Terps, borgs and the pink granite coast: Bollards, birds and barbary

On another fine day we found a boat to take us out to the Sept Isles, off Perros Guirrec, a bird watcher's paradise.

Our attention was first drawn to the knitted bollards on the dock as we headed towards the Gare Maritime to buy tickets. The bollards had been covered in long cylinders of beautifully knitted 'jackets' -- all in a bright and cheerful patchwork of different colours, textures and patterns.

This knitting graffiti, we soon discovered, was a bit of 'yarn bombing' by followers of the Knitta Please movement. Knitta Please was started in 2005 by an American whose pseudonym was PolyCottN, who teamed up with like-minded others: AKrylik, SonOfaStitch and PKnitty, knitting up a street art storm: giving signposts, lampposts, fire hydrants and other urban targets knitted graffiti kit, in order to beautify public spaces.

Knitta Please spread quickly with internet publicity finding keen followers in Australia, Japan, South Africa and Scandinavia, and now, a member has decorated this corner of the world in Brittany: on the docks of the port of Perros Guirrec.

We head off to board the boat that was to take us tripping around the Sept Isles, a group of tiny islands and reefs which form a small archipelago not far out to sea. Since 1912 these islands have been protected as a special habitat for migratory and mating birds.

The first island we viewed was the Isle Rouzic where Northern Gannets breed. This is the only place in France where they do breed. At any one time 20,000 pairs of mating gannets can be seen on this rocky crest and from a distance its top appears thick with a covering that looks like white snow. The white is all gannet nests. These are so precisely, so mathematically, spaced at such an acceptable social distance apart that you would think they had taken a tape measure before setting up each nest. Gannets, we learned, are incredibly faithful and nest year after year with the same partner, often finding the same nesting space this year as last.

The hunter-gatherers amongst them whizzed past our boat with rockets on their feet, small spherical flashes of black and white bombs diving beak first into the sea for their evening meal. Down six metres and up with a catch.

Near another island we came across a tiny colony of puffins floating on the sea. Some 120 couples of puffins are here at the height of the season, but they usually head south about now so this was an opportune sighting. Lucky to see any at all, in truth, as until 1912 puffins were slaughtered in this part of the world, but, thankfully, the League for the Protection of Birds which runs these boat tours and looks out for these islands, put paid to that.

We first saw puffins in Newfoundland years ago, and then, as now, they appeared as funny little fat bundles of black and white feathers with snappy bright flashes of orange, yellow and blue on their beaks, that, together with their movements, make them appear to be playing 'the clown' with other birds about. So I tend to think 'sea clown' whenever I see a puffin now.

We paused to watch a couple of lone grey seals lounging on rocks. One rested on his side on a jagged tip of rock sticking out of the sea. As we watched he lazily twisted over and around, completing his evening exercise regime, preening, as he placidly allowed us to take our many photos.

Further on, past guillemots and gulls we came to the forbidding Isle aux Moines. This is called the Monks Island because, in the fifteenth century monks from a strict order of observance chose to live here. Their mission in doing so was to find a place on earth to live where their living conditions were so hard that they might earn indulgences that would grant them a better place once they reached heaven.

I remember this thesis from primary school. I remember every Catholic nun and priest I ever knew, but particularly the fire and brimstone missionaries who were sent to us from Africa, attempted to imbue, or indoctrinate, us with exactly this philosophy. I remember asking wasn't everywhere in Heaven perfect? Why would you need to earn a better place? So, I learned early in primary school, that there are rotten places to go in Heaven, too: places that people on earth worked really hard to avoid ending up in. The message didn't quite work with me.

It didn't quite work with the monks either. They came. It was cold. It was wet. It was way too hard out on these wind-lashed rocks. Added to which they were terrible sailors. So many shipwrecks did they have coming to and from the island that one day they simply chose not to return.

In their stead came pirates. Then a few centuries later some hemp smugglers. Neither of whom stayed too long either. A lighthouse was built in the nineteenth century, and bombed in the twentieth. And though rebuilt it now stands alone and untenanted.

The island has been left for the birds, who are entirely happy here. And that seems to me the way nature wants it to be. For the birds.