Brittany & Its Byways

What compels a Victorian woman to leave her drawing room for the wind-blasted coasts of Brittany? In this lively travel account, Mrs. Palliser Bury ventures beyond the guidebook and into the beating heart of France's most ancient province. She climbs to Mont du Roule for views that steal her breath, wanders through fishing villages where Breton is still spoken in daily life, and traces the region's rich layers of Roman occupation and Celtic legend. Her eye catches everything: the model of a Roman galley in the Cherbourg dockyard, the moss-covered chapels standing silent witness to centuries of pilgrimage, the fierce pride of Breton peasants who have never quite considered themselves French. This is Brittany before the age of mass tourism, when ancient customs still governed the rhythm of life and strangers were rarities worth studying. Bury writes with the curiosity of an anthropologist and the pleasure of a traveler who knows she is witnessing something vanishing.