Saint-Pol-de-Léon: The Kreisker Spire and the Cathedral of the Léon

Required Activities

• From the square, read the Kreisker tower in its parts: forty metres of solid tower to the open gallery, then thirty-eight metres of pierced spire above it, with four sixteen-metre pinnacles at the corners — and know that its model, Notre-Dame-du-Mur at Morlaix, was pulled down in 1806, a year before Napoleon's decree saved this one

• Inside, look for the join between the two stones — the nave built of Caen limestone shipped in at great cost, the rest in local granite — then find the shrine of 1897 holding a thorn from the Crown of Thorns and the skull, an arm bone and a finger of Saint Paul Aurélien, and go outside to see that the tower over the crossing is a copy of the Kreisker's west gable

• Work along the carved choir stalls, then find the Étagères de la nuit and the skull reliquaries kept on them, and in a side chapel the retable of Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel, brought here from the town's Carmelite convent

• At the Kreisker's north porch, count the ten patriarchs unrolling a parchment round the entrance arch, pick out the farm animals and invented monsters among the foliage over the doors, find the fifteenth-century Virgin and Child at the apex, and the empty triangular pediment where the donors' arms were chiselled off in the Revolution