Calan The Lec'h Circuit

Before being joined to Lanvaudan in 1516, Calan was a large parish in the Middle Ages, as its Romanesque church attests. Its population, from 500 to 700 people from 1800 to the 1960s, dropped to 410 in 1975 before gradually rising again. Located in Lorient’s catchment area, Calan currently has 1,175 inhabitants, 85% of whom are under 60 years old. This demographic boom has been accompanied by recent construction. Nearly 350 houses, mostly detached and in the town, were built between 1968 and 2015, more than half of them just in the last fifteen years.This renewal has helped to maintain and revive local shops and services. Between modernity and tradition, the heart of the village remains organised around its parish enclosure. Some ancient architectural structures have been restored, such as the bread oven, which was fired up again for events. Low stone walls mark out areas of circulation. The former presbytery has been refurbished as a town hall while the former school hall, built in 1900, houses various town services. On the right, two buildings, once thatched, now house the library. Their segmental-arch doors and ogee arches indicate that they date from the 16th and 17th centuries.

A true masterpiece of Breton Romanesque art, the listed Trinity Church was enhanced by several restorations between 1978 and 2000. The work revealed three main construction campaigns, two in the Romanesque period and one in the 15th century. The nave and transept still have bays with arcades resting on square piers from the end of the 10th century, others from the 12th century with capitals sculpted with geometric decorations, volutes, latticework and foliage. Fragments of ochre and brown paintings from the 11th or 12th centuries, rare Breton testimonies of Romanesque mural painting, were uncovered. They represent the Last Supper and Hell. In the 15th century, perhaps in 1425 as indicated by a date inscribed on the eaves of the roof frame, the choir and its aisles were rebuilt with three bays with broken arches and a bay opening onto the chevet to the east. Outside, while the lantern tower of the transept is a reminder of the Romanesque origin of the building, the elevations date from the first quarter of the 15th century. The gallery, unique in Morbihan, is comprised of a series of columns and a frame with capitals and hammerbeams carved with faces supporting the sloping roof. Built in the 16th century, unusually, it includes the south porch and an ossuary in its western part. A skylight was created in the roof slope to combat the darkness created by this arrangement. The preserved parish enclosure still houses the cemetery, a rare occurrence today.

Witnesses to a past way of life, essential on a day-to-day basis, bread ovens and wells are numerous in our villages and our countryside. Their construction intensified in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Calan, there are three bread ovens in the village, two of which were already on the Napoleonic land register of 1843. This one, more recent and very well looked after, is typical: a base with an ashtray on which rests a cut stone dome covered with a green roof, a mouth with a semi-circular arch, a vent to evacuate the excess steam and two corbels supporting the dome. Opposite, in a private courtyard, one can see a well, typical of the western Morbihan, that would bring water close to the house before it reached the tap. Called “puits de la Trinité” and listed since 1934 on the inventory of Historical Monuments, it is said to date from the 17th century. Its circular moulded base is topped by a coping and a superstructure with a lintel on pedestals housing the lifting mechanism. Balls and masks are traditional decorations found on the two other wells in the village, one of which is not far from the church. Visibly reassembled on a rectangular base more in keeping with the early 20th century, its lintel is carved with inscriptions, obviously a name, perhaps Jean Ja.1st.

The route runs along the bottom of the valley through a wetland area which plays a fundamental role in the water cycle. Acting as a regulator, it stores water in the winter and releases it to the river during dry periods. It is also a purifying filter and helps improve water quality. The dense vegetation of the wetland includes various characteristic species that like to live with their feet in the water. In winter, the waterlogged brown soils, dotted with tall clumps of sedges with sharp grasses, willow and birch with thin, twisted trunks covered in fluorescent green mosses, make for a hushed atmosphere. The summer is more exuberant. The colour green bursts through. Ferns, nettles, water hemlock and angelica cover the ground and border the stream. The leaves of the trees form a protective canopy. This poor, peaty soil is also home to the royal fern, a large, light green clump of ferns that can grow up to 1.5 metres in diameter. In the spring, stems slowly unfurl from the thick stumps to form large bipinnate fronds. Unlike other ferns, the sporangia of the royal fern do not develop on the back of the pinnate leaves, but at the top of the fronds in the form of pinkish beige to reddish brown panicles, hence its other name of flower fern. The spores disseminated at maturity ensure the survival of the fern. Present all around the globe, it is nonetheless becoming rarer. It is protected in several French regions, in the Finistère and the Ille-et-Vilaine in Brittany.

The subsoil of Calan, consisting mainly of hard rock, granite and gneiss, is conducive to a surface hydrographic network. The commune has nearly 3.5 km of permanent waterways and 4.5 km of intermittent waterways. These streams and creeks mark out the territory, the Crano to the north, the Stang-Varric and the Kerollin to the east, the Kergonano to the west. Here, the stream er Hoëh-Coh, fed by several springs gushing towards the town, near Kerbrimot and Kerihuel, flows into the Crano. It is part of the Scorff watershed. The water flowing past you joins the Saint-Sauveur, a major tributary of the Scorff. In 1843, on the Napoleonic land registry, it was possible to cross the river here over the Hoeh Coh Bridge, also written Hoch Coh, a Breton term whose meaning is unknown. The creek was known as Hoeh Coh Bridge Creek. It may have been a simple ford made of flat stones such as the well-preserved one found a little higher up on the Crano stream, also called the Kergono bridge at the time. It was crossed here by the “path from Plouay to Kerihuel”.

Walking along the embankment hollow, one becomes aware of the incredible network of hedgerows created by farmers from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Located here, mid-slope between old pastures on one side, and the moor and cultivated plain on the other, this man-made path linked the villages and the fields. It played a significant role as a ditch, channelling rainwater while at the same time limiting erosion. Sculpting the landscape, the embankments marked out common and private spaces, separated the arable land from the moorland, woods and meadows, thus protecting the crops from free-ranging animals. Various trees planted provided fruit, timber, firewood and handles for tools. Here, one can only admire the more than one hundred-year-old beeches lining and barring the path, like mossy sentinels extending their large tender green branches in spring.

The territory of Calan extends on the other side of the stream. A path from Kerihuel to Poulgourio, already crossed the river here in 1843, probably by a ford, combining a path still visible and stone paving. The Napoleonic land registry also reveals a “stream used to water the meadows” on the left bank. This system, known as “irrigated meadows”, diverted some of the water from the creek at the Hoëh-Coh bridge and led it along a canal to here. Located over the meadows, the canal watered them thanks to a system of valves and gutters. Already common in Lower Brittany in the 18th century, this system worked in winter. The water warmed the soil, allowing vegetation to start early and an abundant harvest of quality hay. The bottoms of these valleys, now abandoned by modern agriculture, have gradually wooded over. One third of the area of Calan is currently planted.

Farming represents 20% of the economic activity in Calan. More than 50% of the land in the parish is devoted to farming, half of which is for cereal crops and corn, with forage and grassland accounting for a third. Seven of its eleven farms are dedicated to livestock, milk and meat production. The landscape on this plateau bears witness to these activities, but also shows how it has changed since the 1950s.  In the 19th century and until the 1960s, before farming was reorganised and mechanized, there were about thirty plots of land surrounded by embankments on either side of this road. Comparing aerial photographs from the 1960s and the present day reveals the former footprint of the embankments in lighter colours. In 1843, on the Napoleonic land registry, the combination of wide strips of farmland and thin strips of moorland at mid-slope is a reminder that the moor, with its heather, broom and gorse, was not a useless wilderness, but a resource exploited by farmers for generations. This resource, regularly cleared, uprooted, burned and then reseeded, provided area for grazing, forage and firewood. The buzzing above your heads and the pylon are other marks of the changes in our society. They bring electricity to our territory to meet our growing energy needs. In addition to this high-voltage line supplying the Finistère department, another very high-voltage underground line passes through Calan in the east towards the Côtes d'Armor. Calan plays an important role in this scheme with an electrical transformer station installed in an old quarry.

Recently built up, Kerihuel, the “upper village”, still has some old buildings, partly converted when rural buildings were updated in the 19th and 20th centuries. These houses, recognizable by their symmetrical and standardized rectangular windows, sometimes reuse older bays. They can be found on other houses: segmental arch door and segmental arch windows from the 16th and 17th centuries, from the second half of the 18th century. In 1843, this hamlet had fourteen buildings. Several longères, placed around courtyards, confirm the existence of six or seven farms. The bread oven, with its low-arched mouth, was already here too. Located at the heart of Kerihuel, this shared equipment was used by the whole village. Each family in turn had to provide a bundle of wood or heath and manage the fire, before they could bake their dough. Analysis of the Napoleonic land registries of the area reveals that this type of construction was very common in the 19th century. The largest villages sometimes had several. In 1843, Calan had 26 ovens, including the village oven, i.e. nearly one per hamlet. One of them, marked in yellow at Poulgourio, is in ruins, and demonstrates that bread ovens were already common in the 18th century. Another, at Kercrohennec, extended by a shelter, is of the barn oven type. Others were built after this date, like the one in the village of Kergarenne. Many of them became useless in the 20th century and were destroyed. There are ten left in Calan, including three in the town. Three of them are of the barn-oven type. It is essential to preserve these constructions showing the technical skills of past masons. Once the base of the “chapel” walls was built, an earthen mound was erected to guide the construction of the dome. The earth was then evacuated through the mouth of the oven. The floor was made of clay or paved with stones. Many were lined with firebrick at the end of the 19th century / start of the 20th century to increase their heating capacity.

Preserved in its original state, the modest fountain of Kerandiot shows how life developed around springs, vital to the domestic life of villages before the arrival of tap water in the 1960s. It is surrounded by ashlars laid on edge, one of which is bevelled, thus reused, and is extended by a widening basin also surrounded by stones. It was probably used as a washhouse, as the sloping stone near the spring suggests, but perhaps also as a watering place. This fountain appears on the Napoleonic land registry of Calan in 1843 which lists twelve springs. It is likely that there was at least one per hamlet. Only one at Kergueris is cited as a washhouse, a reminder that these rectangular basins were built mainly after 1851, following State aid granted for their construction. Located below the hamlets in the wetlands, difficult to access, springs also competed with wells built by dowser masons near the houses. Curiously, not one of them appears on the Calan land register in 1843. However, among the twelve still present, some are older, such as the one at Poulgourio bearing the date 1776 on its lintel. Although inventories carried out in neighbouring towns confirm that the construction of wells intensified after 1850, as did the construction of washhouses, the conditions of the land registry inventory, which varied in accuracy from one commune to another, and perhaps also the population's distrust of surveyors, may explain these gaps.

This hemispherical stone cut in granite is a sign of the Gallic settlement in our region in the 5th and 4th centuries before our era. Called a lec'h, it was once part of a group of three funerary stones indicating the presence in this area of a burial ground associated with a nearby Iron Age village. Aerial surveys have revealed enclosures which were probably contemporary with these stelae at Kerbiron, Mane Duel and Cosqueric. Burnt bones were placed in urns or small chests in the ground. More than one thousand steles have been identified in the Morbihan, including two others in the town of Calan, which are now difficult to locate. They vary in shape. Sometimes tall and elongated, they are usually low, ovoid or hemispherical like this one, and sometimes decorated with cupules.  These incinerations disappeared at the end of the 4th century before our era and some steles were broken. Others were later Christianized, engraved with a cross or moved near a religious building. Many of them became wheel chasers at the corner of buildings, were used as property markers or were built into embankments. Rosensweig, in his archaeological inventory in 1859, describes the stones of Kerandiot: “three rounded lec'h, one that went into the construction of a wall; another overturned next to it; the third, remarkable for its size, 2 meters in diameter and 1.50 m high, at the foot of a very old oak tree.” He adds: “It is one of the extremely rare cases where we found these kinds of stones elsewhere than in the vicinity of a chapel.” In the 1980s, the archaeologist Daniel Tanguy reported the three stelae of Kerandiot, grouped on this small square on the site of an ancient chapel dedicated to St. Conneth. Was it Saint Connec, a former disciple of Saint Caradec, who gave his name to a town in the Côtes d'Armor department? It's hard to say. The remaining stele, 1.40 metres in diameter and 1 metre high, is decorated with two cupules on its top. One of them has been hollowed out.

The subsoil of Calan, mainly granite and gneiss, especially in this area is incrusted with quartz and mylonite veins. Several quarries, now closed, were in operation in Calan. Mylonite gave the “blue stone” known as Calan stone, for which local quarries were renowned thanks to its high quality as a paving material.  This geological diversity can be found in the old buildings, such as this stone barn with its shades of beige, blue-grey and rust. It is representative with its large arched doorway surmounted by a segmental arched window engraved with a partially erased date. The 1 and 7 are a sign that it was built in the 18th century. Its walls have been raised to accommodate a slate roof. These structures were used as haylofts, sheltered carts and sometimes the press for cider. Among the fifteen or so buildings visible on the Napoleonic land registry of 1843, the barn was part of one of the hamlet's farms arranged around this courtyard. The two bread ovens have now disappeared, but the dwellings, although altered, show signs of their age: magnificent 16th century ogee-arched doors and segmental arch windows.

This wood, qualified as a forest in 1843, has been replanted with pine trees. Pine trees were introduced in the 17th and 18th centuries and have acclimatised well. They were intensively exploited from the 19th century. Scots pines were used for boat masts. Maritime pines were planted in the inland moorlands and on dunes. They were used to make 25 to 30cm diameter posts for English mines, exported from the port of Lorient. Cut rapidly every 25 years, they offered landowners a good return.  While this industry has declined, many forests have been replanted with softwoods, pines and firs, since the 1970s. These fast-growing species, preferred by foresters are intended for forestry use, especially the Sitka spruce. However, in recent years, many plots have been felled because of the great spruce bark beetle. This insect burrows into the trunks drying them out.

From the end of the Middle Ages, villages started to emerge with the gradual setting up of traffic routes. Some were narrow and connected the villages to the fountains and fields, others were wider and more passable, like this one linking the town to Keralloch. The country folk dug out the central part. Earth and stones were used to build the embankments, which were then planted with trees, here centuries old. They were known as sunken paths not only because of their construction technique. Many of these sloping paths, washed out by the rains, have become so dug out that they sometimes reach several metres in depth and expose the granitic subsoil or veins of underground water.

On the edge of the fields, this part of the town contains the sports facilities, the new multi-purpose hall and the public school Le Levant, which was gradually moved here in 1985. In 1854, Calan was one of the 33 communes in the Morbihan to have a public school. In 1869, the mayor wrote to the Emperor to help finance a school house. A project was launched in 1882. However, in 1895, the 65 boys and 58 girls still attended the mixed school in a rented building.  In 1900, the new town hall was built with the help of the Academy of Rennes. Along the traditional model, two classrooms, for boys and girls, were located on either side of the town hall. Each had its own courtyard with toilets and a shelter, and the teachers were housed on the first floor of the town hall. One of the classrooms has been demolished, but the courtyard and shelter are still there. A private school, run by the Congregation of Christian Sisters, known as Saint-Gildas, was also opened in 1938. It no longer exists.

Now back at the starting point, linger a while to visit the Romanesque church. Inside, the furnishings have been enriched over the centuries: an altarpiece and its statuary, in particular a Holy Trinity, from the end of the 17th century; a baptismal font, high altar and censer from the 18th century; statues, banners, choir stalls and baptismal font enclosure from the 19th century The remains of a 15th-century Virgin and Child were found decapitated and buried in the cemetery. This practice was used in the past when people did not want to keep a statue. From the 16th century, a holy water font and two bas-reliefs of the Annunciation and the Crucifixion from an old granite altarpiece have been preserved. For a long time, the church of Calan housed a very special stone, which has mysteriously disappeared, although its presence was known after the 1939-1945 war. Roc'h Kaelan, stone of Calan, or Mell benniget Kaelan, which can be translated as blessed ball of Calan or blessed mallet of Calan. Although we don't really know what it looked like, similar objects are reported around Brittany in churches and chapels, especially in the Morbihan. The Locmeltro stone in Guern is an impressive example: a spherical granite ball 20 cm in diameter weighing no less than 3.5 kg. But what was it for? There are two opposing theories. For some, it could be a sacred stone, a sort of viaticum, that the dying person kissed or that was placed on the forehead as a rite of passage from life to death. For others, it could be a form of euthanasia tool used to put an end to the suffering of the dying, a rite found in many ancestral cultures around the world. In the popular memory, some speak of it jokingly, such as the testimony of this Calan woman born before 1939: “In Calan, whenever there was a long period with no deaths, we used to say: if this continues, we'll have to go and get the mell beniget from the church.” Others confirm its function to release the dying according to the sayings of the elders.