Urban heritage
Guémené-sur-Scorff / Le Faouët / Gourin
The Pays du Roi Morvan is unique in that it is organised around three larger towns, which were the former county seats before the 2014 reform. These three towns, whose history and organisation are very different, nevertheless illustrate the notion of urban heritage on the scale of small, central Breton towns. They showcase architecture from different periods and public spaces that have evolved differently over the centuries.
Guémené-sur-Scorff, Petite Cité de Caractère ® (Small Town of Character)
The town of Guémené-sur-Scorff bears witness to a prestigious past, marked from the 12th century by the Rohan dynasty until the 18th century. Lord Guégant founded his seigneury, Kemenet Guégant, in 1050. However, by 1120, the fiefdom of Guégant had become part of the newly-founded Viscounty of Rohan. The first wooden castle was the starting point for a long series of transformations over a period of five centuries. In the 16th century, the castle, at its largest extension, covered an area of two hectares.
The town grew around its castle without expanding into the countryside. The bourgeois and merchant town flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries, in contrast to the stately home, which was beginning to show its age. The Rohan-Guémené family's lack of maintenance and interest in the estate combined to foreshadow its doomed fate.
After the French Revolution, the château was used as a quarry, but the standing walls are still majestic and hint at the grandeur of days gone by.
The 20th century was particularly devastating for Guémen's heritage: for the castle, which was three-quarters dismantled in 1927, and for other old buildings, sacrificed on the altar of modernisation.
What remains of the castle has since been enhanced, the ramparts restored and a museum created. A heritage protection and enhancement policy launched some thirty years ago is continuing today, at both municipal and inter-municipal level. As well as the castle, many other heritage features have been saved and enhanced.
The fabric of this medieval town is still clearly visible in the main street. Stone and timber-framed houses from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries line this old "Grand' Rue", which has retained its striped layout. The architectural evolution is clearly visible and bears witness to the town's prosperous past. Surrounded by a dense network of waterways, the town also boasts a rich heritage linked to water, which can be seen in the many wash-houses and fountains that line the streets. For centuries, the presence of the Scorff river has been a key factor in the development of the town's craft industries. In addition to the various mills along its course, tanneries have been in operation since the late Middle Ages.
Le Faouët
The origins of the seigneury go back a long way, perhaps to the 11th century. Sources mention a lord of Le Faouët in the 13th century, but there is very little information on the identity of the first lords of Le Faouët. Like many other towns, Le Faouët grew up around a fortified castle, of which nothing remains today apart from its location. It gave its name to the rue du Château. The church below, which was built in the 16th century as the successor to a primitive 13th-century building, suggests that the first urbanisation took place around these two places of political and spiritual power.
In the early 14th century, the estate came into the hands of the Boutteville family, who played a key role in the town's development. The fortified castle was ruined by the War of Succession, forcing the lordly family to live in their château du Saint, a few kilometres from Le Faouët.
Urbanisation moved westwards and developed around the market square, where the covered market was built at the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century, on the initiative of the Bouttevilles, who were undoubtedly keen on art and architecture; the chapels of Saint-Fiacre and Sainte-Barbe are part of their legacy.
The Place des Halles was originally lined with houses of character. Beautifully decorated 16th and 17th century dormer windows still adorn those that survived the destruction of the 20th century. There are few or no timber-framed houses as in Guémené-sur-Scorff; many of the houses surrounding the square hadawnings on pillars. The last house of this type, in rue du château, disappeared in the second half of the 20th century.
At the south-west corner of the square, the Ursuline convent is a 17th-century building founded by the Dufresnay family, lords of Le Faouët since 1655. The Ursuline order was a congregation of teaching nuns. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Le Faouët provided education for young noble girls and girls from good families, unfortunately excluding the most modest.
The Revolution, followed by the 1905 law separating Church and State, led to the definitive departure of the Ursuline sisters in 1923. The teaching mission was taken over by the Sisters of Jesus of Kermaria in the Sacred Heart School. The large L-shaped building, with its main building and chapel, was reinvested in the 1980s and became the Musée des Peintres du Faouët in 1987.
Gourin
The parish of Gourin has existed since the 12th century. The largest in the diocese of Cornouaille, it was also the capital of the Viscounty of the same name, on which the first lords of Le Faouët probably depended.
No plans prior to the cadastre of 1838 are known of the town's urban development. However, we do know that the town was organised around two main centres: the church and its enclosure to the north and the market square to the south. Unlike Le Faouët, Gourin's centre of activity was more diffuse.
The market halls, demolished at the end of the 19th century, occupied the present-day Place Stenfort. Old houses from the 16th and 18th centuries still surround this square.
Unlike the other two communes, Gourin has had a greater impact on recent history, with a large number of its inhabitants emigrating toNorth America and Canada at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Nicolas Le Grand, a tailor born in Roudouallec in 1852, and two friends were the first to set off for the United States in 1881. Experience proved them right, as they returned home much richer. And so began the great adventure of the Bretons in America. To find out more about this adventure, visit the exhibition "Ces Bretons d'Amérique" (July/August) at Château de Tronjoly.
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Inspirations and great experiences!
