The granite square of Locronan

Locronan is a single square and a handful of streets, twenty minutes north of Quimper, and it made its money on sailcloth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The merchants built in granite, the trade collapsed, and nothing was rebuilt afterwards — which is why the Place de l'Église is an almost unaltered Renaissance square: heavy grey houses with dormer windows and stone mullions, a well in the middle, and the fifteenth-century church of Saint-Ronan closing one side.

The detail that matters for photography is invisible until you notice it is missing. The overhead cables were put underground decades ago, and there are no shopfront signs at street level of the usual kind, so there is nothing modern in the frame at any angle. Film and television crews have used the village for exactly that reason for fifty years.

Granite is dark and it drinks light, so this is a place that works better under bright overcast or in the first hour than under hard midday sun, which turns the square into blocked shadow and blown sky. Early morning also solves the crowd: Locronan is on every coach itinerary in Finistère and by mid-morning in summer the square is full.

The streets running downhill from the square — Rue Moal in particular — give the same stone with fewer people, and the chapel and the view over the Bay of Douarnenez are a ten-minute walk up the hill behind. Parking is outside the village and paid in season, and the square itself is pedestrian.