Le Rhun is in Brittany.  Brittany is one of the 18 administrative regions of France.  Within each region is a number of Departments, and in Brittany there are four departments.

Each department has a number – originally based alphabetically – and Le Rhun is in Department 29 or Finistère.  Within Finistère, Quimper is the capital, whilst Brest is the most populated city.

The literal translation of Finistère is ‘the end of the land’, and indeed it is true – Finistère is the western-most department of metropolitan France.

Listeners to the Shipping Forecast may recall that there used to be a shipping area called Finisterre which was a 90,000 square mile area of Atlantic Ocean off the North West coast of Spain.  The name caused confusion, not with Brittany’s Finistère but a smaller Spanish meterological area, also called Finisterre and so it was changed in 2002.  Nowadays its new name is FitzRoy who started the Shipping Forecast Service.

At Le Rhun, we also see the name Penn-ar-Bed on signs and official documents – it’s the Breton name for Finistère.