Last updated on September 6, 2022
I met the Iron Lady on a walk by the river. We had taken a short drive down through the green fields of Morbihan to the village of St. Nicolas-des-Eaux – St. Nicholas of the Waters in French. Here, a river called the Blavet winds its way between sloping, forested banks, arcing around the little peninsula of Castennec.
We had come down not to try and find any folklore, but simply to eat crepes. These are a particular speciality of Brittany; crispy pancakes of brown buckwheat flour, cooked on a griddle with butter and generously garnished with a range of meats, veg and cheese. Healthy they are not, but they are delicious. The closest creperie to the village where we stay happens to be in St. Nicolas-des-Eaux; and it was to prove a fortuitous coincidence.
Walking along the riverbank towards the creperie, we came upon a rather striking sight. From beside the waters of the Blavet there rises a towering modern statue composed of curving struts of steel, forming the shape of a woman. The figure stands over twice the height of a normal man, and seems to be striding forward, iron hair billowing out behind in the breeze. Her proportions suggested that a male artist was responsible.
I assumed initially that this represented simply ‘Art’; that mighty, trans-national force for uplifting the minds of the masses that leaves large, random objects scattered around in unexpected corners of the countryside, often to the bemusement of the populace. An explanatory plaque nearby agreed partially with my analysis, but with some additions that made quite a considerable difference.
This particular manifestation of art was also a manifestation of legend. The lady carved in iron wasn’t didn’t represent anything abstract, universal or personal; she wasn’t the personification of love, or the recreation of a personal muse of the sculptor. She represented a figure from the history of the place; in Breton, Ar Groareg Houarn, the ‘Iron Lady’.
I read on with increasing interest, followed by surprise and a little incredulity. The story that was related to me was this; the sculpture represented a Breton Venus-deity, a fertility spirit associated with the Blavet river. A statue had once stood in her honour on the peninsula of Castennec, until the remarkably late date of 1661 when it was thrown into the river. It was thereafter recovered from the current some years later, before being mutilated and thrown back in again in 1670. Fifteen years later, however, she had been retrieved once more by one Pierre de Lannion, lord of nearby Quinipily, who had installed her in the garden of his castle. Since that time, the plaque advised the spirit of the Venus had abandoned the banks of the Blavet; the installation of the sculpture here, opposite her original seat on Castennec, marked an attempt to reverse that process.
It would seem that, in the process of going for some dinner, I’d stumbled over one of the last survivals of pagan Celtic religion; a cult that had continued into the 17th century, and which lingered in the memory of the region even now. This required some investigation…
***
Subsequent study added some more meat to the bones of the story. The site on which the statue originally stood had a long history, covering the period of the Iron Age Celts, the Romans, and medieval occupation. An important juncture of Roman roads lay near here, marking the site as one of importance in ancient times.
The statue had gone by various names over the years. These included Er Groach Couard (‘The Cowardly Old Lady’), Groah Hoart (‘The Old Guardian’), and, according to the inscription on the pedestal in Quinipily, Venus Armoricorum Oraculum; ‘Venus the Oracle of the Armoricans’. Armoricans was the name given to the peoples of Brittany and Normandy in Roman and pre-Roman times; it means something like ‘peoples of the sea coast’ in Gaulish.
A number of superstitions attached to the statue. She was accredited with being a sorceress, who would aid those who approached her in the proper fashion, but would inflict grievous punishment on those who failed to give her due respect. Offerings were made seeking her aid; touching her image was believed to heal the sick, while women recovering from childbirth would bathe in a stone tank that stood before her. Pregnant women would walk three times round the statue, reciting charms, and would touch a band to the image in order to retain some of its power through their pregnancy. There were stories also, distinctly non-specific, of erotic practices being performed in her vicinity; presumably so as to give her, in her function as a fertility goddess, the most direct opportunity available to intervene in the reproductive process.
All this went on well into the late 17th century; a century after the Protestant Reformation, and several decades after the height of the European Witch-Craze. It is frankly astonishing that this should be so; we have here an example of the most blatant idolatry imaginable, totally contradictory to the demands of Christian religion, and even of the rules of the Ten Commandments. That this cult was able to persist in its original location for well over a millenium since the ostensible Christianisation of northwestern Gaul speaks to a deep and firmly rooted pre-Christian tradition in the region.
For the missionary, all this would sound horrifying; for my part, the idea that something so ancient managed to survive so long fills me with more than a little delight! Towards the end of the 17th century, alas, the influence of missionaries grew stronger in the region, and the statue came under the kind of onslaught that had toppled so many of its brethren over the centuries.
In 1661, some missionaries, backed by the Bishop of Vannes, requested that the regional authorities destroy the statue. At the orders of Claude the Count of Lannion, a major landholder in the region, the statue was toppled from its pedestal on Castennec, and rolled down into the river.
The local peasantry were not pleased by this turn of events. They were even less pleased when subsequent poor weather severely damaged their harvests; they drew a connection between the two sources of their dissatisfaction, and blamed the climatic disruption upon the removal of their idol. Three years after the Venus was cast down they gathered together, fished her statue out of the river, and placed it back on its altar. Re-commencing once more their ancestral rites, they observed that no further episodes of disastrous weather struck them – and considered themselves to have had the better of the theological debate.
The Bishop of Vannes did not concur. Word reached his ears of the Iron Lady’s resurrection and, keen to ensure that only one divinity in these parts would maintain a reputation for coming back from the dead, he once again enjoined Claude de Lannion to have her overthrown. Workmen were dispatched, this time with the added instruction to smash and mutilate the statue. This time, retrieval was to be impossible. As they went about their business, however, they found that a substantial audience of the local peasantry assembled around them, with no little hostility writ upon their faces. Discretion being the better part of valour, they opted to inflict a little token damage on an arm and a breast, and then replaced the lady in her previous watery position. The peasants conceded the draw, permitted the workmen to depart, and revised their worship to focus upon the idol’s new riverine location.
Shortly thereafter Claude de Lannion, the bishop’s appointed destroyer of idols, fell from his horse and perished; his misfortune was once again interpreted as divine disfavour. Far from destroying the Iron Lady’s hold over the imagination of the region, her sacrifice to the waters merely ended up confirming it.
This remained the status quo for the next twenty-five years when, in 1695, the Bishop of Vannes issued another request for the idol’s destruction. This time the instrument of his will was Claude’s son, Pierre de Lannion. In his case, however, the instrument was to prove somewhat faulty.
Pierre and his men went to the Blavet, and dredged up the statue. Rather than smashing it, however, they proceeded to haul it, along with a large stone tank with which it was associated, back to Pierre’s castle at Quinipily. Pierre, it turned out, was a keen antiquarian, and wished to claim this piece of the region’s heritage for himself.
He met stiff opposition. As the wagons passed through the green fields of Morbihan, the peasants came out and lined the way, shouting abuse in Breton and making clear just what they thought of this theft of their holy symbol. Nor were the peasantry alone in this; following the arrival of the statue at Quinipily, a lawsuit was filed against Pierre by a strikingly high-ranking aristocrat, the Duke of Rohan. The Rohan line held title to the site of Castennec, which had housed during the early medieval period the first castle of their clan; it was their ancestral home, and they did not wish to surrender lightly such an important part of its heritage.
Pierre, however, was eventually victorious. The statue remained in his keeping, and he installed it in a specially constructed section of his garden mocked up to resemble a sanctuary. The tank was placed before it, with the statue itself placed on a new pedestal atop a high wall, with Latin inscriptions added to give the whole a suitably antique ambience. Pierre wished to be able to offer visitors an antiquarian treat, to pique the jaded imaginations of cosmopolitan aristocrats with a taste of the primitive exoticity of the Breton countryside. In so doing, however, he installed the statue in a setting distinctly reminiscent of a temple. Iconoclasm came to look more than a little like reverence – and visits by the people to pay their respects to the idol seem to have managed to continue.
As the years passed, the House of Lannion fell on hard times. In the time of the Revolutionary Terror the last lord of the line emigrated to the Americas, and his castle was taken into public ownership in 1795. Over the succeeding years considerable conflict wracked Brittany, with assorted invasions and insurrections playing out in the countryside of Morbihan. The castle of Quinipily did not survive the epoch, being largely broken down and its masonry re-used in assorted construction projects. Throughout all the turmoil and destruction, however, the Iron Lady remained upon her pedestal in the garden; a garden that had now become a shrine, outlasting the fortification that had housed it. The mock sanctuary became a real one.
There are a number of theories as to the origin of the statue but, if she does represent an autocthonous Gaulish deity, then it would seem that she has survived the fall of three fortresses that housed her; the Gaulish camp of Castennec, the Roman garrison that rose on its ruins, and the late-medieval heap of the Lannion line. In each instance, as walls have crumbled around her and ivy crawled up over the stones, the Iron Lady has remained. Three also is the number of the recent attempts to destroy her; two attempted drownings in the Blavet, and one attempt to repurpose her as a garden ornament. She’s returned from her own particular Triple Death – a motif well known in Celtic legend – and remains an icon of the Morbihan countryside to this day.
It would have been rude not to pay her a visit.
***
Lush green trees lined our way as we drove down the back road from Baud to Quinipily. The summer air was hot and fragrant; as we pulled in to the little grassy verge that passed for a car park, we were surrounded by blooming flowers.
A little stone cottage of the traditional type sits by the current entrance to the gardens of Quinipily. A little old lady resides there, sitting dozing happily in the sun as we arrive. She smilingly requests three Euros for the privilege of admission, to pay for the upkeep of the place; in return, we’re presented with a little booklet detailing the history of the place.
We walk up a path surrounded by blossoms and the buzzing of insects. Around, traces of the walls of the castle are still visible, broken ruins partially submerged in vegetation. The garden, by contrast, is anything but ruinous; it positively throngs with vivid life. Bees and butterflies flutter from flower to flower, their own colours as bright as those of the petals.
At the top of the path, at the head of the gentle slope we’ve ascended, we come to a flat lawn, hemmed in by high walls several times the height of a man. In the centre sits the great stone tank in which rituals were once conducted. Above it, on a pedestal at the centre of the high overlooking wall, stands the statue of the Iron Lady.
She is a carving in the round, resembling a little Graeco-Roman statuary, but with a more stylised air to her. Some observers see a resemblance to Egyptian statuary. She is naked, with small breasts exposed, and a small cloth object obscuring her lower quarters. She stands taller than any but the tallest humans – 2.2 metres – yet not so much larger that she feels monumental in scale. Meeting her feels a little like meeting a person; you can stand by her side, and look her in the face easily enough. She’s a very human kind of a goddess, which perhaps explains some of her enduring popularity.
The altar on which she stands feels considerably more grandiose. It’s unmistakeably classical in inspiration, after the neo-classical sensibilities of the time, and carries the following inscriptions in Latin;
“Erected to Venus by Caius Julius Cesar.”
“Venus, oracle of the Armoricans, Julius Caesar being Dux, Caius Claudius Marcellus and Lucius Cornelius Lentulus Consuls, the year of Rome 705. Or six years before Jesus Christ.”
“Caesar, after having subdued all of Gaul and taken the title of dictator, after having passed through Brittany, not only crowned himself with his victories, but crowned his country with him.”
“Pierre, count of Lannion, having wrested from superstition this pagan divinity, venerated hitherto by the people, ordered that it was placed in this place. Lord’s year 1696.”
There is a combination of fantasy, fabulation and history wrapped up in these inscriptions. Little else exists to tie the idol to Julius Caesar; Pierre was attempting to attach it to prestigious names and figures from the past, and enhancing his own prestige in the process. Historians and archaeologists are divided on the precise origins of the statue itself; what is certain is that it ended up as a Breton deity, worshipped in a fashion redolent of the old Celtic paganism.
Behind the statue lies a secondary shrine, a nod to this older variant of paganism. To the rear of the pedestal, behind the high wall, lies an earthen hollow, a trough perhaps intended to hold water that would flow into the tank below. Around its edges lie trees, and within its circle have been laid out stones, mimicking the stone circles of prehistoric northwestern Europe, which popular tradition in the 18th century considered the temples of the druids. It’s a place of ivy and dappled shade, the very image of a holy grove of the olden days as conjured up by the writers of Antiquity. It’s a fitting backdrop for the spirit of the place.
We spent a good little while exploring the garden sanctuary. It has quite an atmosphere. Popping our heads over the edge of the tank as we left, we saw that a great many visitors had considered it good policy to deposit a little monetary offering, recalling the warnings that a failure to offer due respect would be met with divine displeasure. With a metallic tinkle we complied, just in case…
***
I’ll try and dig a little more into the story of the Venus of Quinipily in the coming months and years. There’s more to this story than outlined above, more elements to the plot which I haven’t yet got a handle on. The site of Castennec has a great deal about it; it was once the site of a Gallo-Roman city called Sulim, which was a place of considerable importance. A chapel dedicated to Gildas, the Dark Age writer, sits just beside it; another chapel lies nearby to which all the cattle of the region were brought for blessings at the start of August, at the time of one of the four main Celtic seasonal festivals. This date (called Lughnasadh in Ireland) was associated with Lugus, the chief of the gods of Gaul. A few miles in the other direction lies a village with the intriguing name of Kermabon; Breton for ‘Town of Mabon’, the latter being a Celtic deity known from Welsh legend and Gaulish inscriptions. This place was clearly once something a little special, and perhaps surrounded by a ritual landscape of great complexity.
The link to the House of Rohan is also an intriguing one. This lineage of Breton lords in later times claimed descent from the legendary founder of Brittany, Conan Meriadoc, one of the stars of the Welsh text “The Dream of Macsen Wledig”; they rooted their power in claims to a very Celtic kind of authority. Whatever the truth of their claims to illustrious antecedents, it is fact that they established their very first recorded dynastic centre on the Castennec peninsula itself, within the ruins of the city of Sulim, right beside the original seat of the Iron Lady. The name Rohan comes from the Breton Roc’han, meaning ‘Little Rock’; this refers to the small rocky mount at Castennec upon which their fortress lay. Their very name, the symbol of their House, is a reference to this spot. The connections between place, power, house and goddess may be very old indeed – and it is fascinating to note the reaction of the Duke of Rohan to the goddess’s eventual removal from their joint ancestral seat. There may be a story here, and I’ll do my best to unearth a little more of it, before too long…
For more on Brythonic Celtic mythology, see my book “The Ghosts of the Forest” here.
Bibliography:
- Explanatory booklet, Chateau de Quinipily
- Information post, St. Nicolas des Eaux, by the sculptor Christophe Milcent
- Bradshaw, George; Hughes, John William C. (1897), Bradshaw’s hand-book to Brittany
- D’Anvers, N; Bell, Arthur George (1906). Picturesque Brittany
- Floquet, Charles (1989), Châteaux et manoirs bretons des Rohan
- Freitag, Barbara (2004), Sheela-na-gigs: Unravelling an Enigma
- Hare, Augustus (1896), North-western France: (Normandy and Brittany)
- Macquoid, Katharine Sarah (1877), Through Brittany. South Brittany
- Trollope, Thomas Adolphus (1840), A summer in Brittany
- Worth, George J. (1876), “The “Venus” of Quinipily”, Macmillan’s Magazine
(And grateful thanks to Wikipedia, English and Francais, consulted repeatedly around the start of April 2020 in the process of compiling this post)
© William Young and Inter-Celtic, 2020. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to William Young and Inter-Celtic with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Be First to Comment