been listed and safeguarded by associations of enthusiasts.  Developed by the farmers over time, some were appreciated for their taste, while others were kept over winter. Good cider is a careful blend of acidic, sweet and bitter fruit, and each producer could make it according to their own taste and know-how, passed down from one generation to the next. A few passionate enthusiasts keep up this tradition.

The villages passed through show the upheaval that occurred in the countryside from 1950. From that time, new houses and farm buildings sprouted up on the outskirts of the villages. Old buildings and stone barns housed crops, animals and farm machinery. Many buildings, typical houses, ovens and wells, etc. were destroyed and fell into ruin, especially inland where the population declined after the war. During the 1990s, there was great enthusiasm for renovating these old buildings, thus safeguarding this heritage. 

From the end of the Middle Ages, villages started to emerge with the gradual setting up of traffic routes. These routes linked the villages to the fountains, fields, manor, town, and created links between villages.  The pathways were created by peasants who dug a trench and used the soil and stones to build the embankments, comprised of dry stones. Planted with trees, they took on their name of sunken paths, as they were eroded over time and dug out by the rains.

In areas with rocky outcrops, embankments were mainly made of dry stone walls. In the Ancien Régime, they marked the boundaries of common land and private plots, were used to protect crops from roaming animals and separate fields from moors, woodland and prairies. The various trees planted provided fruit, timber, firewood and handles for tools. The embankments limit erosion and water runoff down the slopes. Ditches and paths helped to drain and channel the water to the marshes at the bottom of the valley. Over the centuries and driven by man and beast alone, nature was tamed and sculpted. Stones pulled from the ground during ploughing were used to build the embankments. Leaves gathered in the woods in autumn were used as bedding for livestock. 

Granite forms the majority of the planet’s continental crust and is ever-present in Brittany. Born of the cooling of huge masses of magma, granite formations comprising faults outcrop due to erosion and are worn down by the action of surface water. Over millennia, stones of all shapes and sizes, sometimes piled up in precarious, chaotic rocky piles, appeared. Several of them, worn into hollows, gave rise to cults and beliefs: cup stones, sacrificial stones, devil stones, etc. 

There are several springs and religious fountains in Quistinic. From the Middle Ages and in the Ancien Régime, the villages were built near these springs as water was vital to daily life. Often built and extended by a washhouse, many domestic fountains were abandoned or destroyed when running water was introduced. This beautifully built one with its triangular wall dates from 1722.

The village of Locunolé owes its name to the chapel of Saint-Gwénolé. Dating from 1696, the current building is typical with its small bell-turret topped with a cross, accessible via a staircase. A 15th-century statue of Saint Geneviève from another building and a 16th-century Crucifixion group are preserved. The chapel is devoted to saint Guénolé, a 5th-century evangelist, but also to Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Cornély. The latter was the protector of horned animals and is represented with two oxen. The chapel was twice restored, in 1929 by its rector who installed windows, and in 1999 by the district committee. 

In Quistinic today there are around fifteen crosses and calvaries, sometimes with just a simple cross, sometimes with the figure of Christ. These crosses were erected near religious buildings, or at the edge of paths. They often testify to an event. The Locunehen one commemorates the assassination of the priest Jean Olivier during the Revolution. On this road, once called the path from Hennebont to the village, there are no fewer than three crossed in the 500 yards from Locunolé to Kermoisan. Although we no longer know the reason they were erected, it is certain that the villagers and travellers believed they protected them.

From the Middle Ages and especially in the Ancien Régime, watermills sprang up along the rivers. Glayo mill, for milling grain, was fed by a derivation canal on the stream. It was associated with a windmill of the same name, to the east on the hill. Sometimes this use of two types of power was needed when the water level did not allow the wheel to operate. Glayo mill was not the only one to take water from this watershed on the Blavet river, as further upstream there was Kermouël mill and downstream, Bodery mill.

Overlooking the valley of the Blavet and Minazen lock, this partly cultivated slope used to be a vast moorland as can be seen from the gorse that is still present. These “cold heaths” hardly changed were part of the pastoral farming system. It provided grazing, fodder and firewood, especially the gorse which was planted there. Soil fertilisation has almost entirely destroyed this natural habitat.

Characteristic of the pillar fountains built in the western Morbihan in the 19th century, the beautiful Sainte-Barbe fountain is topped with a roof. It is associated with Sainte-Barbe chapel, 500 metres away on a rocky promontory overlooking the Blavet valley. Completely rebuilt in 1684, this modest chapel, similar to that of Locunolé, still has the old two hammer-beam roof, the ends of which are sculpted with children’s heads. The statues, altar and furnishings date from the end of the 19th century.

The Blavet runs for 163 kilometres from its source in Bourbriac in the Côtes-d’Armor department, to the ocean at Lorient. While channelled today, at the start of the 19th century, it looked very different with islands, meanders and steep banks. The riverbed was strewn with stones and the water was no more than 30cm deep in places. Alder, willow and ash grew on the banks among reeds and rushes. The river was however much used. There were many mills and about thirty fisheries comprised of stone dams to create bottlenecks where nets were placed at the end. Salmon pike and eel were caught during the autumn migration when they left the river to reproduce in the Sargasso Sea.

The Blavet was channelled between 1806 and 1825 as part of the vast Nantes-Brest canal project resumed by Napoleon. It had several goals; to connect the English Channel to the ocean and prevent a blockade by the English, to open up the arsenals of Lorient and Brest, but also to connect Lorient to Pontivy, for a time known as Napoléonville. The river was profoundly reorganised. A channel 40 metres deep was dug into the riverbed. The work was laboriously done using shovels and pick axes by workers, beggars and prisoners, housed in wooden barracks along the banks. Accidents and illness were rife. In total, several million cubic metres of earth was moved and tonnes of stone assembled.

The canal is a complex and accurate hydraulic machine, based on hydrodynamics and designed by French State engineers. Each element is essential and has a role to play: gutters feed water into the canal, locks tame it and make navigation possible and bridges connecting the river’s two banks facilitate communication. The tow path completes the system, enabling craft to navigate upstream, pulled by horses. Facilitating the circulation of goods and raw materials, until the start of the 20th century, canals and rivers helped to develop the economy of Brittany, especially agriculture and industry.

Another means of transport, the railway, helped to transport goods and especially fertilisers. While the Quimper-Paris line passed through the administrative capital, Vannes, it was chosen to link Pontivy, a garrison town, to the port of Lorient for strategic and political reasons. In 1865, the Auray-Pontivy line which followed the course of the Blavet, was opened. It was the first internal railway line in the Morbihan, prior to the development of the famous departmental network of “small trains”.

The railway led to the construction of rail bridges over the Blavet and tunnels built to standard plans drawn up in 1880 by the French railway department. Railway crossings were installed on roads, with their typical houses where the gatekeeper lived, employed by the railway to lower and lift the barriers before they were automated.

With the bargemen, lock-keepers and their families were key personnel in the life of the canal. In charge of operating the locks, they lived in lock-keepers’ houses - modest houses provided by the employer and today part of an endearing architectural heritage. Like the later gatekeepers’ houses, these houses with their garden allowed for self-sustained living, and are some of the only houses designed in the 19th century by state engineers. Built with materials from the outside, and subject to dampness and flooding, they were abandoned and fell into ruin from 1950. On this side, an electricity station was built to extend the lock in 1933.

On the bank opposite in the commune of Saint-Barthélémy is the village of Saint-Adrien, comprised of several farms which developed around its 15th century chapel. In the 19th century, new houses and shops appeared along the new roads. Between the two bridges on the Blavet and tow path, bargemen and their families moved along the river and lived on board all year round. Navigating day and night on their non-motorised wooden barge, they drifted down the current or were towed upstream by a horse and deckhand. The Nantes barge was typical of the time, as was the Breton barge. The Hennebont boat, a small estuary and river boat, could carry up to 40 tonnes of mine posts or coal.

With competition from the railways, and then from roads (here the departmental road from Baud to Guémené-sur-Scorff opened in 1936), navigation of the Blavet gradually declined. The Nantes-Brest canal kept its traffic until 1914 thanks to prices that were 40% lower than those of the train. But technical issues, the increase in draught from 1.1 metres to 1.65 metres in 1860, floods, the width of the canals and arches, maintenance, slowness and the low capacity of boats disqualified this means of transport. From the start of the 20th century, it was no longer commercially viable. In 1920, the State sold the part between Guerlédan and Bon Repos to a private company to install a hydroelectric power station. The dam built between 1924 and 1930 flooded eight locks and stopped all traffic. The Union Hydrolélectric Armoricaine was supposed to install a boat lift to restore navigation, but never did so. Around 1960, river tourism became popular and saved some structures from abandon, giving them a new vocation.

Overlooking the valley, the chapel of Saint-Jean is decorated with sculptures of animals on its inclines. Except for its 17th-century altar and stoup, and two 18th century statues of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Isidore, the furniture is recent. It owes its name to the Order of Saint John’s Hospitallers, sometimes confused with the Knights Templar. It seems to have been built on the ruins of an establishment mentioned in 1160 as the “Blaguelt chaplaincy”, i.e. Blavet. Sick people were treated there. The calvary in front of the chapel dates from 1684 and is sculpted with a Virgin and Child on the back and Saint John the Baptist on the front. 

Culminating at 147 metres, Lann Velin Avel (the windmill moor) used to be an ideal setting for this type of mill. Known as Kerbrouët mill in 1843, with the mills of Glayo and Villeneuve Jacquelot, it was one of three mills listed on the Napoleonic land registry. This moorland, lightly wooded in the 1950s, is now a complete forest. 

Rebuilt in the 17th century on a 15th-century ruin whose stoup it conserves, the little chapel of Saint-Roch was much visited for its horse blessing (pardon). Horses and families are still blessed here to protect against illness and accidents near the fountain with its washhouse and a new altar built for outdoor ceremonies. Inside, the two niches in the 17th-century altarpiece house recent statues of Saint Roch and Saint Eloi, the patron saint of horses. Ex-voto horseshoes are testimony to how old this cult is.

This wood is filled with Breton native species such as beech, oak and chestnut. The latter gave their name to Quistinic, Breton for chestnut grove. They are said to have been introduced by the Romans. They played an important role in the daily life of the peasants who used it as food and for building timber and firewood.

Saint-Mathurin fountain is a large triangular stone fountain dating from 1678. As well as the Virgin Mary in the niches are statues of Saint Mathurin and Saint Peter, the patron saints of the chapel and the parish church in the centre of the town. It is enclosed by a low stone wall with benches.

This large washhouse is a reminder that they were built everywhere after 1851, thanks to State subsidies. The goal was to develop hygiene and cleanliness. Women gathered to do their laundry and chat; laughter and joking made up for the hardness of the chores.