Roscoff is a French commune in Léon located on the north coast of
Brittany, in the department of Finistère. A former haven for
privateers and then smugglers, from where the Johnnies left to sell
their pink onions, Roscoff, approved as a “small town of character”,
is a small seaside town which has preserved its architectural
heritage from the 16th and 17th centuries. Its deep-water port,
served by Irish Ferries and Brittany Ferries, which is headquartered
there, provides ferry connections to the British Isles as well as
Spain.
Its foreshore, swept by tides with a tidal range of up
to 10.40 m, is home to a biological diversity specific to two border
algae ecosystems, the study of which, in 1872, is the origin of the
first European pole of research and development. teaching in marine
biology, the Roscoff Biological Station. Sought after for its
iodized spray and the mild climate maintained by a sea current that
varies only between 8 ° C and 18 ° C, Roscoff saw the birth of the
concept of a thalassotherapy center in 1899, with the institute of
Rockroum, and the foundation of a heliomarin center in 1900.
Île-de-Batz is served by speedboats from the old port of Roscoff.
By train
The Morlaix railway line ends at Roscoff station. In
Morlaix there is a connection to the TGV towards Paris.
In the
street
At Morlaix, the N12 exits onto the D 58, which leads to
Roscoff via Saint-Martin-des-Champs, with a bypass of Saint-Pol-de-Léon.
By boat
Ferries depart from Roscoff Ferry Port to the English
city of Plymouth (6-8h), and the Irish cities of Cork (14-15h) and
Rosslare Harbor (15-17h)
In the old harbor from the pier, the
passenger ships depart every half hour for the Île de Batz.
By
bicycle
The Vélodyssée, which runs from Brittany along the Atlantic
coast to the Franco-Spanish coast, begins in Roscoff. GPS track in the
bike travel wiki.
The Breton name of the town in Breton is Rosko pronounced.
Roscoff comes from the Breton ros meaning promontory, and from goff
which means blacksmith, probably an anthroponym, perhaps that of the
same patron saint as that of the parish of Plogoff, Christian mask of a
blacksmith deity, Gofannon. The name of Roscoff could therefore be
translated into French as the hill of the blacksmith.
A consonant
mutation hardens after ros the g in c. The pronunciation of the final
consonant -ff is mute in Leonard, hence the modern Breton spelling:
Rosko. The French pronunciation is a misreading of the classic Breton
spelling, Roscoff.
The inhabitants of Roscoff, called Roscouins
in the eighteenth century, are today called Roscovites.
"A rei, a skei atao" ("To give and to strike always").
The
motto is a pun on the components of the name of the city pronounced in
Breton: Rosko, the final double f being mute. In Breton, ro means in
fact gives, and sko literally means strikes, depending on the context in
the physical sense of making fists or in the moral sense of striking the
imagination, accomplishes something touching, but also directs, orients,
commands. Hence the imperative ro, sko, give, strike, attenuated by the
infinitive a rei, a skei, expression of a kind of immanent justice, the
ironic implication of which is that whoever pays, decides. The true
etymology of Roscoff is, however, quite different.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Viscount Eugene d'herbais de Thun wrote, on Welsh music that had been very successful in Celtic circles, the anthem Paotred rosko (The guys from Roscoff). The companies of departing Johnnies sang the refrain Rosko, sko mibin, sko kaled, sko atao ("Roscoff, bangs dry, bangs hard, bangs constantly") hoisting the pavilion three times in sight of the chapel of Sainte Barbe, patroness of the city since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Global warming, which began in the Epipaleolithic by completing the
transformation of the Manche valley into the sea and continued after the
Boreal to the Atlantic phase, sees in Brittany the man of Téviec
settling around - 7000 around sites of "red feet" (shellfish harvesters
on the foreshore), in particular that of the bay of Pemprat, south of
Roscoff, which, in the absence of bones, preserves a kokkenmodding
similar to those of the olive culture Ertebølle.
Megalithic
traces remain faintly: the Kerfissiec dolmen, the lech of Reuniou ...
The triple covered alley of Keravel was blown up by the owner of the
land in 1942. The tip of Bloscon was probably around - 4 500 a tumulus
such as that of Barnenez, candidate for the place of oldest monument in
the world, before being reused as a fort. As in the entire perimeter of
the bay of Morlaix, the toponymy however testifies to an important pole
in the Neolithic, natural development of two thousand years of presence
of the "red feet" of the Mesolithic: Park al lia (lia is the plural of
lech) set back from the tip of Bloscon above the current deep-water
port, Park an dolmen and Goarem an dolmen, names of fields around a
hypothetical dolmen located a little further south at a place called
Ruveic, etc. Roscogoz, district of the city where the first port was
located, was remembered by witnesses of the nineteenth century the name
of a dolmen can be evoked in the name of Rochgroum (curved stone) which,
in Santec, is used to designate one.
The maritime civilization of
Wessex, the one that built the second Stonehenge in the Chalcolithic
period, around 2100 BC, is located further upstream (Cléder, Plouvorn,
Saint-Vougay, Saint-Thégonnec) but its mining chiefdoms maintain an
intense tin trade and necessarily exploited natural ports such as those
presented by the coast, then lower, of the future Roscoff and the
Île-de-Batz joined by land. This component of bronze, melted with copper
from Cambrian and Spain, naturally outcrops in the alluvial sands of the
current Saint-Renan deposit and its Dartmoor twin, which, among many
others scattered in the Armorican west and the British southwest, were
the two main suppliers to the West. The imagination will let dream that
the "blacksmith's promontory" which gave its name to Roscoff was an
export site of this bronze civilization where the blacksmith played a
magical role.
The lech of Reuniou dates from the Iron Age, which
is late in the Cassiterides, that is to say at the earliest - 700. As it
does not mark a fountain, it perhaps corresponds, like some other lechs,
to an ancient cemetery, here destroyed, and certainly marks a place
frequented by the Osisms.
Around 100, the Celts, anxious after the defeat of Bituit to maintain
the links with Carthage that Massilia no longer allows, founded in
Armorican territory the colony of Vorganium, of which the site of
Roscoff was one of the possible ports. During the reconstruction of the
fort of Bloscon in 1615, the Gallic statue called Saint-Pyriec of a
child with a bird, a statue that has now disappeared, was found ten
meters deep. The construction of the deep-water port revealed a shelter
from the Gallic era, perhaps in connection with the funerary stelae of
the Île-de-Batz which was then attached to the mainland. The green
island, which is located on the southern edge of the Île-de-Batz channel
at the end of the current pedestrian pier, indeed delivered at the end
of the nineteenth century two swords, eight axes, five of which carry a
ring, a torque, a spearhead and a piece of dagger. The Osman navigators,
partners of the Tartessians and Carthage since at least the voyage of
Himilcon, that is to say nearly four hundred years, were an asset in
this alliance against Rome, which will materialize militarily during the
expedition of Hannibal.
Pol Potier de Courcy found near the same
dolmen of Keravel small bronzes, traces of a garrison of the third
century, probably one of the detachments of the Mauri Osismaci that
Carausius scattered to monitor the pirates along the new coastal road
linking Osismis, which became capital of the city in 282, to the ford of
Mount Relaxe towards Aleth. From Roman times, have also been found in
the Kergoff farm, a gold coin from the sixth century. Other Roman coins
were found between the two wars in Ruguel on the Perharidy peninsula.
A Roman shipwreck dating from the II or III century was discovered
to the east of the island of Saozon in 2014. Excavated by the DRASSM
under the name of Bloscon 1, it revealed objects allowing it to be dated
as well as more than 800 ingots of tin or lead-tin alloy probably coming
from present-day Great Britain.
According to the hagiographic legend written in the Low Middle Ages
from a manuscript dated 884, Saint Paul Aurelian, commissioned by the
bishop of Guicastel, landed in Ushant in 510 and was welcomed by his
cousin at the fortress of Saint-Pol, Castel Paol in Breton. From the
ramparts, he could see, according to the documents compiled by Albert
the Great, the king of Domnonea hunting in 513 the Danes settled in the
island Callot. Paul eventually settled in Batz, then attached to the
continent, founded a monastery there and evangelized the region acquired
by Pelagianism for more than a century as attested by the missions of
Saint Germain and his deacon Palladius.
Three centuries later, in
857, the Normans, following the example of Hasting, settled on the
island of Batz and plundered the entire region. Their recurrent abuses
provoke in 878 the transfer of the relics of Saint Paul to Fleury and
that of the population far from the shore. It will not be reinvested
until the installation in 937, in the wake of Alain Barbetorte returned
from exile and winner of Rognvald then Håkon, of the court of Even the
Great, Count of Leon, in Lesneven. The old Roscoff, plundered,
destroyed, depopulated several times, was each time rebuilt,
crystallizing then around two main poles, the port and the church.
During the winter of 1114-1115, the English Channel freezes a few
distances from the coast, which had already happened in the winter of
763-764.
The progressive siltation in the Middle Ages of the port of Pempoul,
at the foot of the capital of the bishopric-county, forces the ships to
disembark on the other side of the peninsula, at the place called
Roscoff located on the eastern beach of Laber, today called Rosko Goz
(old Roscoff in Breton). The current Pointe du Vil is a cul-de-sac where
the road to Saint-Pol-de-Leon leads, called at the seventeenth Ker da
Laez street, that is to say from the city via the top, current Albert de
Mun street. The road then shares the territory between the parish of
Toussaints, to which Bloscon belongs, to the east of this road, and the
parish of Saint-Pierre, to which Santec belongs, to the west. These are
two of the seven parishes of the minihy of Léon, each being headed by a
perpetual vicar and the primitive cure exercised directly by the
cathedral chapter of Léon.
This future street of Ker da Laez,
current Albert de Mun street, once arrived at the cul-de-sac of the
pointe du Vil turns back by what will become the rue du Cap, current
Édouard-Corbière street, along the coast towards Perharidy, ex-cap Ederi
or pointe Ederi, which is called Pen Ederi or Pen ar Ederi. The place of
the fork was then occupied by an inn, on the site of the current Hotel
de France today housing the Biological Station of Roscoff. The place is
called Croaz Vaz, that is to say the Cross of the Île-de-Batz, a cross
that will give its name to the fort built by Vauban three and a half
centuries later. As evidenced by a charter from 1323, this family inn is
built on a feudal concession from the lords and owners of the land, the
prior of the Île-de-Batz and the Abbey of Saint-Mélaine in Rennes.
During the War of the British Succession, in 1363, fourteen years
after the beginning of the Black Death, the fort of Bloscon, northeast
of the current old port, taken by the English, is taken over by Bertrand
du Guesclin. From 1374 to 1387, the port of Rosco itself was burned
several times in a row by the governor of Brest, Richard Fitzalan, whom
Richard II chose to support the Montfort party. The population settles
further north in a place called Golban to form the Vil district, that is
to say the Millet (Millet in Middle Breton, feminine Vil). In June 1403,
one thousand two hundred men-at-arms under the orders of Jean de Penhoët
set out from the cove of Laber in thirty ships to defeat the English off
the coast of Pointe Saint-Mathieu. They bring back forty enemy ships
from it. A year later, Plymouth is taken and ransacked.
On
December 19, 1455, Duke Pierre de Montfort, endorsing a statement of
facts generated by this Hundred Years naval War, orders that gentlemen
"who haggle wholesale and in several goods without detailing them or
selling by hand" should not derogate from the nobility. This singularity
of Breton law gives rise to a capitalism of shipowners at the origin of
the economic development of Saint-Malo and Morlaix as well as the
advanced port of the latter, Roscoff. The unfortunate cadets could thus,
without exposing themselves to the search, indulge at sea in a "life of
common scholarship" at the end of which they regained the privileges and
obligations of their order. For this, they therefore had to appoint
intermediaries to the sales, often foreigners who were numerous to
settle in Roscoff. Conversely, chartering offered commoners the
opportunity to rise to the rank of the "sleeping nobility" and sometimes
to access the condition of "annobliz".
During the following
years, the race was encouraged by Louis XI, personally involved in the
navy through the policy of his vice-admiral Guillaume de Casenove and
very eager since the Treaty of Caen to attach ambitious Leonards and
distant, if not opposed, to ducal power. This is how he ennobled the
Roscovite shipowner Tanguy Marzin in 1480.
In 1500, the new Roscoff was built seven hundred meters further north
of Roscoff goz where a few wells allowed fresh water to be delivered to
ships. The port thrives thanks to the importation each winter of Liepāja
in Courland via Antwerp, mainly by ships from Lübeck which have a
monopoly in the Baltic, flax seeds harvested in midsummer in Lithuania
and chosen exclusively by the "manufacture" groomer of the crees of
Leon. All those parts of the hinterland that are unsuitable for wheat
cultivation then form a production area of international renown, the
second in France after the Rouen region. Developed slowly during the
second half of the fifteenth century, it knows a boom in the Renaissance
with the opening of the English market. The whiteness of this linen
canvas is appreciated for making linen and its regularity for making
sails. The paintings were re-exported from the port of Morlaix, which
had a privilege, along the entire Atlantic coast to Spain from where
wine and oil were imported on the way back, via Bilbao then from 1530
Seville, and to Portugal as well as their new colonies. Thus, in 1527 a
ship armed for Brazil by the Roscovite Jean Jarnet was sunk by the
Portuguese fleet in the Bay of All Saints. In this network, Roscoff,
next to a secular interloping activity, becomes the main market for flax
seeds. His control office, under the authority of the judge of the
Petitioners, has them distributed by commissionaires in the Haut Léon
which produces the rosconne and his brand will end up monopolizing in
the eighteenth century the rerouting via the branches installed in the
ports of Trégor, where the Gratiennes come out, and Penthièvre, where
the Bretagnes are produced.
As everywhere in Leon, the
accumulated capital is sacrificed to prestigious religious
constructions. Notre-Dame de Croaz Vaz was erected between 1522, the
year of the sacking of Morlaix by the Anglo-Spaniards, and 1545. The
Saint-Ninien chapel was built on the initiative of the bishop and in
1538 received the chapter assembly of the minihy of Leon. On August 18,
1548, the new town welcomes on its disembarkation, for the time of a
prayer, Mary Stuart, five-year-old Queen of Scots and promised to the
Dauphin Francis II to reactivate the Auld Alliance.
A year later,
the Parliament of Brittany accedes to the request of the town to become
an independent parish of the minihy du Léon (whose seat is located in
Saint-Pol-de-Léon) then, in 1550, while the representatives of the old
order Claude de Coetlestremeur, lord of Penmarc'h, and Jean de
Kermellec, commander of the castle of Taureau, are engaged in piracy on
the coasts of Léon and that the Reform is at the heart of concerns, King
Henry II authorizes him to equip a municipal militia with arquebusiers.
At the same time, the bishop of Leon grants secessionist parishioners
the right to have their children baptized in their church. Between 1575
and 1576, the city was endowed by Monsignor de Neufville with a hospice
for the indigent, the Saint Nicolas Hospital, current retirement home
where the chapel built in 1598 remains. Accused of attracting the poor
to the territory of the parish, the hospital will be in 1715 reserved
only for people settled in it for more than ten years. In 1559, one
thousand eight hundred pounds were devoted to the roadway of the town.
From 1560 until the end of the seventeenth century, the land around
the church was allotted by the bishop-count to investors from Leon, such
as François Jaffres, merchant and governor of the church of Roscoff, in
1561 or Olivier Le Maigre, to build trading hotels that would become
residences in the eighteenth century. They are built for the sole trade,
such as the hotel of Mathieu The Hir of the Carpont and Keramanach in
1582, or to serve in the basement as a store, or even as a fortified
house, such as that of the Christian corsair Le Pappe who had to defend
himself in 1592 against the peasant regiment of the Holy Union of
Morlaix led by Arm Wrestling. Those of the buildings that overlook, or
used to overlook, the shore participate in the defensive system of the
city.
On May 17, 1595, the Duke of Mercœur, claiming to be a
bailiff militarily allied with the Spaniards against the king for five
years, restored by letters patent trade with Bilbao and Seville, the
main outlets of the crees. Three families of Basque merchants settle in
Roscoff. Roscoff also served as a refuge for several English Catholic
families fleeing the persecutions that began during the reign of
Elizabeth I.
On June 12, 1600, after a terrible winter, the first
stone of the chapel of Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian, saints invoked
against epidemics and religious persecution, was laid on the site of the
cemetery of the victims of the epidemic of December 1593. This double
thanksgiving decided in December 1598 celebrated the Edict of Nantes
which closed the five years of the civil war waged by La Fontenelle,
plunderer of Roscoff in 1592, and simultaneously aimed to obtain the end
of the massacre caused by the resurgent epidemic which lasted during the
year 1599. A municipal decree of 1632 transformed the lazaretto into a
dying prison for all individuals suspected of plague.
At the very
beginning of the century, Roland de Neufville erected the north of the
parish of Toussaint, that is to say the Bloscon peninsula east of the
current Albert de Mun street, in Trève. Now the parishioners, who have
become relatively numerous, will be able to receive the sacraments,
celebrate weddings and funerals, without going to the cathedral, the
seat of the minihy. However, as early as 1611, the ecclesiastical city
of Saint-Pol obtains the suppression of the deputy to the States of
Brittany of the proud and bourgeois Roscoff. The merchants of this one
organize themselves from the following year in the "brotherhood of Sant
Ninian", equivalent of the current municipal council. Despite its
growing demographic, Roscoff continues to depute only one representative
out of the twelve that the council of the city of Saint-Pol has, where
the vicinal developments and the related taxes are decided, which is a
source of eternal disputes.
Around 1619, the Sainte-Barbe chapel,
protector against pirates and intercessor for the deceased souls without
absolution, was erected in turn. Two years later, the Capuchins under
the direction of Father Pacifique de Morlaix, will open in the parish,
at the request of the inhabitants who grant them the land, a small
convent whose cloister will be completed in 1682. The Capuchins, who
give the basics of education to some poor children and treat the sick,
are botanists: they acclimatize a fig tree, which will become a
curiosity, and introduce other Mediterranean plants including in 1661
the artichoke, which will become the fortune of the region. In 1634, the
Alabaster chapel was inaugurated (see below), which replaced the south
porch of Our Lady of Croaz Vaz. In 1640, the erection of the chapel of
Saint Anne, patroness of Brittany, thanks to the donations of Françoise
Marzin, lady of Kerugant, and Louis Ronyant, her husband, marks the end
of fifteen years of plague and in 1643 the quay of the port is completed
over a length of one hundred and eighty meters after twenty-six years of
work.
In 1649, Roscoff obtained confirmation from the Regency
ruled by Mazarin of the letters patent signed in 1600 by Henry IV
authorizing him to hold a fair six times a year. Both the economic
situation and an alleged opposition from the city of Saint-Pol will
prevent the holding of these. In March 1649, the church offered itself
organs that Thomas Harrison, an English Catholic living in Roscoff,
delivered twenty months later. The census of 1664 counts fifteen ships
attached to the port of Roscoff. In 1665, Monseigneur de Visdelou set up
a very modest regulation concerning taverns.
Roscoff is also from
the sixteenth century, with Morlaix and Paimpol, one of the first ports
to arm for cod fishing on the banks of Newfoundland, then on the coasts
of Iceland. Salted cod was sold in France and especially in Spain;
Brittany was not subject to the gabelle, Picardy and Norman fishermen
came to Roscoff to get cheap salt. The traffic of professional
false-saulners was very active until the eighteenth century, provided by
about fifty boats of 50 to 100 tons, mainly coming from the port of
Dieppe. The shipowners of Roscoff took their loads of salt to the
Croisic. Along with salt, the main sea goods were then at the exit linen
cloths and wheat (destined for ports such as Dunkirk, as well as to
Spain and England), at the entrance wines and brandies, olive oil,
meringues and tea.
The fall of Nicolas Fouquet marks the beginning of the economic and
political destruction of the province under the absolutist rule of the
Duke of Chaulnes. The policy of Louis XIV and the protectionist measures
of Charles II closed the English and Hanseatic markets. The taxation
imagined by Pierre Deschien and the policy of state manufactures
initiated by Colbert ruin free trade. The decrease in the production of
linen, now in competition with that of cotton from the colonies whose
cost price is artificially lowered by slavery, and the decrease in
attendance at the port, now out of the Atlantic commercial game, are not
compensated by military activity or by the race, which Morlaix benefits
almost exclusively.
Roscoff became for almost three centuries the
first port of smuggling with the British Isles. The origin of this
development is the Navigation Act, the first navigation law signed by
Cromwell in 1651, which prohibits any ship from importing into Great
Britain goods that do not come from the country to which the ship
belongs and which ensures the monopoly of importation from the islands
to ships served by crews at least three-quarters English and commanded
by English captains. The traffic, which will know its apogee in the
eighteenth century by then exceeding the volume of legal imports, takes
advantage of the proximity of the Channel Islands and becomes, despite
the risks involved, an essential economic activity for the populations
of the coast both British and French, advancing shipbuilding, marking
territories of an architecture which benefits from these technical
advances, forging characters, evoking legends, bringing together
populations of the same origin that the borders have separated,
asserting alterations. The boats practicing this traffic are called
"smugglers", distortion of the English word smuggler which means
"smuggler".
Regularly suppressed, but unofficially encouraged by
Colbert and then by the supporters of industrial mercantilism for the
fact that it would weaken rival economies, this maritime smuggling would
prosper until 1784 when William Pitt, prime minister of King George III,
decided to lower customs duties, which would increase for example for
tea from 127% to 12%, and two years later signed a free trade treaty
with the former enemy. It will quickly perish when Napoleon III signs,
on April 16, 1856, the Treaty of Paris, which will abolish the related
activity of racing at sea. It will not survive the railway or the
opening of Cornwall that will ensue.
On November 30, 1694,
Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban signed the plans for the transformation
executed by La Renaudière, of the fort of Bloscon into an important
battery of thirteen guns closed by a drawbridge. To finance it, a
special tax is levied by the municipality on the inhabitants. The grass
merlons cost ten times less than a wall and stop the bullets without
damage. The Bloscon becomes the seat of the captaincy of
Saint-Pol-de-Léon which extends from Ploujean to Cleder and whose
centerpiece is the castle of the Bull. The coast guard militia was a
chore that fell to the inhabitants grouped into a battalion under the
command of a captain general. On the port itself, the Fort of the Cross
housed a powder magazine and a cannon guarded the pier facing the Gran
Quelen rock.
In 1699, a storm silted up two hundred and fifty hectares of
agricultural land in Santec where silting began in 1666, favoring the
development of new subdivisions. The War of the Spanish Succession
almost completely stopped the linen trade for ten years but allowed
enemy ships to be ransomed, as Captain Lair did for two hundred and
fifty pounds on September 1, 1705 in the port of Cork where he had
entered under the English flag.
In 1715, another storm damaged
the dock and in 1722 more than fifty centimeters of sand had to be
removed from the streets of Roscoff. The port then had a capacity of one
hundred vessels of four to five hundred tons, but the fleet was
considerably reduced (in 1730, there were only three deep-sea fishing
boats from Normandy) even if some ships sailed long courses between
Newfoundland, Saint-Domingue and Île-de-France. It will be necessary to
wait until February 19, 1743 and a subscription of eight thousand pounds
with the society of Roscovite shipowners gathered around gentlemen of
Portenoire and Sioch'an of Kersabiec, in conflict with the city of
Saint-Pol who refuses to contribute, for the reconstruction of the quay
on a double length to be completed, the stones coming from
Petit-Quellen, the island of Batz and the island of Callot.
Roscoff will then become a minor but sought-after shipyard under the
brand of the Kerenfors dynasty, which it will remain until its closure
between the two world wars and which will build in particular in 1779
the senau The Duchess of Chartres. On October 10, 1746, two centuries
after her grandmother, Bonnie Prince Charlie, escaped from her defeat at
Culloden, disembarked there from a privateer, The Hermine escorted by
Captain Malouin du Fresne. At that time, naval battles between the
English and the French were constant. In 1756, an engineer was
dispatched to set up the means to combat silting. The storm of October
4, 1765 brought down the spire of the bell tower and damaged the roof
and the porch of the church.
At the turn of the 1770s, the port,
which had lost most of its sailors during the war of 1758, was
devastated by the unexplained disappearance of mackerel which abounded
off the coast of Batz and which the shipowners of Honfleur and Fécamp
had specialized in Brittany. The disappearance of the "fortune of the
sea" and the decline of the flax culture are palliated by the
cultivation of potatoes initiated by Monsignor de La Marche then by the
development of that of artichokes and other early vegetables, introduced
a century earlier by the Capuchins, which is a speculative agriculture
based on the complementarity of seasonal markets. Some Roscovites are
thus pushed to peddle them in Maine, Anjou and Normandy.
The rector of La trève de Roscoff, in a letter written in 1774
addressed to the bishop of Léon Jean-François de La Marche in response
to his investigation into begging, protests against the declaration of
October 30, 1772 which limits the goemon cup to the first three months
of the year. He writes (the spelling of the time has been respected) :
"The object of the sermon is very interesting for the pagan. The
regulations that prohibit the cutting during the month of August or
September greatly increase the misery of a part of the low-people and
the residents. This cut, which has been made of all tems, on this coast,
in this season, is used almost exclusively for heating, and it is the
only one for these poor people. No wood on the coast, of any kind. The
one we wear there is exorbitantly expensive. The moors are meager, rare;
there are no ferns. This cut must not harm the dips [use of goemon as
fertilizer], because our coast bristling with rocks provides abundantly
of this grass [goemon]. The quenching has for it the almost entire cut
of February and all the tidal waves [stranded goemon] during the year.
The latter cannot be used for fire. »
Following an investigation
organized by a circular dated June 8, 1819 from the Prefect of
Finistère, the municipal council of Roscoff responds (the spelling of
the time has been respected): "Those who only use baskets must be
authorized to start harvesting goëmon two or three days before the
farmers provided with horses and cars" and wishes that "each transport
car must be accompanied by only eight people, and each horse by four,
unless the household is more numerous. It must be forbidden to remove
the goëmon brought by the waves during the night".
During the Revolution, the complaints book of March 29, 1789
denounces the unfair competition of the free ports of Guernsey and
Alderney, the insufficiency of the port's warehouse, the negligence of
the city of Saint-Pol, the tithes levied by it without it developing a
road facilitating the transport of goods from the port, the taxes
decided by the same having ruined the export to Ireland and the west of
England as well as the import of tea and rum from the Americas. He says,
among other things, that it is necessary to abolish "the ruinous grants
obtained for frivolous embellishments in Saint-Pol-de-Léon" and asks to
benefit from "the freedom to store eaux-de-vie from Spain, rum or tafia
from abroad, as His Majesty granted for the juniper from Holland and the
tafia from his colonies (...) If it is necessary to lift any duty on the
export, let it be small enough, so that the trader could cede it of his
profits in order to put it in competition with the islands of Guernsey
and Origny (...) which, by an exemption from all rights (...), have
attracted all this trade to them".
On January 31, 1790, Roscoff
unilaterally establishes itself as an autonomous municipality of
Saint-Pol-de-Léon and chooses for mayor a merchant, Gerard Mège, who, on
July 14, will himself lead the prayer in front of the refusal of the
rector, Mr. Boutin, who will resign from the municipal council in the
fall. On August 2, on the occasion of the pardon of the Portiunculus,
two hundred Republican soldiers quartered in Saint-Pol come to sack
Roscoff and rape the population. The civil Constitution of the clergy
completes making Roscoff a hotbed of passive resistance. Under the
National Convention, from September 1792 to May 1793, then during the
first semester of 1794, Roscoff became a deportation center. On October
11, 1794, a road between Roscoff and Saint-Pol was finally inaugurated.
The proclamation of March 9, 1795 by Deputy Bruc restores freedom of
worship but the constitution of a National Guard on July 9, 1795
provokes the so-called Pitiguet revolt.
The Directory closed all
the places of worship again and returned the two remaining priests of
the parish underground. The port activity was then reduced to those of
vegetable freight forwarders serving Brest, Morlaix and Landerneau. The
Consulate in no way calms the conflict between the population and the
new administration: the city, suspected of rebellion, is put under siege
twice, and the mayor is accused of organizing the liaison between the
clergy and his deposed bishop, Monsignor de La Marche, exiled to London.
Finally, the sub-prefect authorized the local clergy again on May 2,
1800 and returned Our Lady of Croaz Vaz to Catholic worship on October
30.
While favoring the "smogging", random smuggling carried out
in Roscoff by four ships, the First Empire and its continental blockade
ruin any chance of resumption of trade so much so that in May 1810, the
shipowner and mayor of Roscoff Picrel falls into the resounding
bankruptcy of the Morlaisian Philippe Deleville.
This economic
crisis was prolonged from 1816 to 1818 by a climatic famine.
It was only around 1790 that market gardening really began, even if
previously vegetable gardens already existed, mainly around the port, to
supply the inhabitants, but also the ships on call. The Capuchin fathers
were the first to grow vegetables in a large scale on a property
belonging to them from 1622. The natural conditions were favorable for
the cultivation of vegetables due to the climate, the natural fertility
of the soils, the fertilizing of the fields in goémon and the correction
of the poverty of the limestone soils thanks to the maërl. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, during the season, the peasants of
Roscoff loaded 10 to 12 carts of vegetables every day that they were
going to sell in Morlaix, Brest, Landivisiau, Landerneau, even Quimperlé
and Lorient.
The Roscoff pink onion is a variety imported in the
sixteenth century from Portugal, sold in the seventeenth century to
Sweden and Russia; in the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, during the season, the peasants of Roscoff loaded
every day from 10 to 12 carts of vegetables that they were going to sell
in Morlaix, Brest, Landivisiau, Landerneau, even Quimperlé and Lorient,
and even to Paris around 1830. Jacques Cambry describes the Roscovite
region as the "garden of Brittany", writing that it "produces an
incredible amount of vegetables of all kinds (...): onions, cabbage,
turnips, parsnips, cauliflower, asparagus, artichokes ". In the second
half of the nineteenth century, steam navigation facilitated shipping to
Holland and Great Britain: groups of Roscovites went, on their
overloaded bicycles, to sell onions in Wales, England and as far as
Scotland.
In 1828, overcrowding, combined with the seasonal
nature of agricultural activity, triggers the story of the Johnnies,
street vendors often Roscovites leaving to sell, between the end of July
and Advent, their pink onions from Roscoff in England (Henry Olivier was
the initiator). From now on, agriculture ceases to be a food activity
and returns to the commercial vocation of the city.
The
establishment of a steamboat line from Morlaix to Le Havre in 1840, and
especially the creation of the railway line from Paris-Montparnasse to
Brest in 1865 favor the growth of vegetable crops by opening up more
extensive outlets for them. No plot remains uncultivated anymore.
Constantly searched, turned over, fattened by new amendments, the land
bears 3 or 4 harvests a year: cauliflower in winter, artichokes in
summer, meanwhile garlic in abundance, potatoes, onions.
Roscoff
and Leon having the privilege of harvesting the first fruits four, five
and even six weeks before England and Ireland and the English seeking
outside their island the essential supplement to their livelihood, steam
cabotage services were created, facilitating the export of vegetables.
From July 10, 1839, a third generation of Roscovite farmers-peddlers,
already accustomed to the markets of western France, benefits, thanks to
the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce and Edouard Corbière, from the
weekly connection Morlaix-Le Havre provided by the steamers of the
Compagnie du Finistère. The links established for business and by
marriages between these peddlers and their Norman interlocutors end up
passing a large part of the grocery store of this province into the
hands of Breton immigrants. The connection to Le Havre relaunches
fishing. In 1854, a campaign of works decided by the department and
renewed in 1870, rectifies the road leading to Morlaix, the main
vegetable market in the region.
In July 1858, 28 passports were
issued to Roscoff for England and Wales, which testifies to the
beginning of vegetable exports to these destinations.
From 1817 to her death, on October 2, 1820, Dorothy Silburne, who had
sheltered and rescued Monsignor de La Marche during his exile in
Holborn, was received by the Count of la Fruglaye in his house near the
church from where she spent the pension she received from Louis XVIII to
his charitable works.
From November 1 to December 6, 1832, the
cholera epidemic, which is raging throughout France, kills eighty-six
Roscovites. Faced with the incompetence of the local doctors, two Navy
doctors are dispatched from Brest and put an end to the excess
mortality. The following April 8, the municipality is forced by a
sanitation law passed by the Assembly to open, in addition to the
cemeteries of the parish enclosure and the hospice as well as that of
Santec, a fourth cemetery, the cemetery of Vil. In the same year 1831,
investors from Brest, hoping to develop a polder of one hundred
hectares, built the dam with a lock which closes the bottom of the cove
of Laber, a hope disappointed by the opposition of the municipality
favorable to the goémoniers and to the free grazing practiced by the
Santéquois.
The town then counts many indigents, day laborers and
unemployed sailors between two jobs. Literacy is the exception even
among the most experienced businessmen. The budget of the municipality,
reduced to some four thousand francs derived mainly from the grant and
taxes on smogging (importation of whiskey), struggles to maintain the
dyke of the Vil and the paving stones, to the remuneration of a postal
lady, a cantoner and, since 1831, two teachers, one in Roscoff itself,
the other in Santec. The municipality often relies on the supervision of
the prefect. Around the middle of the nineteenth century the disused
ossuary served as a school.
Steam engines and the fashion for sea bathing
The liberal phase of
the Second Empire and then, on a much larger scale, the Third Republic
saw Roscoff, whose budget in the 1870s had more than doubled in forty
years, equip itself with new infrastructure and enter modernity in
stages.
In 1860, Claude Chevalier built the Roscoff Fishponds on
a concession near Pointe Sainte-Barbe.
On February 12, 1867, one of
the first stations of the Central Society for the rescue of shipwrecked
people was opened, a year after the foundation of a local branch. It has
two teams of ten rowers and their crew leaders.
In 1869, thanks to an
abundant subscription by loan and subsidy, six freshwater pumps were put
into service at the port.
In June 1873, Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers
opens by subscription a laboratory of the Institute, the Biological
Station of Roscoff, in two adjoining trading hotels of the end of the
sixteenth century that Édouard Corbière had acquired in 1860.
In
1877, the port was equipped with the Pen ar Vil embankment opposite the
Roscoff Biological Station. It serves as a port for his maritime
expeditions and becomes the pier for the Île-de-Batz.
On June 10,
1883, the inauguration of the line from Morlaix to Roscoff by the Penzé
viaduct and Roscoff station allows the influx of tourists using direct
trains from Paris and opens the outlet of the halls of Paris to the
primeurs and the tide.
In 1890, the Château de Laber was built by the
heiress of a Lorient merchant.
In 1899, Doctor Louis Bagot, ten years
after Doctor Henry Abélanet had perfected the device in his villa in
Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie to treat his son suffering from Pot sickness
and then some other patients, invented the first medical thalassotherapy
institution open in Europe to the public, the Rockroum Institute,
complementing the traditional sea baths, launched by the Duchess of
Berry in Dieppe in 1829, with a heating system and seawater
distribution.
In July of the following year, the Marquise of
Kergariou founded on the Perharidy peninsula a heliomarin sanatorium
entrusted to the Dominican sisters who treat patients with bone or lymph
node tuberculosis. When his benefactress died in 1915, one hundred and
eighty patients were accommodated.
In 1912, the construction of the
current port begins, which will be completed in 1932. The chapel of
Saint-Ninien, the ruined seat of the former brotherhood, is sacrificed
there.
Mass transportation does not come without disasters. The
shipwrecks of 1897 and 1899, even more so that of the Hilda in 1905,
give rise to moving commemorations at the Vil cemetery which preserves
the memory of it. More often, accidents (a cart in the water, an
overturned rowboat ...) are only material but ruin two generations of
the same family in one season.
The port at the beginning of the twentieth century
"At the
beginning of the twentieth century, the port of Roscoff was experiencing
significant traffic thanks, in particular, to the cross-channel links.
Number of coasters and long-haul regularly stop there. The fleet
consists mainly of cutters specialized in fishing with nets and ropes
(or bottom lines)". Jacques de Thézac inaugurates the Sailor's Shelter
there, financed by a Brest resident, Mrs. Kernéis, on December 19, 1909.
The Shelter closed in 1952.
At the beginning of the twentieth
century, about 1,300 Leonard peasants embarked from Roscoff in the
second half of July. Many Johnnies from Roscoff and neighboring
municipalities died when the Hilda sank on November 17, 1905; the list
of victims, members of the five companies Pichon, Quiviger, Jaouen,
Calarnou and Tanguy, is provided by the newspaper L'Univers of November
26, 1905. The newspaper L'Ouest-Éclair describes the arrival of the
victims at Roscoff station and the poignant scenes during their funeral.
At the beginning of August 1914, the mobilization and then the entry into the war of the British Empire provokes patriotic parades accompanying the soldiers to the station or to the port in which the population fraternizes with tourists and inhabitants "great Bretons". Those who are not mobilized for the defense of the Île-de-Batz or the front spontaneously form a militia which, as soon as the Great Retreat ends, dissolves at the same time as the enthusiasm. The war postponed the lighthouse project which would not be built until 1934.
In 1920, the municipality of Santec, an autonomous parish since 1840,
was created on part of the lands of Roscoff, Saint-Pol-de-Léon, and
Plougoulm. Expected for almost a century by the Roscovites, the
inauguration in 1927 of the Rope bridge, doubling by road the Penzé
viaduct, considerably improves access to the Morlaix market. This road
is the one of the second most important traffic in Finistère.
The
sardine fishing disappeared from Roscoff during the interwar period (22
sardine boats in 1922, none in 1938).
The solar-marine sanatorium
of Perharidy was decorated at the beginning of the 1930s with large wall
panels painted by the self-taught painter Kerga and Art Deco-style works
by the mosaicist Isidore Odorico.
In 1937, the Capuchins
resettled in their convent sold in 1793. The following year, the
construction of the aquarium begins, initially intended only for SBR
researchers.
On April 18, 1943, the occupier decided to destroy some parts of the
fort of Bloscon built by Vauban to set up seven blockhouses, fourteen
firing casemates and some other concrete works, all accommodating a
battery of sixty men. At the beginning of January 1944, it is through
this element of the Atlantic Wall that Erwin Rommel begins his
inspection tour to Plérin.
On Monday, June 19, 1944, the funeral
forbidden by the occupier of Franck Mac Dowell William Stout, a New
Zealand aviator shot down the day before by the DCA of Île-de-Batz,
gathers at the song of Libera two to three thousand people from Roscoff,
Saint-Pol and Santec including a hundred children carrying flowers. The
demonstration will be renewed the next day at the Vil cemetery.
In 1953, the Rockroum thalassotherapy institute, destroyed during the
Second World War, reopens and the station of the Central Society for the
Rescue of shipwrecked people closes. The Charles Pérez Aquarium is
completed and open to the public, and the CNRS, in a new wing, adds
oceanography laboratories to the SBR equipped with their first ship, the
Pluteus II. From the early sixties, the center directed by Georges
Tessier, until then summer resort for foreign students and researchers
limited to the intertidal zone, welcomes permanent teams. A second wing
was built in 1968. For a few weeks in May, a strike committee occupied
the laboratories.
In August 1969, the pedestrian pier, allowing
boarding for Batz at low tide, was inaugurated after two years of work.
The fleets of tourist shuttles are developing. In 1972, the first car
ferry connection with England took place, at the deep-water port of
Bloscon, work on which had begun two years earlier. The following year,
the cooperative headed by Alexis Gourvennec was finally able to deliver
the artichokes to Plymouth.
On March 21, 1978, the port was
invaded by oil escaped from the Amoco Cadiz, broken in two in front of
Porsall thirty-two nautical miles away. Some species of the flora
disappear permanently. The Tanio oil spill hit Roscoff on March 7, 1980.
In 2001, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Morlaix inaugurated
a fishing dock and an auction in the new port, replacing the one that
the municipality had opened in 1988, then in 2009 began the construction
of a marina for six hundred and twenty-five boaters.
Roscoff occupies the tip of
the promontory which closes the bay of Morlaix to the west. The city
stretches over 619 hectares north of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, 5 kilometers
from center to center, with which it tends to form a conurbation,
and has 14 kilometers of coastline with several beaches of very fine
white sand. . Access by land is from Saint-Pol by a single road, the
RD 58, the old national road, or from Santec, to the southwest, by a
small coastal road.
This territory is drawn by three points.
The one in the middle, the least marked, occupies the center of the
old town and is called the Pointe du Vil. The other two are, 0.665
miles to the east, the Bloscon peninsula, separated from the
previous one by the little cove of the old port, and, 0.604 miles to
the west, the tip of Perharidy, separated from the same by the cove
of Laber. This one, sinking for nearly two kilometers between the
peninsulas, is fully discovered at low tide. Its upstream third has
been a polder since 1835.
The Roscoff region, warmed by the
Gulf Stream and protected from the north winds by Île-de-Batz,
belongs to the privileged zone of the Golden Belt, this loess
outcrop thirty to sixty centimeters deep, formed in Devensien by
friable droppings and moraines from the edge of the ice cap, whose
fertility, although over a thousand times thinner, compares only to
that of the Yellow River plain. It is this loess, amended by the
magnesium of maërl and the phosphates of seaweed, which gives the
impression that the Roscovites, like Ulysses, cultivate sand.
In 2010, the climate of the municipality is of the frank oceanic
climate type, according to a CNRS study based on a series of data
covering the period 1971-2000. In 2020, Météo-France publishes a
typology of the climates of metropolitan France in which the
municipality is exposed to an oceanic climate and is in the climatic
region of Finistère Nord, characterized by high rainfall, mild
temperatures in winter (6 ° C), cool in summer and strong winds. At the
same time, the environment observatory in Brittany publishes in 2020 a
climatic zoning of the Brittany region, based on data from Météo-France
from 2009. The municipality is, according to this zoning, in the
"Littoral" zone, exposed to a summer climate, with cool summers but mild
in winter and average rains.
For the period 1971-2000, the
average annual temperature is 11.7 ° C, with an annual thermal amplitude
of 9 ° C. The average annual cumulative rainfall is 863 mm, with 15.9
days of precipitation in January and 7.4 days in July. For the period
1991-2020, the annual average temperature observed at the nearest
meteorological station, located in the town of Pleyber-Christ 27 km as
the crow flies, is 11.7 ° C and the average annual cumulative rainfall
is 1,101.6 mm. For the future, the climate parameters of the
municipality estimated for 2050 according to different greenhouse gas
emission scenarios can be consulted on a dedicated website published by
Météo-France in November 2022.
Roscoff is included in the Natura 2000 Special Protection Area of the Bay of Morlaix and borders the natural area of ecological, faunistic and floristic interest of the Penzé estuary. The exceptional biological diversity of Roscoff, made up of more than three thousand animal species, is linked to its maritime interface and its geographical singularities (tide, climate, marine currents, cloudiness, geodesy, etc.) which overlap two algae ecosystems, a Nordic and a Mediterranean.
Roscoff is 98 nautical miles, or 182 kilometers, from Plymouth, 210 kilometers from Rennes and 562 from Paris. It takes 6 hours by ferry, about 15 hours sailing (but two days in headwinds), to reach Plymouth. The Morlaix aerodrome and the Landivisiau base are each around thirty kilometers away.
An important agricultural product of the region is a special onion.
It is traditionally braided and used to be valued as provisions for
ships. Farmers from Roscoff used to sell the onions as hawkers in
southern England. Hence the nickname Johnnies for the onion traders, who
are commemorated in the small local history museum Maison des Johnnies.
With the global economic crisis and at the latest with the Second World
War and the devaluation of the British pound, business gradually
declined. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did the Roscoff onion experience
its renaissance as a specialty. It has held the Appellation d'Origine
Contrôlée seal of approval since 2009 and the Appellation d'Origine
Protégée designation of origin since 2013.
Fish wholesale Viviers
de Béganton is an internationally renowned seafood trading centre.
Today the port is the destination and departure point for Brittany
Ferries ferries across the English Channel and the Irish Sea to Plymouth
and Cork. You can also reach the nearby Île de Batz.
Roscoff is
at the western end of the EuroVelo 4 cycle route, which starts in Kiev.
It is also on the EuroVelo 1 cycle route, which runs from the North Cape
to Sagres in Portugal.
The Morlaix – Roscoff railway line (SNCF
route 447 000) has been closed since 3 June 2018 following a landslide
caused by a storm. Since January 2, 2019, there has been a rail
replacement bus service. A reconstruction of the route is still
uncertain or under discussion due to financing problems.
Roscoff is an urban municipality, because it is part of the dense or
intermediate density municipalities, within the meaning of the Insee's
communal density grid. It belongs to the urban unit of
Saint-Pol-de-Léon, an intra-departmental agglomeration grouping 3
municipalities and 12,409 inhabitants in 2017, of which it is the
suburb.
In addition, the town is part of the Roscoff -
Saint-Pol-de-Léon attraction area, of which it is a municipality of the
main pole. This area, which includes 9 municipalities, is categorized in
areas with less than 50,000 inhabitants.
The municipality,
bordered by the English Channel, is also a coastal municipality within
the meaning of the law of January 3, 1986, called the coastal law.
Specific urban planning provisions therefore apply in order to preserve
natural spaces, sites, landscapes and the ecological balance of the
coastline, such as the principle of unconstructibility, outside
urbanized spaces, on the coastal strip of 100 meters, or more if the
local urban planning plan provides for it.
The land use of the municipality, as it appears from the European
database of biophysical soil occupation Corine Land Cover (CLC), is
marked by the importance of agricultural territories (53.8% in 2018),
nevertheless decreasing compared to 1990 (66%). The detailed
distribution in 2018 is as follows: heterogeneous agricultural areas
(50.7%), urbanized areas (38.6%), industrial or commercial areas and
communication networks (4.7%), arable land (3.1%), coastal wetlands
(1.3%), environments with shrubby and/or herbaceous vegetation (1.2%),
open spaces, without or with little vegetation (0.2%), maritime waters
(0.1%).
The IGN also provides an online tool to compare the
evolution over time of the land use of the municipality (or territories
at different scales). Several periods are accessible in the form of maps
or aerial photos: the Cassini map (eighteenth century), the general
staff map (1820-1866) and the current period (1950 to today).