A couple on the pier of the Île-de-Batz ferry with the seaside town of Roscoff and its lighthouse Phare de Roscoff in the background, Brittany, France
Some background information:
With its approximately 3,500 residents, the little port town of Roscoff is located in the northeastern corner of the French department of Finistère. The department itself lies in Brittany and represents the northwesternmost part of France. Roscoff is renowned because of its picturesque architecture, for which it is labelled "petite cité de caractère de Bretagne" (in English: "small town of Breton character") since 2009.
Since the early 1970s, Roscoff has been developed as a deep water port. Today, the ferry operator Brittany Ferries links the town with both Plymouth in the United Kingdom and Cork in Ireland. Opposite to Roscoff lies the Île de Batz, a small inhabited offshore island that can be reached by launch from the Île de Batz ferry pier in a mere 15 minutes.
However, Roscoff is also famous for its onions. The onions, which grow here since the 17th century, are not only celebrated for their rosé colour, but also for their unique mild and sweetish flavour as well as their high vitamin C content. These onions were imported by overseas travellers and only grow in certain soils around Roscoff. Hence, they are not found in many places beyond that area.
The onions from Roscoff became famous thanks to the so-called Onion Johnnies, who travelled from Roscoff in the 1800s to sell their produce further afield, notably in England. These men travelling the country on bikes, wearing strings of onions and dressed in their Breton striped tops are the source of our stereotype of the bike-riding French man. Nowadays, these onions have been recognised with an AOC approved label, acknowledging the longstanding know-how behind their production, which yields about 1,500 tons per year. Once a common sight, the Onion Johnnies have declined since the 1950s to only a few. But with renewed interest in small-scale agriculture, their numbers have recently made a recovery.
Excavations have proven that the area of Roscoff was already inhabited in the Bronze Age. Around 100 BC, the Celts founded the colony of Vorganium, whereby Roscoff became one of its harbours. Several artefacts from this time were brought to light, among them the figure of a child with a bird. In 510, Paul Aurélien, also known as Saint Paul de Léon, went ashore at the coast near Roscoff and founded an abbey on the offshore island Île-de-Batz, right opposite of Roscoff.
In 857, the Normans settled on the Île-de-Batz, while they were plundering the whole region concurrently. The recurring mistreatments and plunderings of the Normans caused the monks of the abbey to transfer the relics of Saint Paul to the abbey of Fleury, where they were safe. In the periods that followed, the settlement of Roscoff was repeatedly plundered, destroyed, depopulated and always rebuilt. But by all these upheavals, two main centres emerged: the harbour and the church.
In the Middle Ages, the nearby harbour of Pempoul silted up. That’s why from then on many trading ships were forced to moor in the harbour of Roscoff. To secure the harbour, a fortress had to be built, the Fort de Bloscon. But in 1363, during the War of the Breton Succession, the fortress was captured by English troops. Between 1374 and 1387, Roscoff’s harbour was burnt several times by Richard Fitzalan, the English governor of the city of Brest.
In 1403, the day of reckoning had come: 1,200 soldiers in 30 ships under the command of Jean de Penhoët went off to the sea to defeat the English fleet at the Pointe Saint-Mathieu. Despite the Bretons were outnumbered by far, they celebrated a total victory while capturing 40 English ships. Just one year later, the Bretons even occupied, plundered and burnt the English harbour town of Plymouth.
In 1500, a new commune of Roscoff was built, just 700 metres north of the old Roscoff. This move was reasonable because there were several wells at the new location, which made it easier to supply the ships with drinking water. In the first half of the 16th century, Roscoff’s harbour saw a boost, mainly because of the thriving export of wheat from the interior, the import of flax seed and the export of linen that was also produced in the surrounding area.
Some of the the commune’s accumulated funds were poured into Roscoff’s main church Notre-Dame de Croaz Vaz, which was erected between 1522 and 1545. In August 1548, the town bid Mary Stuart welcome, the soon-to-be Queen of Scotland. Although she was only five years old at that time, she arrived in France to become betrothed to the French dauphin Francis II, whom she married ten years later. By the way, the house where she stayed, still exists today.
In the following decades, recurring outbreaks of the plague took a heavy toll on human lives. At the beginning of the 17th century, Roscoff became one of the frist French harbour towns whose fishermen sailed to the coastline of Newfoundland to fish for cod. Unlike the rest of France, Brittany was exempt from paying a tax on salt and hence, salt to cure the cod was very cheap there. But in the second half of the 17th century, Roscoff was in decline – for one thing because of the new strict tax policy of the French King Louis XIV and for another thing because cotton began to supersede linen in the textile industry.
The town had to reinvent itself. For the next two centuries, buccaneering and smuggling became Roscoff’s profitable main lines of business and the commune evolved into some kind of a pirate’s nest. At the end of the 17th century, the French military engineer and architect Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban began to convert Fort de Bloscon into a modern fortress with a battery of 13 guns. It’s an afterwit of history that this modern fortress did not only help to protect Roscoff’s trade and fishing fleets, but also its fleet of buccaneers.
In the 19th century, while smuggling and buccaneering became unprofitable, the culitvation of vegetables in the Roscoff area started to thrive. The fruitful growing of potatoes, cauliflower, artichokes, asparagus, garlic and onions was the reason why the area was soon called "the garden of Brittany". In particular, the rosé onions that were originally imported from Portugal in the 16th century, became a success. For more about these onions, see above.
In 1877, the harbour was equipped with a jetty, which also serves as the pier of the Île-de-Batz ferry today. In 1912, the construction of a new harbour began, which was finished in 1932. In 1934, the lighthouse Phare de Roscoff was built. In 1943, parts of the Fort de Bloscon were destroyed by the German occupiers because they were a stumbling block to the extension of the Atlantic Wall. And in 1969, the long footbridge was built, which allows the approach to the Île-de-Batz ferry even at low tide.
Nowadays, Roscoff is not only known for its beautiful old townscape and the onions, but also for its ferry port that connects Brittany with the United Kingdom and Ireland. By the way, the ferries from Roscoff to Cork are cheaper than those from Cherbourg in Normandy to Rosslare. So if you come from mainland Europe and plan to visit the Republic of Ireland by car, the Roscoff ferry could be an alternative worth considering.