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Crossing backroads West Texas you drive from water tower to water tower, crossing backroads Brittany you drive from steeple to steeple.

Breton church steeples are both ornate and pierced.



That long first day is that it was a Sunday, and rural Brittany is closed on Sundays, I'd ride through village after village and everything would be shuttered. It was about 90F and even getting water was a problem.

Late in the day I did come across this town (Bell-Isle-En-Terre?) where there was some kind of small festival going on, and one restaurant sort of open.



France is full of crucifixes, leastways Brittany and Normandy are, set up at crossroads, mostly from the 19th Century and earlier, apparently by private individuals and families as memorials.

The older ones in Brittany followed the same form; tall post, stubby cross, crucified Jesus on the front, and what might be a saint on the back.






When the Allies were establishing a beachhead in Normandy things got ugly in occupied France. Calls had gone out to the Resistance across France before and during the landings to impede the German war effort, sabotage became widespread. The Germans applied brutality in an effort to suppress it.

I already posted the photo earlier in this thread outside of Morliax of the roadside monument marking the place where on August 4th 1944, fifteen civilians were shot in reprisal.

Here's another sort of roadside cross, July 15th 1944, seventeen members of the Resistance executed here.