22 The end or the beginning

of a story, of the land

(This post is a digression, a bit of a personal backtracking that partly explains my ending up living here – see posts 1 & 2 for context.)

Recently, my friend Pauline sent me this image, above. Pauline lives close by this cottage, though I’ve only met her very recently.

Seeing it, 35 years dissolved.

The Mill on the Creek
Newly in love, I was travelling in the campervan with my then-amour – let’s call him T* – and my young daughter. We’d spent a couple of weeks travelling round parts of Brittany in the van; bathing and washing hair in rivers and the Nantes–Brest canal, exploring megaliths, walking on long nearly-empty white sand beaches.

What I didn’t know till partway through the holiday was that T was tentatively looking for somewhere small to buy. Last day of our holiday, and we were driving back to catch the ferry at Roscoff; we had plenty of time, but he was anxious about being late.

‘E (my daughter) really needs a break and something to eat,’ I’d said to him. ‘Look – let’s take this track down to the left. You never know – you might find your dream house.’

So we did, and he did. We approached the house above from the other side from that in the photo (thank you P for this image), and there was an ‘A Vendre’ sign. As it happens the owners, who lived in Brest, were there tending the garden. T made an offer, the owners accepted it, and we sealed it with a small brandy, gave E something to eat, and drove on.

The cottage, an old mill cottage, was (is) in a conservation valley close to the coast. The creek beside it is tidal, and at high tide you could drop a kayak off the cottage balcony; we did. A large old stone barn came with the property.

T was a medic, and was very interested in complementary approaches to health and healing. I had been training in various holistic modalities and was currently completing a training in Transpersonal Psychotherapy (differentiated from many psychotherapies, such as cognitive/behavioural, by its understanding of the human need for meaning through transcendent/spiritual experience, and the importance of Jung’s idea of the collective psyche and archetypes).

T’s idea was that he’d take early retirement and we’d move over and between us we’d convert the barn and set up a holistic retreat centre to offer therapies such as acupuncture, herbalism and psychotherapy, and practices like meditation (I was at the time leading weekly Zen meditation evenings). We are both of us artistic, and imagined music, art, poetry being on offer on occasion.

This relationship had a sad, and for me and my daughter traumatic, ending, but that is a private story.

*Not to be confused with ‘The Man’ with whom I’ve loved and lived for quite a few years now, but whom I only met in my early 50s.

From Cornwall to Brittany

Lanyon Quoit, West Cornwall

My dad, a fiercely passionate Celt, loved Brittany, and being Cornish (as was my mum) had a great affinity for the land, culture and language, so this was already in my blood.

Settlers from what is now Devon and Cornwall, seemingly squeezed out by Anglo-Saxon expansionism, along with missionary-monastics from Wales, all colonised Brittany (Armorica) in the early centuries of the first millennium CE. In fact, however, there had been a great deal of nautical, cultural, and trading interchange, in addition to common proto-Celtic origins, for millennia before that. The similarity of the prehistoric megaliths in Cornwall and Brittany is striking. We’re cousins; or maybe siblings.

Although England has long claimed Cornwall as a mere ‘county’, historically it is its own culture and has its own language (a Brythonic language like Welsh and Breton, and all three languages have distinct similarities) and until about the 1700s Cornwall and its inhabitants were regarded as a separate people by their English neighbours. Cornwall was increasingly subsumed into England, but was once again politically acknowledged as a nation with its own minority language in 2014.

The area in Brittany TM and I now live in is in fact Cornouaille, ‘Cornwall’.

Carn Euny Iron Age Fogou, West Cornwall, UK

Armor and Argoat
What is relevant to this story is that what T gave me with that holiday was a great, deep and enduring passion for Brittany, its coast (Armor – ‘The Sea’) and its wooded interior (Argoat – ‘The Forest’). I love the northwesterly Finistère coast, and the Crozon peninsula in particular is like a vast mirror of West Cornwall and its coastline (think ‘Poldark’).

Especially, I have him to thank for the Forêt de Huelgoat, even though that first visit was in 1988, just months after the great storms of 1987 which destroyed so much of its interior (echoed again in the great storm of November 2nd last year; this time, mostly the edges of the forest were destroyed).

There are a few times in your life when you arrive, to paraphrase Albert Camus, at one of those two or three places in the world that have been waiting for you – or rather, less anthropocentrically, that you know you have been waiting for, and in arriving know that you are home. ‘The heart is at last at peace,’ says Camus.

And now we – TM and I – live near this forest.

The Forêt de Huelgoat is one of those ‘thin places’; for me like my homeland of West Penwith in the very far west of Cornwall, near Cape Cornwall where bodies of water meet; like Dartmoor, on or near which I’ve spent almost all my adult life; and also for me like the sacred Isle of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides.

These places, edge places, have an indefinable mystery and magic to them; they are entrances to the Otherworld of the Celts, places of myth and legend from a time when we knew the woods were enchanted, animals, birds and plants communicated openly with humans, everyone understood that land held spirit and memory, and was walked by gods and goddesses… the Old Ways.

‘Such places are liminal places, thresholds into an experience of the meeting of the physical and the metaphysical… [where] we’re on the cusp of another reality hovering, waiting to be revealed – just a blink away, rather like walking in the forest, in and out of sunlight and tree shadow… into a storied land. The Wood, archetypally speaking, has long been a birthplace for story: legends leak from every corner, one catches the whisper of story in the undergrowth, in the leaves, on the breeze… [I breathe in] myth, fable, poetry through my skin and the soles of my feet when I walk in this forest,’ I wrote in A Spell in the Forest.

Once the whole of the interior of Brittany was blanketed with woodland, of which the relatively small Forêt de Huelgoat is the remains; possibly a fragment of the mythic original Brocéliande of some of the Grail legends, a forest that might have encompassed the whole of Armorica in the storytelling of the time.

This forest for me still epitomises the Wildwood, despite its smallness and popularity; for that archetype still echoes in our interior life. ‘When I walk into this forest, I walk into a deep receptive and humming silence, a benign presence’, as I wrote in my book mentioned above: ‘a place where innate wildness and natural principles combine to work in harmony and synergy – the Tao – beyond human interference’.

I realise that part of the reason for always having felt at home in this forest is because I lived in the 1980s in a fairy tale house – green, wooden, thatched, with a humming and non-threatening swarm of wild bees in the layers of the walls – in the Wray Valley near Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor. The Wray Valley was punctuated with large round granite boulders – exactly like those here in the Forest, except that these are about 10 or 20 times larger. Also, it’s a much bigger version of the magical and ancient Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor where dwarf oaks and rocks intertwine, a place I have loved for as long as I can remember; recently come to prominence via the work of Guy Shrubsole, who described it as one of the few remaining fragments of Celtic Atlantic rainforests left in Britain.

Wistmans Wood

Finistère or Penn ar Bed
So the story of my life here began at the end of the land (Finistère: finis terrae). That was a long time ago now; more than half my life ago.

Or the edge of the land.

What I love about the Breton name for this place, Penn ar Bed, is that it means rather ‘head of the land’: we could see this as both end and beginning, depending on which way we’re travelling.

As a postscript: I’ve worked for many decades now with the esoteric depths of the Tarot, something I generally keep to myself. Laura Perry of the Minoan Tarot Substack has reminded me of what I’d forgotten when writing this post: the significance of the number 22 in the Tarot. In some ascriptions, 22 symbolises the carefree Fool at the beginning of the Tarot who now, at the end of the journey, has grown wise, and holds the world and everything in it lightly.

Thank you, my friends, for reading. I’d love it if you commented, liked, subscribed if you haven’t, and/or shared. Let this be a conversation!