Our First Trip to a Gated Community

The gate to the tower.

On Wednesday, we visited the city of Dinan, north of Rennes, about halfway between Rennes and Dinard (where we went last week). Unlike Rennes or Saint-Malo, most of Dinan's medieval section is well-preserved, including its 3 kilometer-circumference city wall (hence, a "gated community"!). Riding on the bus from Rennes to Dinan, the Breton countryside struck me as being very much like western Pennsylvania (or even southwestern Wisconsin, for that matter): hilly, lots of cornfields, a fair amount of dairy cattle, and the occasional horse or sheep. If it weren't for the architecture of the houses and the French road-signs, it'd be hard to tell you were in France!

The viaduct/bridge.

Dinan is situated on a large rocky outcrop overlooking the River Rance. To get into the city, you have to ride across a viaduct several hundred feet above the valley floor. We arrived in the late morning and our first stop (as always) - the local tourism office to get our free map of the city! The map helpfully included two different walking tours of the city, one along the city ramparts, and one through "vieux Dinan," that is, the old medieval city. We decided that, as cool as medieval fortifications might be, walking around the entire city on the walls would probably not be the most interesting way to spend our day. So we opted for the walk through the city instead. We walked through numerous narrow medieval streets, some with wooden arcades over the sidewalk (the structures probably date back to the Middle Ages, but they've been rebuilt and repaired so many times that there's nothing medieval left - it's the old "Ship of Theseus" paradox, for any classicists/philosophers out there!). Along the way, we passed many tourist-y chain stores, not to mention a lot of German tourists.

Church of Saint Malo.

Spiral rose window.

We passed the city's 15th-century clock tower, built by a duke of Brittany, but the first major site we stopped and looked around at was the Church of Saint Malo. It's named for one of the "seven founding saints of Brittany," Welsh monks who arrived here in the mid-sixth century to spread Christianity. Upon entering the church, it had a definite moldy smell, proof, I think, of its age (unlike the clean-smelling church we visited in the city of Saint-Malo which was rebuilt after World War II). The church has been built and rebuilt in various stages, so it dates from anywhere between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, depending what part you're looking at. There were a lot of very nice stained-glass windows and a rose window of a type I'd never seen before - the petals were arranged in a kind of spiral, making it seem as if the rose were turning.

"When cloisters fall completely
out of use, what do we turn
them into?" Lisa says Larkin
would ask.  "Parking lots,"
she would answer.

After eating our picnic lunch outside with our backs to the wall of the church, we continued on our tour, walking past a former monastic cloister that's now a school, and heading down the extremely steep Rue de Jerzual. The shops on this street were mostly of local artisans and craftsmen of one kind or another - jewelry makers, sculptors, wood-workers, even an illustrator (Chris Hahner) who had done work for Disney! At the base of this street, we exited through the city walls and (continuing down-slope), we ended up at the River Rance and the city's "port" - a large array of sailboats and tour boats. We walked along the river for a while, then began the trek back up the slope of the hill to the city walls. Along the way, we got a good, up-close view of the viaduct (pictured above), forcing us to contemplate just how high in the air we were when we rode into town! After getting quite the work-out climbing the stairway back to the level of the city walls, we continued to climb along the edge of the wall to the next gate. It certainly gave us a good perspective on just how difficult medieval siege warfare must have been!

Statues outside the basilica.

On re-entering the city, we made our last stop on the tour, at the Basilica of Saint-Saveur. The exterior wall where the main door is dates to the twelfth century, and it shows. Most of the statues carved in the stone have weathered away and are barely recognizable. The architecture isn't as over-the-top Gothic as that of Saint Malo, but there are a lot more elaborately carved altars in Saint-Saveur. Like Saint Malo, it was built and re-built in different stages so it's a mish-mash of medieval and more modern elements.

A pheasant with feathers all
the way down to its feet!

This was the end of the map's walking tour so we decided we had earned some ice cream. We went to "The North Pole" and Lisa got amarena (cherry) while I got Bounty (the British version of a Mounds candy bar), both topped with copious amounts of whipped cream. We then walked to a large park area outside the city walls. Unbeknownst to us until we entered, this park contains several cages of rare pheasant and chicken breeds as well as some domesticated deer, allowing us to expand our knowledge of strange bird breeds! Afterwards, we went back into the city walls and stopped at a large tourist-y store full of Breton souvenirs to try to start getting ideas for Christmas gifts for some of you.

Feeling as if we had seen most of what there was to see in Dinan, we decided it was time to make our way back to the bus stop and come home. Unfortunately, our bus was forty minutes late (the driver explained that there was some kind of "catastrophe" on his way to Dinan, but he didn't elaborate). To make up for that, the driver decided to skip a few stops closer to Rennes and get on the autoroute (the French version of an interstate highway) to get us home faster which he (thankfully!) did. So ended our first trip to a (very old!) French gated community.