Roundabouts and lighthouses

Driving through France you will quickly realise that the towns enjoy decorating their roundabouts. It is quite incredible, there are some quite elaborate constructions often taking inspiration from  local legend,  history, or even something just pleasing to the eye.

Just across the Bretagne border in the department of  Loire Atlantique is the small town of La Turballe. A rather awkward junction was rebuilt with a rather plain roundabout. Then after two years it suddenly sported a new structure, a Lighthouse.

According to the local newspaper, the lighthouse was commissioned to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of twinning with Bussang in the Lorraine. It is a replica of the lighthouse ‘Le Four’ marking the Le Four plateau some four miles of the coast from Le Croisic.

However ……..  there is something not quite right,  take a look a the shot below of the actual lighthouse,

The black spiral stripe goes round in the wrong direction ! all the other details are correct, the jetty at the base and even the bank of pebbles.

Now this particular lighthouse gets visited regularly by kayakers on the very high co efficients.  At low tide the plateau is exposed for a couple of hours and is a bountiful supply of delicious and enormous mussels. As well as mussels, good sized brown crab can be hooked out of holes and crevices, hence all the subjects in the photo bent over with their net bags !

I came across an interesting blog covering French Lighthouses where the blogger included a little piece about Le Four   http://www.pharadise.com/blog/?p=500

 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.