Site: Lanrivoaré

Name:Lanrivoaré (Lanriware) CISP No:LRVOA
Place:Lanrivoaré (Lanriware) Grid Ref:84.8 2409.1 (FR)   Map
Parish:Lanrivoaré (Lanriware) Stones:1
County:Finistère (Penn-ar-Bed) , France Saint(s):none
Site Type:modern secondary

Site Notes

Davies et al/2000, 119, `The bourg of Lanrivoaré lies in the far north west of Brittany, 9km from the west coast; the bedrock is granite. At 90m above sea level, it has a slightly elevated position in relation to the surrounding landscape; there are several water courses in the immediate neighbourhood of the bourg and the lavoir remains visible, on the eastern side of the road D168. The bourg is situated in land of good agricultural quality, although present land-use is largely pasture; when the 1844 cadastral survey was drawn, there was meadow within the immediate neighbourhood of the houses but plenty of arable land in the surrounding area (ADF 3P Lanrivoaré).

The church and churchyard stand at the north-eastern edge of the bourg, and are focal to neither housing nor road patterns; in 1844 the bourg had the character of a collection of dispersed hamlets rather than a nucleated village. Nothing therefore suggests that it was the centre of a very early parish, although it appears to have achieved parish status by the 13th century (Vallerie/1986, 186). There is good evidence, however, that it was the focus of an early medieval ecclesiastical settlement, since a religious foundation at Lanrivoaré, with its attendant properties, was the subject of a grant to the monastery of Landévennec in the 10th or 11th century, quite probably in the mid-10th (CL no. 39; Davies/1986, 93--94). Clearly, from this text, the foundation was already in existence at the time that it was absorbed by the Landévennec group and the cartulary title (de tribu, i.e. `tref', settlement) also makes it clear that people lived there. The place was very much an outlier of the Landévennec network (see the map at Davies 1986: 89), perhaps suggesting that the properties were valuable and well worth the journey to inspect and to collect returns (they were later transferred to Saint-Matthieu-de-Fine-Terre)'.

References

Stones