West and South Brittany from Roscoff

Walk out to the Pointe de Pen-Hir above 70m of cliff and pick off the six Tas de Pois from the landward one outwards - Grand Dahouet, Petit Dahouet, Penn-Glaz, Chelott, Ar Forc'h and Bern-Id; then find the Croix de Pen-Hir, cut from blue Brennilis granite for the Bretons of the Free French, and read the Breton motto on the back of it, Kentoc'h mervel eget em zaotra, rather death than dishonour

Stand in the nave of Saint-Corentin and sight down it to see the choir swing about 10 degrees to the left, then go outside and find King Gradlon on his horse between the two spires — every 26 July a Quimpérois used to climb up behind him, hold a glass of wine to his lips and throw the empty glass down to the crowd

Visit the Port-musée in Douarnenez, with its traditional boats afloat in the harbour and its museum in a former sardine cannery

Walk the rampart walk round the Ville Close, find the Tour du Fer a Cheval where the 13th-century tower base and 14th-century wall of the medieval enceinte were dug up, and remember the walls were only saved from being sold off and listed in 1899 because the painters who worked here got up a petition

Visit the Musée de Pont-Aven, reopened on 26 March 2016 with its gallery space doubled, and find its fourteen Gauguins and the six works the Musée d'Orsay lent it, among them Gauguin's Village breton sous la neige of 1894

Start at the Maison des mégalithes at Le Ménec and walk the Ménec alignment — inside the rows on a booked commented visit in summer, when the fenced sites are open to 400 people a day, or on your own out of season when access is free — and follow the files far enough to see that they converge rather than run parallel

Walk the Côte Sauvage between the pointe de Beg en Aud and the pointe de Beg er Lan, and on the rock platform at the foot of the cliffs look at how the granite splits: it is a two-mica leucogranite that deformed while it was still crystallising, so it comes apart in parallel sheets five millimetres to a centimetre thick

Walk the length of the four fragments and work out what was done here: a single block of orthogneiss between 300 and 330 tonnes, quarried at least 8 to 10 km away towards Vannes or the Rhuys peninsula, which means it was brought across a stretch of water with a strong current before it was ever stood up

In the basilica, find the bronze statue of Saint Peter at the entrance whose foot pilgrims kiss for a forty-day indulgence, then go into the treasury for the chasuble said to have been given by Anne of Austria in 1638 in thanks for the birth of the future Louis XIV — the sanctuary's own account calls its authenticity doubtful

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

Cycle the waymarked 40 km circuit of Lac de Guerlédan from the abbey of Bon-Repos, by way of the Mûr-de-Bretagne dam, the Quénécan forest and the Forges des Salles, and stop at the anse de Tregnanton on the wild side of the lake for the best view down the drowned valley

Walk round the Cairn of Barnenez, 75 m long and 28 m across at its widest, and count the entrances to its eleven passage graves, then look at the quarried west face, where a contractor's excavator cut open chambers A to D in the spring of 1955 and left the inside of the cairn on show

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

On the 3.5 km crossing from Roscoff's old port, watch the water in the narrow channel: the currents here run hard enough that the boat takes a long dogleg to cover a strait barely a kilometre wide, and divers working this channel in the early 1990s brought up Roman amphorae and pottery from its floor