Cap Fréhel, more blue. And pink.

When my sister was here, we made a trip to Cap Fréhel. I hadn't been there for ages. It's a headland that sticks out northward into what is still the English Channel.

Looking west, you can see across the Bay of St Brieuc, up the Paimpol peninsular, to the Ile de Bréhat, at least on a clear day, which it wasn't really.

Eastward is the Bay of St Malo, the land jutting out in many little limbs, mostly named for saints: St Cast, St Jacut, St Lunaire, St Briac, St Malo...


It's a tricky place to come to by sea,

there's a fairly modern lighthouse,

built onto the body of an older one,

then, right out at the point, a small, stumpy one, presumably the oldest of all.

With rocky thin soil, moorland and a lot of obdurate rock, no one much bothered to develop it. Now I think it's protected.

So the birds, like these cormorants, can live their lives in peace, since even the many visitors who come to walk here can't get close to where they live and feed.

The photo below, without the zoom, gives you some idea how high you are above the sea and the rocks, the tiny black dots are the cormorants, the white flecks may well be gannets, a bird with a four-foot wingspan, I certainly saw some there.

And this shows how little the landscape is spoiled by fussy nonsense like safety barriers: the little boy who I inadvertently got partially in the shot is standing more or less on the edge of a sheer drop - his bigger brother was standing by him, though sibling rivalry being what it can be that was not necessarily a guarantee of his safety.

At the other end of the same peninsular is Fort La Latte. Remember that 1950s epic 'The Vikings'? It was filmed here. I think I'd like to see it again, but Tom says I'd have to watch it on my own, as he finds the chopping-off-Tony-Curtis's-hand bit too bloodthirsty.

Most of this coast is granite, but this is part of a strip of pink sandstone, (not pink granite, as is found further west on the pink granite coast round Perros Guirrec) that runs mostly under the sea, but emerges again at the northernmost tip of the Ile de Bréhat, where it seems to take on a quite peachy hue, and another lighthouse has been built from it, so it rises from the rocks it stands on in a very harmonious and all-of-a-piece amnner .

Here it has been sculpted by the elements into dramatic stacks and towers. I wonder how long that chunk of stone has been trapped in that space, and when and why it fell?

It blends with the blue-grey and golden lichens, and with the yellow gorse and reddish heather that cover the landscape much of the summer, and looks quite vivid against the blues of sea and sky.

And the birds seem to like it too.