Quistinic - Poul Fetan Circuit

Poul Fetan is a twelve-hectare tourist site offering total immersion in a 19th century Breton village. The project was born in 1978 when the municipality bought the village and its land with the aim of restoring it and making it into a cultural and tourist attraction. A real challenge taken on by all the people of Quistinic, signing up to the idea of promoting their roots and their know-how, and not hesitating to roll up their sleeves. From 1978 to 1992, 16th and 17th-century dwellings, houses, and barns were restored to a high standard. The area surrounding the village was also restored. Ruined bread ovens were reborn with ti-forn: a house with an oven. Courtyards, gardens, fields and paths were redesigned and enclosed by low walls, the fountain and the hemp-rolling pond were restored. An association, created in 1985, arranges visits to the site. Since 1989, events around the daily life of countryfolk have been organised, and diversified with heritage classes welcomed from 1995, a Nature and Heritage Workshop created in 2005, festivities... Everyone involved in the project is still there, to help you discover this farm of yesteryear with fun activities and tasting sessions: making butter, bread, spinning, washing clothes, etc. The site is constantly evolving and reinventing itself.

All along your route, you will discover the rich heritage of the villages of Quistinic. As this is mainly private rural architectural heritage, we invite you to observe it from the public road to preserve the peace of its inhabitants. At Le Hévédic, you will see the typical buildings of the farms in Quistinic: buildings that once combined people and animals under the same roof, barns, bread ovens and wells. The hamlet has changed little in its organization since the 19th century.On the right, farms, dating from the 16th-18th centuries, organised in a U-shape around courtyards, while on the left, the 19th and 20th century houses are built along the road. In a garden, you see two circular stones on top of each other, remains of a “pile-mile”, used to crush millet before the development of millet mills. In the past, millet, along with other cereals, was a staple food and is still eaten as sweet porridge in Quistinic and the surrounding area.

From Le Hévédic, follow one of the routes taken by local farmers to come and grind their grain at the Bodery mill. It was active from at least the 18th century, but declined after 1950. Today, the main body of the mill can be seen with the location of the wheel axle, the millstones, some elements of the mechanisms and the bypass canal. Water from the stream, captured upstream, turned a clever system of two staircase paddlewheels, placed one on top of the other, to compensate for the low water flow.The wheels set in motion a system of gears that operated the grinding wheels. The grain was crushed between the fixed and the rotating millstone in a wooden box called an “archure”. Two different millstones can be seen lying in the grass. The first, made from one piece of granite, was replaced by the second in the 18th century. The composite checkered wheels, which were easier to produce, were manufactured in the Seine-et-Marne department and exported throughout Europe. Combining several quarters of stones of different hardnesses, granite and quartzite for example, cemented with plaster and strapped with hot iron bands, they were often transported in kit and assembled on the spot.

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.

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.

In the middle of the 19th century, Kermoisan had two bread ovens and about thirty buildings, farms grouped around courtyards, but also small dwellings in rows. The openings, with basket-handle and semicircular doors still in place, indicate that the hamlet was already inhabited during the 17th century. In the 20th century, buildings grew up along the roads leading to Quistinic and Poul Fetan. 

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.

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. 

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. Planted with trees, they took on their name of sunken paths, as they were eroded over time and dug out by the rains, as far as exposing the granite rock underneath. Called “hent’ in Breton, these paths were usually named. Here, to get to Coët Organ, you will pass along the Hent Huern and Hent Marué, names which are difficult to translate into French.

The entrance to the village of Coët Organ, or Organ’s wood in English, is marked by a roadside cross bearing two dates on its base: 1669, the probable date of its construction, and 1951, in connection with the 1950 Jubilee, a great religious prayer event promulgated by the Pope after the 1939-1945 war. The construction is characteristic with Christ on the cross and its scooped-out shaft, decorated with excrescences, probable evocations of the buboes of the plague. Coët Organ consists of three large farms organized around courtyards with buildings, stables, barns and bread ovens. The first to the north is a series of dwellings, the most recent of which, with its symmetrical bays, dates from 1818. The quality of its construction is obvious, as it its doghouse attached to the facade, rather contemporary to the typical wells of the west Morbihan, richly carved and dated 1771. The other farmhouses are just as beautiful: the layout of the facades and the architecture of the windows suggest successive constructions between the end of the 16th and the 18th centuries.

On your left, you can see a pond that was once used as a washhouse by the women of the village of Le Porzo. Although Quistinic still has a few stone washhouses, especially in the town, most of them, often associated with a fountain that supplied the villagers with water, have disappeared. It was common practice to wash clothes directly in the stream. Stone basins became widespread after 1850, particularly following the state aid granted by the French government for the creation of public washhouses.

With its 17th and 18th century dwellings, Saint-Quion bears witness to the prosperity of the countryfolk under the Ancien Régime. Some of the old farms are arranged around courtyards, while others are aligned along the Blavet below. On your right, the domed bread oven is one of the hundred or so ovens listed in Quistinic on the Napoleonic land registry of 1843. Saint-Quion had three of them. It is characteristically domed, with a plant cover and a stone structure with a low-arched mouth. The oven was often shared: villagers took turns to provide the wood to heat the oven before putting the bread to be baked into it.

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

This rocky promontory where the Breton moorland is everywhere, mixing gorse and heather, offers an unobstructed view of the deep valley of the Blavet. The river meanders through, bordered by the towpath which enabled boats to go upstream pulled by horses. In the distance, Minazen lock and lockhouse show the complexity of this hydraulic machinery, a real boat lift. At the start of the 20th century, more than 3,000 boats passed through here every year carrying fertiliser, sand, limestone, timber and firewood, as well as iron ore and coke from Bilbao and Wales. Lock keepers and bargemen, with their families, were central characters in the life of the Blavet, nowadays popular with walkers, cyclists and kayakers.