Megaliths and hoopoes: chance encounters in untamed Brittany

A five-day walking trip along the shoreline and around the islands of Brittany’s Gulf of Morbihan reveals a fascinating blend of the familiar and the exotic

I’m in a dark corridor with four strangers. The ceiling is low, as is the temperature, and the granite walls are covered in engravings: overlapping patterns of wavy lines and psychedelic swirls, like giant notepad doodles etched in stone. We stumble slowly along the passage, peering at the carvings by torchlight. It feels a bit like being in an art gallery during a power cut – except here, the gallery in question is a 6,000-year-old burial chamber on an uninhabited island.

“This is the Cairn de Gavrinis,” says my guide, Maude, as I emerge blinking into the French afternoon. “We call it the neolithic Sistine Chapel. It’s empty now, but we think it held the most important members of local stone age society.” I’ve come to the Gulf of Morbihan, a natural harbour speckled with more than 30 green islands on Brittany’s south coast, but I’ve been beaten to it by some six millennia. The cairn’s builders, and its original occupants, were here in an era so distant that the islands here weren’t islands at all, but low hills separated by rivers.