Concasseur à galets

The Prat-Ar-C'hastel pebble extraction and crushing site. During the Second World War, Germany occupied France and set about building the Atlantic Wall. Thousands of bunkers were built along the west coast of Europe to repel any Allied attack from England. Building these bunkers required a lot of gravel, among other things. The Ero vili, an immense 10 km long stretch of pebbles between La Torche and Penhors, offered the Germans an abundant resource. At the end of 1941, the occupying forces set up a large pebble mining site at Prat-Ar-C'hastel, served by a railway line to Pont l'Abbé. Sheltered by a monumental unloading quay 8 m high and 200 m long, the site's tracks, crusher building, silos and various barracks were laid out. Between 350 and 400 workers were employed from June 1942. On the seafront, a bulldozer pushed the pebbles towards a mechanical shovel that loaded wagons. Pulled by a small locomotive, the convoys made their way up a long ramp to the quay. Their contents are then tipped into hoppers to sort the pebbles: the smallest fall directly into the gondola wagons waiting at the foot of the platform; the others, unusable as they are, will later be crushed and stored in silos. 4 to 6 trains a day left for Pont-l'Abbé, then on to Quimper station, where they were redistributed to the various sites in Brittany where the Atlantic Wall was being built. On 4 August 1944, the Germans abandoned the site. In two years, the Ero vili will have lost 400,000 m³ of pebbles, or around 1 million tonnes. At the end of the war, reduced from 50 m to less than 30 m in width at certain points and seriously weakened, the pebble beach continued to be mined by French companies. In February 1966, the Ero vili broke up and the sea invaded the cultivated land, creating a new amphibious landscape. In 1968, water extraction was finally banned along the entire coastline. But since then, other breaches and active marine erosion have continued to batter the fragile Bigouden shoreline. Text by Yvan Marzin, Jacques Morvan and Alain le Berre.