City
Condate
Rennes
Listen to the story
Condate sits on the map at a meeting of roads, a junction where routes from the Loire valley and Normandy converged on the town that is now Rennes in Brittany. The name is Celtic and means much the same as the Latin confluentes, 'where rivers meet', and indeed the town grew up where the Ille joins the Vilaine. The geographer Ptolemy mistakenly placed it on the Loire, where another Condate lay. The town was the seat of the Redones tribe, whose name slowly replaced the old one and became Rennes. In 1890, seventeen Roman milestones were found built into its city wall, two dated to AD 237.