Megaliths in Brittany '96

The  first megalithic place we went to was at Le Bono in the south of Brittany on the 13th July. There we visited the Rocher tumulus (round barrow).  A tumulus is a stone- and bronze-age burial mound. Within the mound there's a passageway with a crook in it leading to the main burial chamber. In many of these round barrows there are marvellous and mysterious markings in the  rocks, some- times like hand prints, fingerprints, sunbursts and so on.

Le Bono is just up the road from Locmariaquer and Carnac, two of the places with the most megaliths in Brittany. In Locmariaquer there are lots of megaliths, tumuli and dolmens. The dolmen, from the Breton table stone, is the stone structure left when the earth is removed from a tumulus. One of the dolmens we went in, Pierre Plattes, is free for anyone. It's right on the sea shore. They also have there the largest megalith, probably in the world. This is now broken into pieces, but it must have been very impressive when it was whole.

Along the coast from there is Carnac, the most famous of the Breton neolithic sites. This would make my fourth visit there, interestingly enough the last one was in 1986, and the time before that in 1976! Things have changed since I first went there in the seventies. Then, they were not so popular and a few tourists could walk around the site - the Kermanio alignments - at will, touch the stones, and so on. In the interveining years, it has become so popular that the number of tourists made the ground bare and one of the stones even toppled over due to the erosion. So they have had to put a fence around it to stop the great number of people destroying it any further. This doesn't stop you viewing the stones, nor visiting them, if you pay and take a guide. I didn't go in the compound: the alignments are easily visible.

In case you were wondering, I don't think anyone really knows what they were for. They have dated them to the New Stone Age, about 2,500 - 1,500 BCE. The Carnac alignments contain over 2,500 stones, some over 4m (12ft) high and spread over an area up to 100m wide by 4km long. The area contains circles, tombs, and other constructs besides the alignments. I find it all very wonderful.