Cancale: Oysters by the Port de la Houle and the Pointe du Grouin

Required Activities

• At the stalls on the Port de la Houle, buy a dozen flat oysters and a dozen cupped ones and eat them side by side on the slipway: the flat ones are the oysters that won Cancale its town charter from François I in 1545, when the aldermen of Paris had them delivered twice a week, and the biggest wild ones were known as pieds de cheval, horses' hooves

• From the top of the cliff at low water, count the rows of oyster trestles out in the bay, and work out how a hundred million flat oysters a year were taken from this water before Louis XVI's ordinance of 1787 restricted dredging to about a fortnight each spring — the fortnight when two hundred over-rigged bisquines set off together in the spectacle they called la caravane

• Walk the customs path of the GR34 out to the Pointe du Grouin, about 5 km north of the port, and from the tip look across the chenal de la Vieille Rivière to the île des Landes — then put a hand on the rock: this is Cancale leucogranite, which is why there is a headland here at all, while the softer Brioverian rock either side of it was eaten away to make the bay

• Climb from the Houle to the Bourg and read the two towns off each other: the shipowners' and captains' houses on the clifftop, the fishermen's houses sheltering in the rues de derrière below, built on a mound of shells — then go into the old church of Saint-Méen of 1715 to 1727, now the cinema and the museum of Cancale's arts and traditions