Megalith Diary

New on the CBJ site - Magalith Diary.
Samuel has been working on putting the Megalith Diary from the CBJ online.
It is still a work in progress, but comments are welcome.

Snow in Central Brittany

We have had more snow than at any time since we moved here, and have been snowed in since Tuesday evening.
The CBJ advertising team took the afternoon off yesterday to do some work in the snow (left).
It occurred to me that people might have some interesting pictures of the snow - wildlife, etc. - that they might like to see printed in the Central Brittany Journal.
If so, please send them to me at info@thecbj.com

Anyone Interested in Old Farm Buildings Near Morlaix?

A charming Breton gentleman phoned me last week and asked me to help him to advertise his farm buildings to potential buyers in the UK.
He is asking 285,000€ for the buildings which come together with 3/4 hectare of land. The property is in the Morlaix area.
For more info call the owner on: 0033 (0)2 98 79 16 82 (I think that a reasonable command of French is necessary).

A Return to Resistance

The cinema in Callac is screening 'Walter, Retour en Resistance' on Sunday 10th Jan at 2.30pm. The director, Gilles Perret, is scheduled to be present.

The film is a documentary based around the life of Walter Bassen, who is now 82 years old, and describes his long combat and many battles against demagogues, injustice, and oppression. During the war he distributed anti-fascist leaflets in the streets of Annecy and was deported to Dachau concentration camp.
Today he has concerns about a world in which inequality and injustice gain more and more ground.

One of the themes of the film is the relevance to resistance in today's world.

I don't know if I will be able to make it to Callac to see the film on Sunday, but seeing the publicity for this film made me concsious of the fact that it has become fashionable to complain about the bureaucracy and other aspects of Frenchy life, but it is not mentioned so often anymore that this is a country in which it is still possible to express serious views and have people listen to them.
Callac Cinema Website

New issue Central Brittany Journal

New Central Brittany Journal now in the shops.
This month's issue focusses on gardening jobs that can be done in the winter, and especially upon coppicing.
It is seldom mentioned, but completely true, that up until fifty years ago, Bretons produced more fuel than they could possibly know what to do with - and the vast majority of it came from coppicing.
People used wood for heating their houses, for cooking, for firing bread ovens, for bonfires and festivals, and did not have to pay for any of it, because almost the whole of the countryside was covered by a patchwork of tiny field, each of which was surrounded by a bank topped with trees - many of which had been coppiced regularly for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years.
Many of these banks were destroyed in the infamous remembrements of the 1970s, but many have survived. However, even of these, relatively few are being managed properly, and it is more common to see straggling, tangled, multi-trunked trees on top of banks than the beautiful symmetry of coppiced plants.
When these once-coppiced trees occur beside a road, they become a nuisance to passing traffic, and the commune 'solves' this problem by employing contractors to maserate them with the awful circular saw machine, often collecting up the cut branches with giant tractors and bulldozers, and leaving them in huge piles beside the road.
To my mind, this is a typical example of the madness of modern European man - lecturing the rest of the world about what should be done in the Amazon rain forest, etc., whilst still behaving like the world's biggest idiots at home.
Surely it should not be too difficult for us to do something about this and to start managing our coppiced trees properly.

Plouray

I have visited the commune of Plouray a few times over the past two weeks, it is a beautiful area with lots of woods and streams. Much of the commune is less intensively farmed than more low-lying communes and this seems to have made it a target for large businesses looking for somewhere out of the way to site unpopular projects.
A few years ago the locals fought a successful campain against the development of a large incinerator at the Doux 'factory'. Now they are battling against a project to dump vast amounts of industrial waste on farmland at the head of the Elle river.
When one has a chance to visit this beautiful place, it makes one wonder what form of madness has gripped the world that should make people want to do such things.

Wind Turbines in Central Brittany

We are planning a short article on wind turbines for the January 2010 issue.
I would be interested to hear people's views on the subject - please feel welcome to post a comment on the blog, or on the CBJ Forum.
I believe that the idea of wind turbines received a lot of public support at the outset, and that they have been generally welcomed by local politicians, perhaps because of the revenue that they bring in.
They also seem to be quite widely supported in the press.

I have to admit that I have never been a big fan, they just seem too big to me, and to defy the principle of 'Small is Beautiful' which made absolute sense to me in environmental terms from the first time I heard about it.

However, I would be interested to hear people's views on power generation in general: where Brittany should get its power from, and how much electricity it is appropriate for people to use.