Thursday 26 March 2015

Catching the Train to Erdeven

You may remember that the station at Tours has a series of 18 painted ceramic panels decorating the walls, their purpose being to beautify the station concourse and entice travellers to the destinations portrayed. At present the panels are badly in need of conservation: each panel will cost €8000 to clean, conserve and reattach the tiles to the walls and the fundraising campaign started last year to raise some of this money. In order to publicise the fundraising, last year we started posting photos of the panels.

This panel was one of those which had been removed for restoration in October last year. I was in the station last week, and more of the panels have been removed which hopefully means that the money is in place and the work to restore them is being done.

This panel feels like a bit of a cheat: basically, the way to
get to Erdeven is the same way you get to Belle-Isle en Mer.

Erdeven is in Brittany, and as you can see from their tourism site it is one of the places you can see an awful lot of dolmens and alignments. It would seem from the number of sites in Brittany that the panels depict that it was once much easier to get from Tours to Brittany.


1 comment:

Le Pré de la Forge said...

Simon, I don't know if you've ever see the old tiled railway maps in York or Scarbro'....
but in those days it was MUCH easier to get from A to B by rail...
and probably was much the same in France, etc...
until Mr. Beeching and his European counterparts decided that road transport was the thing...

Tim

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