Flight 1

So off we flew over Trébeurdan and Trégastel,

and over this spine of an empty island called the Île de Tomé.

and on towards Paimpol.  This island above is the Île de Béniguet,

which lies next to Bréhat, where Heather Dohollau lived for many years and which was the inspiration for many of her poems:

at the first sight of the island
among an excess of fragments
like a Leonardo painting 
or a Patinir

I've picnicked by that boathouse on  Bréhat, but it looks like there's no one there today.

This is the Île de St Riom, an old monastic settlement, its owner is restoring the monastery buildings, which you can just see,

And this is the Abbaye de Beauport, which was the mother house of the St Riom foundation where mediaeval pilgrims on the Camino coming from Britain, first came ashore on the continent.

We travelled on down the coast, the western side of the Bay of St Brieuc.

In truth, despite poring over Google Earth and the Michelin atlas, I couldn't identify every place we saw.  The port above is St Quay Portrieux.

It struck me how little we know this coast in detail, with its varied beaches and small cliff top roads, though we drive much further afield to explore sea-girt corners and interesting by-ways.  We should remedy that.

We flew back to Lannion over the Trieux estuary,

with the elegant suspension road bridge at Lézardrieux in the distance.

We flew over woods and fields, see the row of beehives in the heathlands above,

and saw people growing things,

and cropping and packing the things they grew.

And most and best of all the iridescent, silky sea,

and the endless, enamelled, shapes and patterns and textures of the coast, and its natural and human life and movement.

How lucky I am to live here, and how lucky to have friends who want to help me see it in a new way.

~

So that was the itinerary, but needless to say I took many more photos, so I will post more over the next few days.  Because it was such a wonderful experience, I am loath to discard any, however mediocre and blurry, so may end up making patchworks out of scraps and snippets.

(And this is my second attempt at this post.  A catastrophic glitch occurred owing to working on two computers at the same time, and all the text was lost, so this one is rather terser than the first version, with fewer links, for which my apologies.)