Dinan

Why go

Dinan is the Brittany people picture before they get there: overhanging timber houses, granite churches, a castle keep and a ring of walls you can still walk. But the real reason to come is the slope. The town sits high above the Rance, and the rue du Jerzual and rue du Petit-Fort tumble down to a sleepy riverside port, where boats moor under a medieval bridge. Spend the day climbing up and down, then eat crêpes like a local.

History

Dinan grew on a spur seventy-five metres above the Rance, at a point where the river could be crossed on the way between Normandy and northern Brittany. In 1064 the Normans of William the Bastard, the future Conqueror, besieged its castle mound; the scene appears on the Bayeux Tapestry. In 1283 Duke John I of Brittany bought half the town, and the ring of walls that still encircles it dates from this period, with a wall-walk intact for some 2,600 metres.

During the War of the Breton Succession, in 1357, Bertrand du Guesclin and his brother Olivier held the town against English troops and the partisans of John of Montfort. Tradition has Du Guesclin defeating the English knight Thomas of Canterbury in single combat. When Duke John IV finally took Dinan in 1364, he built the great keep now known as the Duchess Anne tower. Du Guesclin, later Constable of France, is remembered here above all: a cenotaph holding his heart stands in the basilica of Saint-Sauveur.

The town’s wealth came from its markets and its river port, which controlled the waterway down the Rance to Saint-Malo; in the eighteenth century weavers settled here in numbers, making sailcloth that went downriver to the shipyards of Saint-Malo. In 1598, at the end of the Wars of Religion, Dinan sided with Henri IV against its governor, the Duke of Mercœur, and its walls slowly lost their military use.

The nineteenth century turned Dinan around. A road viaduct over the valley opened in 1852 and the railway arrived in 1879, and the old port faded as the town became a resort much loved by the British, a few of whom painted it. Today its restored timber houses and its Fête des Remparts, a medieval festival held every other summer, keep it busy without spoiling it.