Pontivy: The Castle of the Rohans, Napoléonville and the Nantes–Brest Canal

Required Activities

• Go inside the castle of the Rohans — open again since the summer of 2019 — and find, in order, the guardroom, the ducal chamber with its carved ceiling, and the two 16th-century fireplaces of polychrome stone carried here from the château de Coët-Candec, with their Latin motto and their arms

• Walk the grid of the imperial town south of the old centre, from the cavalry quarter finished in 1811 to the law courts begun in 1807 and not finished until 1846, and work out from the dates on the buildings where Napoleon's plan ran out of money — this is the town that asked in May 1814 to be renamed Bourbonville and then went back to Napoléonville during the Hundred Days

• Start at the écluse des Récollets in the middle of town, on the island the canal cut out of the Blavet, and ride east along the towpath counting locks: 54 of them climb the twenty kilometres towards Rohan, and you can turn back whenever the tally stops being fun

• Walk the outside of the castle, about 90 m by 75 m, under a curtain wall 20 m high and more than 5 m thick in places, and find the stretch of the south side that fell in the storm of February 2014: it was rebuilt on a reinforced concrete skin, faced with the original stones where they survived and with new blocks from a quarry near Carhaix where they did not