The church, the chapter-room, and some other details still remain, admirably preserved, to illustrate the excellence of the early Gothic period of the buildings.
On the way to Rosporden, one passes the principal town of Bannalec, whose original name was Balaneck, meaning the place for planting the broom. It has not much interest for the stranger, unless perchance he happens to pass through it on the day of some local feast or celebration, when he will most likely see the young peasant-folk, men and women, dancing in the middle of the roadway, as they do in the operas. Brittany indeed is about the only place where one is likely to see such a phenomenon, and, if by chance it happen to be a wedding celebration, the diversion will be doubly interesting.
On the particular occasion when the builders of this book passed that way, a wedding dance was actually in progress, and so edifying was the ceremony that the bride and groom were invited into the tonneau of our motor-car, and whirled away to Rosporden for a little excursion, which was unpremeditated and unexpected to all concerned, and was probably also a unique experience.
Rosporden, on the shore of the great lake of Rosporden, as it was described to us, proved a disappointment. Not that so very much was expected of it, but that so little was found in it. The lake is a misnomer, though the water-weedy pond near the church serves the innumerable artists who flock to the region as a highly interesting foreground. The women of Rosporden wear the most immense bonnets and coifs to be seen in all Brittany, and wimples like those of the Sisters of Charity.
The church dates from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and is in every way an admirably preserved monument.
To Concarneau and the smell of the sea is a dozen or fourteen kilometres over a gently rising and falling road, with a tendency always to descend until finally one coasts down the long main street of the celebrated fishing port and artists' sketching-ground (it would be hard to tell in which aspect it is the more famous), until one comes to that famous Great Travellers' Hotel, where one eats of oysters, lobster, and fresh sardines and many other kinds of sea food to such an extent that one feels decidedly fishy, or at least thirsty.