Brest and Concarneau, Brittany's far west from the sea

The French call this corner of the country Finistère, the end of the land, and from the sea the name seems exact. The coast of western Brittany is all granite and broken water: long headlands pushing out into the Atlantic, islands and reefs off every point, and deep inlets running inland between wooded slopes. It is a seafaring country, with a language and music of its own, and its two best-known ports could hardly be more different. Brest is a naval city, rebuilt after the war; Concarneau is a fishing port that keeps a walled medieval town on an island in its harbour.

Arriving by sea is the right way to see either. Signs here are in French and Breton, a Celtic language related to Welsh and Cornish, and the region's music, of bagpipes and bombardes, turns up at every festival.

Brest and its roadstead

Brest owes everything to its harbour. The Rade de Brest, the roadstead, is a great sheltered bay of water almost enclosed by land, reached from the open sea through a narrow channel, the Goulet. A fleet could lie in it in safety, and since the seventeenth century, when Cardinal Richelieu chose it as a base for the French navy, it has been one of France's chief naval ports. It still is.

The old city paid heavily for that. In the Second World War Brest was a German submarine base, and in the summer of 1944 it was besieged and almost entirely destroyed in the fighting for the port. What you see now is mostly a post-war city, rebuilt in a plain grid of concrete and stone, and it is honest about it: Brest is a working city rather than a pretty one.

The old things that survived are worth finding. The castle, on its rock above the mouth of the Penfeld river, has defended the harbour since Roman times in one form or another, and now holds a branch of the national maritime museum. Across the river, the Tanguy tower, a stocky medieval keep, has a museum of old Brest with models of the city as it was before the bombing. And at Océanopolis, by the marina, a large aquarium explains the sea life of the Breton coast, the tropics and the poles.

Concarneau and the Ville Close

Concarneau, on the south coast of Finistère, is the opposite case. Its fishing harbour is busy, with trawlers and the fish market on the quays, but in the middle of the harbour, on a small island linked to the town by a short bridge, stands the Ville Close, the enclosed town: a ring of granite walls and towers, rebuilt and strengthened over centuries, with narrow streets, crêperies and little shops inside. You can walk part of the way round its ramparts, with the harbour on one side and the rooftops on the other, and a museum of fishing inside the walls tells the story of the port.

Nearby, along the coast, is Pont-Aven, the little river town where Paul Gauguin and a circle of painters worked in the 1880s, and where the light and the Breton costume of the time found their way into some famous canvases.

Cruises that go there

Ambassador Cruise Line's twelve-night Cultural Gems of the Iberian Peninsula & France sails from Portsmouth in April. Its ports are El Ferrol, Santander and Getxo in Spain, then Le Verdon, Bordeaux, Concarneau, Brest and Cherbourg in France, and Fowey in Cornwall: the only one of these that calls at both Concarneau and Brest.

Ambassador's nine-night Seaside Charms: Brittany, Normandy & Guernsey also sails from Portsmouth in April, with Cherbourg, St Malo, Le Verdon, Lorient, Brest, Fowey and St Peter Port in Guernsey among its ports. Lorient, on the south coast of Brittany, is another port that was rebuilt after the war, and every August it holds the Festival Interceltique, which gathers musicians and dancers from the Celtic nations.

From Belfast, Ambassador's twelve-night Classic French Escapes: Bordeaux, Brest, Cherbourg & Honfleur sails in May, with Brest, Bordeaux, Cherbourg, Honfleur and Liverpool on its itinerary.

On deck, watch for the Goulet on the way into Brest. The channel is narrow, the headlands are close, and the great bay opens out suddenly beyond it. It is the view that made Brest what it is.