"Landévennec - history and mystery. " a Landévennec Travel Page by ranger49

Landévennec is a small riverside resort which has a very sheltered position
on the banks of the mouth of the River Aulne.
I remembered reading on a previous visit to the area that excavations were underway there at a site that was believed to have the foundations of a 5th Century Abbey.
That was about 10 or 11 years ago but we had never been near enough or had sufficient time to go and explore.
On this visit it was a short drive away so we went to visit on a lovely sunny morning.
As we left the main road to make our winding way down to the village we first passed a number of large, new and rather expensive -looking houses.
We passed too a couple of large hoardings with weather beaten advertisements for hotels and restaurants in the village and thought - Good we can have lunch before we go to the Abbey site.

The roadside vegetation was lush and the gardens of the older, shuttered houses had quite a tropical look about them.
Then we noticed that almost every other house had a For Sale sign; it began to feel a little bit eerie - so many lovely old houses in large gardens in such a beautiful wooded valley leading down to the water and no one there.

In the village we came to the Hotel Beausejour standing at the river edge - but no matter if the only room left was at the front - you would still have a river view - the place had been gutted, there were no windows and the For Sale sign looked as though it had stood there for a very long time.

(I subsequently found out that this hotel went into liquidation at the end of 2004. A young couple from Lanquedoc, a doctor and his wife, a nurse, came a cross the abandoned building while on holiday the following year. They obtained the support of the Mayor to turn it into a hydrotherapy centre maintaining the public restaurant facility and employing 15 people.. After some initial problems work was due to commence in summer 2007 but in June 2008 the lovely old building was in a pitiable derelict state.)

The only other hotel, Le St-Patrick, was also looked very Fermé as in for ever; the only hope of refreshment was a makeshift snackbar.
We decided to make do with a packet of crisps and bottled water from the car.
A little further along the river edge we came to the tiny church, a very neat row of occupied houses, small launching pads for river craft and some workmen tending the beautifully kept lawns and gardens beside the river. And a piece of modern sculpture erected to mark the arrival of the third millenium - the plaque was secured to the granite base with screws that had rusted already.
A man came from of of the houses and watched us closely,without returning our greeting, as we turned to make walk up to the Old Abbey site .
An inexplicable sense of foreboding hit us then.
Good material here, I thought, for a short story, if not a novel.

Fortunatlely the feeling was dispelled by the warm welcome we received from the staff in the Ticket Office. We were the only visitors - another couple left as we arrived so we wandered around the site on our own for a couple of hours including a visit to the museum.