Free trade brings many benefits – including to tourists like you and me. In the early 1970s, Brittany was a distant, neglected corner of France. Alexis Gourvennec was a farmer keen to find new markets. He also had a map, and could see that Plymouth, 100 miles north of the Breton port of Roscoff, was less than half as far as Paris.
The UK and Ireland were set to join the common market (as the European project, then the EEC, was commonly known). He talked to several large shipping companies to try to drum up interest in the route, but all turned him down.
