Ille-et-Vilaine - Plouer - Château de Péhou

The headland now known as the Pointe de Chêne Vert (Green Oak point) is very hard rock and for some millennia it has forced the river Rance out of its straight course for the coast.

It is a very obvious fortifiable strong point. It always has been, and not only to Bretons.

Any attempt to delineate in detail the history of seafarers and sea traders tends to founder on the fact that a sea-going life doesn’t leave behind much evidence in writing. The most ancient European seafaring civilisation we know of were the Phoenicians, based in present-day Lebanon, and most of our knowledge of them comes from Greek historians. There is nothing in the Phoenicians’ own words, and as the Greeks were seafaring rivals one has to take their account with a pinch of salt. But it is known that the Phoenicians traded along the whole shore of the Mediterranean, and that they did sail on the Atlantic coast north and south of the straits of Gibraltar. The Greeks hinted that they reached the British Isles and travelled even further along the North Sea shores, possibly even to Iceland.

And we are sure that they came down the Rance. Within the extensive farmland stretching back from the Pointe de Chêne Vert there has been for over two thousand years a meadow of wild asphodel which blooms startlingly white in late spring. Asphodel is a type of six-petalled lily not at all native to France, and it is a Phoenician favourite – they sprinkled its seeds on their food, serving as a tonic, and also as a laxative after feasting too well. That meadow is considered a serious indication that the Phoenicians set up a trading post on the Pointe de Chêne Vert. The theory is backed by finding carved Phoenician letters on rocks in the Rance between this point and the sea, possibly directing Phoenician boats to the settlement at Chêne Vert.

 Phoenicia was an independent state between 1500 BC and 300 BC, but that doesn’t really indicate a date for a Phoenician settlement on the Rance. Phoenicians were active seafareres before the land-based state was formed around Tyre in Lebanon, and they carried on as sea-traders after the state was taken over first by the Persians and then by Alexander the Great. A trading ship doesn’t rely on a far-away king.

The strong point at the Chêne Vert saw the building of many castles. A wooden one is recorded early in the 900s and the first stone one had been built by 1040 when Duke Alain of Brittany seized it from the rebel Viscount of Dinan. The castle was taken over by William Latimer, lieutenant-general of the King of England, in 1350 – he demanded taxes from all the merchants trading on the Rance. In 1360 the Duke of Brittany threw Latimer out and razed the castle to the ground. The next owners partly rebuilt some defence walls and domestic buildings. The present day pseudo-fortifications date from 1860 and the ownership of Marie Eloy, a young opera dancer known as La Ferrari who was the mistress of the rich Prince Alexander Basilevski. She built the two towers to flank a central courtyard which she used to host extravagant musical celebrations.

The estate and castle fell into disrepair after her death, but in 1937 Chêne Verte was bought by René Martin who, with his son Claude-Noël Martin made a residence from a partial reconstruction of the mediaeval castle, and named it Château de Péhou. They also restored the estate as parkland, and their private woodland and its sheltered water have since become a haven for migratory birds, notably a large colony of egrets in the winter.

The Martins have deliberately encouraged vegetation to veil the old defence walls on the point; they didn't want their house to project a belligerent warlike impression. The romantic result, the tower proudly holding its head above the trees to be reflected in the glassy calm of its surrounding waters, figures without doubt in all the photo-albums of all the thousands of tourists who take a cruise on the Rance – tourists who are unknowingly following the paths of pioneer Phoenician traders over two millennia before.