Brocéliande Forest

A forest named by literature

Brocéliande appears in twelfth-century Arthurian romance as a place of wonders, and medieval writers put Merlin's end, Morgan le Fay's valley, and the storm-raising fountain of Barenton inside it. Whether a specific forest was meant is not settled.

The identification with Paimpont, in Ille-et-Vilaine, goes back to the thirteenth century, when local people were calling the forest Brocélien or Brec'Helean. That is old enough to be part of the tradition rather than a tourist-board decision, which is the usual accusation.

The sites, and what they are

Merlin's Tomb is a Neolithic gallery grave: three large stone slabs, thousands of years older than any Arthurian text, identified as Merlin's prison by nineteenth-century antiquarians. Visitors leave notes and flowers in the gaps between the stones.

The Fontaine de Barenton is a spring with a slab beside it, and the legend holds that spilling water from the spring onto the slab brings on a storm. The Val sans Retour is the valley where Morgan is said to have held knights who had been unfaithful.

None of this is archaeology. All of it is a literary geography laid over real ground across eight centuries, and the ground came first.

The Golden Tree

In 1990, a fire destroyed more than 400 hectares of heath and woodland in and around the Val sans Retour. The following year the sculptor François Davin installed L'Arbre d'Or in the burned ground: a chestnut covered in gold leaf, standing inside a ring of five trunks left black.

It was made as a memorial to the forest rather than to anyone in it. It is now the most photographed object in Brocéliande, and the burnt trunks around it are the point.

The forest is open and free to walk, and the village of Paimpont is the natural base, with an abbey, a tourist office that hands out the site maps, and parking. The Château de Comper on the far side houses the Centre de l'Imaginaire Arthurien, which is ticketed and is the best single introduction to the literary history.

The legendary sites are spread across the forest and are not walkable as one circuit, so a car is close to essential. Merlin's Tomb and the Fontaine de Barenton have small parking areas and short walks in; the Val sans Retour and the Golden Tree are a longer walk from the Tréhorenteuc side.

Much of the forest is privately owned working woodland with hunting in season. It is best practice to stay on marked paths, and the Barenton spring sits on private land reached by public right of way rather than in a park.