My birthday was this week and in the French countryside many businesses are closed on Mondays. We checked for local, swankier restaurants but they were all closed. So for our day out we decided to go to Huelgoat, famous for it’s glorious fake lake and gigantic boulders.
A “fake lake” is when they damn up a stream and fill a valley with water. This one has been here for a while and it’s gorgeous.
Of course we arrived and all the restaurants were open. The restauranteurs of Huelgoat are not silly enough to close during tourist season, unlike some towns I could mention. They all advertised Pizza as one or their main offerings (the current national dish of France) but in fact the Hotel du Lac has a perfectly nice, traditional French restaurant attached. We had goat’s cheese, duck and poulet roti between us, and a fine, half bottle of Graves (Bordeaux) to sip in the sunshine.
When France replants forests they tend to plant them in lines, like a Christmas tree farm. Fortunately this is a natural forest.
Then we strolled through the sun-dappled woods where the river has cut through to reveal gigantic boulders. They really are amazing. You feel like you’ve leapt back through many millennia and expect to get pounced on my sabre-toothed tiger.
The indentation in the rock was apparently an air bubble back when all of this was molten lava. A minute or two ago.
And the place has a primeval/pagan/olde worlde/celtic/running-around-in-skins kind of feel to it. It’s the sort of place where raggedy, tie-dyed musicians come and play the harp and flute and do interpretative dances.
There was a week in 1944 when all over Brittany the panicking German occupiers received orders to publicly execute their local resistance members. You see these memorials in every town. This one is in the peaceful Huelgoat woods.
I have come here several times to paint. It’s tricky to get across the scale of the rocks, you need something convincingly normal-sized, like a human, to show just how house-sized some of them are.
An early attempt at rock painting. You can see that the scale is hard to translate visually. This one is about the size of two cars.
I will make the trek again but with a model who can drape themselves across a rock. It’s too gorgeous not to. All in all a glorious day. One of those moments of delight to store up against the coming winter.