Aber Wrac’h is the longest of river of the three Abers (drowned river valleys) on the north west coat of Finistère. It is 33 kilometres long and navigable for a long way inland, but the steep sides of its valley and the lack of a road along its length means that imuch of its beauty can only be appreciated from a boat.
The name of the river must go back to the Stone Age, because Wrac’h (or Gwrac’h or just Ac’h) was a way of referring to the ancient mother goddess. Her name was Ana (and she was eventually Christianised as Sainte Anne) but rather than impolitely referring to her by name, one of her titles was used instead. Wrac’h is associated with magic and the supernatural, and could be translated as “Miracle-worker”. The Christian church was deeply antagonistic to any vestiges of older religions so they preferred the translations “Sorceress” or “Wife of the Devil”, but they didn’t succeed in changing the name of the river.
Where there are now road bridges across the deep tidal water there were once ferries. But further up river the influence of the sea-tide lessens; while the river may be too deep to wade across at high tide, high tide doesn’t last for long and for much of the day, provided it hasn’t been raining in torrents, the upper reaches of the river are reduced to a large brook. If there has been heavy rain, the brook may grow wider but still not much deeper until the incoming tide blocks the waters’ exit to the sea.
In a lonely spot about two kilometres east of Lannilis an old pathway crosses the river. The track is a “green road”. It has never been metalled, but the weight of passing traffic over the centuries (or perhaps over the millennia) has resulted in the path being eroded by two metres below the level of the surrounding soil. It must have been a main road in its day, with foot traffic and pack-mules and later horse-drawn carts. And it crossed the river – the green road is very evident on both sides.
A ferry boat isn’t a practical solution to crossing shallow water, but the soft mud of the river bottom can make it difficult and even dangerous for people and pack-animals to wade across. So at sometime in the past, a bridge was built to take the road across the river. Early written records are rare; the earliest reference to the bridge dates from 1630 when it is listed by a military commander as “pont Grach”, a river crossing usable by soldiers. But earlier in 1549 someone attempted to construct a water mill there or close to there, and the current design of the bridge does suggest such a possible use. But since those two dates the bridge has often been repaired, the last repair being in the 1990s, and although the last renovation attempted to restore the “original” we can’t be sure exactly what that looked like.
Suffice to say that the bridge is made of roughly-shaped granite blocks and looks very like a dry-stone wall of exceptional thickness, roughly 2 metres across. There is a one-metre-wide gap in the middle roofed by very long stones before being covered with further layers of smaller stones.
The little brook of the low-tide river flows merrily though the gap. At high tide the river rises to the level of the bridge roadway but the waters are by then almost stationary, so there is little pressure on the massive structure. In times of flood or exceptional tide the water rises above the bridge, but not for long. The biggest danger is that as the level drops, the water pouring through the gap might loosen some stones from the sides of the gap. In the last three hundred years this has been recorded as happening, but didn’t collapse the bridge and could be repaired. So if the structure has stood there without total damage since 1549 one wonders just how long it existed before that. The techniques for building a stone dam across a river were known in the Stone Age, and the Devil’s Bridge isn’t much different.
The name may be a clue – the early church tended to associate old structures with the Devil, and that might date it prior to Christianity reaching Birttany. Equally the name might just be a translation of the 1630 name pont Grac’h, bridge over the river Wrac’h, bridge over the river of the Sorceress, the Devil’s Wife. But in 1630 pont Grac’h was the first bridge over the river and the green road leading to and from it would already have been trodden deep into the ground, so it must have been already old.
Hundreds of bridges in Europe are called Devil’s Bridge, and the majority have a similar legend. The Devil agrees to do the work in one night but demands as his price the soul of the first living being to cross the bridge; so the locals send an animal across the bridge first – animals were believed to have no souls, so they came to no harm and the Devil was tricked out of his payment.
For this bridge, the miller who’d bargained for it arrived carrying a sack of flour and with his cat inside his shirt. The Devil was standing on the other side, waiting to grab his soul. The miller began to cross, slowly because of the weight he was carrying, then stopped in the middle of the bridge and released the cat, which took one look at the Devil, raced forward with teeth bared to attack, so became the first living being to cross the bridge.
Despite suffering this over and over again for many different Devil’s Bridges, it seems the Devil never learns!
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