Welcome to the blog of Melanie McDonald ! I'm a professional artist, my life is divided between my home in Newquay, Cornwall and my renovation project - an 18th Century farm - in North Brittany, France. My inspiration comes from the beautiful beaches, skies and seas of Cornwall, Brittany and Scotland. This is where I share my paintings and photographs, I hope it inspires you.
Brignogan Plages - extraordinary and magical rocks
'There's the Ram and Lamb,' said Billy, pointing at two rocks just beyond the narrows. The water swilled over them.
'I like it,' said Quoyle, 'that the rocks have names. There's one down off Quoyle's Point - '
'Oh, ay, the Comb.'
'That's it, a jagged rock with points sticking up.'
'Twelve points onto that rock. Or used to be. Was named after the old style of brimstone matches. They used to come in combs, all one piece along the bottom, twelve to a comb. You'd break one off. Sulfur stink. They called them stinkers - a comb of stinkers. Quoyle's Point got quite a few known sunkers and rocks. There's the Tea Buns, a whole plateful of little scrapers half a fathom under the water, off to the north of the Comb. Right out the end of the point there's Komatik-Dog. You come on it just right it looks for all the world like a big sled dog settin' on the water, his head up, looking around. They used to say he was waiting for a wreck, that'd he'd come to life and swim out and swallow up the poor drowning people.'
Excerpt from The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
These are photos of some of the rocks on Brignogan Plages in remote northwest Brittany near where I live. Do these extraordinary rock formations have names, I wonder? The story is that this is a wreckers' coast, Breton sailors must have known and named them .... Great pilings of rock upon rock, created by Nature, formed by the forces of water and wind. These strange and excessive rocks are like prehistoric animals or megaliths ....
Tell us your names ....
My name for the rock above is 'La Baleine de Peintre' ....
P.S. The famous English surrealist Eileen Agar, named this rock 'Bum Thumb', when she took this photo in Ploumanach in 1936, (another place in Brittany famous for its rocks).
