Even as morning frost dissipates under an unconcerned blue sky, the town square of Callac clangs to the gravely tones of Luke Kelly singing Raglan Road. The town's public speaker system disgorges Irish music, some of it more plastic Celt than anything else. The local cinema is showing Man of Aran.
But Callac is not hosting a festival. In an hour the town will shift into commercial gear. An intimate farm town in the Breton countryside, Callac slopes upwards into two public squares, one embracing a church and a grave statue of a soldier, common to every village in France, with the words "Morts pour la Patrie" at his feet. A local newsagent, as well stocked as many in bigger towns and with its windows plastered with notices of every parish event, large and small, sells novels in English and a startlingly-titled magazine, Brit-Mag, full of information for les anglais for whom speaking French in France is something one might possibly take up one day if one is sufficiently bored. You can also find here the works of the Breton poet Emmanuel Le Peillet, or Frédéric Le Bonhomme, born in Kergrist-Moelou in 1911.
Down a falling street is an ancient general goods store with the word "Café" over the front door. It is not a café but a store-and-bar, common in Ireland before we got posh. There are a couple of other unhurried café-bars in town, but this one is unique. The former proprietor, a lovely, animated woman who last year showed us patiently around the various bowls, cups, saucers, farming implements, enormous rat-traps, and wonderful wooden rakes for making crepes, died earlier this year. This is where local men idle for an hour or two. Thankfully, it's a listed building, one of a heritage of such ancient shops in similar villages. Were it in Ireland, it would long ago have been demolished to make way for "town houses," i.e. flats. Callac too has its giant supermarket. But in the fields, hunting men walk with their guns carefully broken, spaniels trotting behind them.
The relationship between the Bretons and the Irish has overshadowed perhaps a more historically, if not genetically, complete one between ourselves and the Galicians of Northern Spain. Yet there is little doubt that being Irish in this dolmen-studded, myth-tattooed land is an advantage. There is an immediate, and very genuine, sense of friendship. This does not always extend so automatically to others. Driving up a mountainy road, there, slipping under the wheels of the car, are the words in big letters and sound English: "Brits Out". Not for a moment should this be taken as an indication of a general hostility to newcomers, but it does make one think. The Bretons, like the Irish, know about invasion.
English kings have fought over this strategic coastal region of France throughout history; the French finally grabbed a solid hold on Brittany, and any hopes of Breton independence, in the 16th century. In 1919, a benevolent French writer, Henry Roger, wrote in praise of Breton tenacity. In 1923 Jules Vendryes, less charitably - and less fairly - wrote that Bretons were not interested in matters of philosophy. Some Breton commentators have added to negative notions of being Breton. In an article in Le Monde in the 1970s, Jérome Savary declared that Bretons could not invent, and so fell back on stereotypes, on their "bardes" and yarns about "Robin des Bois".
Still, Brittany is the region of choice for chic Parisians and platoons of well-off, retired English to set up house and reinvent themselves. For the Bretons, problems arise - and they will talk about these openly enough, though in French, when English-bought houses, revamped or otherwise, are put back on the market at inflated prices, thus excluding local purchase; or, worse, used only as holiday homes, and left empty most of the year. The same happens here in Ireland, of course, where "holiday homes" are often purchased for occupation only a fortnight in a year, and are left empty the rest of the time. It is possible today to walk down a street in an Irish village that resembles something from Goldsmith: boarded-up windows, locked doors, curtains mouldering on blind windows.
Throughout Brittany there appears to be, in the main, a practice of incomers sticking together socially, even employing one another as handymen - in spite of a French regulation that provides for a reduction in the cost of building materials if one employs local artisans. Once again, this sort of thing is not unique to Brittany; Irish expatriates in, say, Paris, clot around each other like a green Raj under siege.
But there is something still alive in Brittany that is dying here: a real sense of rural community where tradition continues and the outside world, thankfully, can make little impact. It is still a country of myth, mystery, old magic, older faith.
In a community hall in the tiny hamlet of Magoar, a young girl steps down from the stage where she has been playing the accordion for the dancers. There is a poster on the wall behind her announcing a parish draw, with the first prize a trip to Ireland. The girl's beauty is scarcely believable; she has stepped out of a tapestry, a Brocéliande tale. She disappears.
Later we explore, in moony dark, the 12th-century church. Under the worn coat-of-arms, in Breton, is the legend: "The last hour is hidden."
Hidden too, no doubt, is the mystery of how a Breton girl can step out of myth, or at least poetic imagination, onto a stage in a village hall. Was the moon full? I cannot recall.