August is the month of Celtic celebrations, with the Eisteddfod in Llanrwst, the Fringe in Edinburgh and the Festival Interceltique de Lorient in Brittany all kicking off this week.
Following last year’s hugely successful ‘Year of Wales’ in Lorient, Wales is once more represented by a strong delegation of performers with 10 music acts, an exhibition of photography... and a statue of Dewi Sant, aka Saint David.
As local French press (Breizh Info; Le Télégramme; and Ouest France) reports, the patron saint of Wales is the star of the second edition of « La Traversée des Géants » (The Giants' Crossing). Organised by the Valley of the Saints association, the project involves sculpting a Celtic saint in a different Celtic country each year, and getting the statue across the sea on a boat all the way down to Brittany.
The crossings are a symbolic celebration of those saints who sailed the sea to reach Armorica – the name given in ancient times to the part of Gaul between the Seine and the Loire that includes the Brittany peninsula – between the fourth and fifth centuries.
Last Thursday (1st August), the statue of Saint David reached Lorient where it will stay as part of the Festival Interceltique until Sunday (10th August), before joining the Valley of the Saints in Carnoët for the Kan Ar Vein (singing of the stones) festivities.
The statue was sculpted by Paul B. Kincaid in a block of Granite from Cornwall – where Saint David built several monasteries. It will be erected on a block of Blue Stone extracted from the Preseli hills in Wales, which also served to build parts of Stonehenge.