Camping le Ranolien, Ploumanche, Brittany, France, 30th August 1992
The pink granite spire of Notre-Dame de la Clarte, Our Lady of Light, reaches skyward in supplication. The porch door opens under the rays of a sunburst of white spokes. Inside model ships are suspended from the vaulted roof and a gold-crowned Madonna, dressed in blue, waits another year for the 15th August, the Feast of the Assumption, when she is carried at the Grand Pardon – a mixture of religious fervour and secular jollity – with the prayer: ‘Notre-Dame de la Clarte, protect sailors and keep our bodies and souls from the terrible evil of blindness’.
The symbolism expresses both the history of this chapelle de granite and the spirit of the wild and rugged Cote de Granit Rose between Perros-Guirec and Trebeurden.
A 15th century Breton privateer, the Marquis de Barac’h, was returning with a fleet from a foray along the English Channel when he ran into thick fog near Les Sept Iles, a few miles north of this inhospitable coast. Unable to navigate, it was only a matter of time before the currents would take his ships onto the hull-shattering rocks that make these north-western approaches a maritime graveyard. In desperation the Marquis invoked the intervention of Las Mere de Dieu, Star of the Sea. He promised: ‘I will raise a chapel to the Virgin if we survive!’ Almost at once, so the story goes, the sun broke through, the fog cleared and the ships put in safely at Perros.
True to his word, the Marquis had the pink granite chapel built on the cliffs, allegedly above the spot where the sun appeared, hence la Clarte.