Everywhere in Brittany you come across large boulders, either individually or in groups. Signposts often bear the names ‘dolmen’, ‘menhir’ and ‘megalith’. I know the menhirs of Carnac, but all this made me curious. So I started researching for information.
First of all, there are differences not only in terminology. Dolmen is the traditional term for a burial chamber made of stone, usually with a monumental cover slab, which has often disappeared due to erosion or human activity. Cairns are larger burial sites for communal burials. Menhir (men=stone, hir=large) is an erected stone stele. Megalith (megas=large, lithos=stone) is a monument consisting of one or more monumental stones. Dolmens and menhirs are different types of megalithic architecture.
Researchers have since discovered that these huge stones were erected around 5000 BC to build gigantic burial sites for the time. More than 6000 such monuments have been found in Brittany. To this day, scientists have not been able to find out why people suddenly started erecting huge stone structures. In any case, these structures provide information about the high technical level of Neolithic man.
Carnac is just round the corner from us. So we took a look at the rows of stones, which were unfortunately fenced off. We went to the formations in Ménec and Kermario because I had read that Kermario was not fenced off, which was not true. A sign explicitly states that this is the only way to protect the site.
The 3 rows of stones are kilometres long, consist of 2800 stones and each end with a stone oval. However, we had imagined the boulders to be larger, and there were only a few of them in Kermario. There are many attempts at interpretation, e.g. a kind of sacred landscape design, but the true meaning of the rows of stones is still not clear. My theory is that they were counting something, very elaborately of course. My husband thought that the aliens had built a landing strip for their UFOs.
The menhirs, near which pagan rituals were held, were a thorn in the side of the Catholic Church. Without further ado, they converted them into Christian shrines by placing chiselled crosses on the stones.
Oh, by the way, it probably has nothing to do with Obelix 😉 At the time of Asterix and Obelix around 50 BC, the megalithic culture had already disappeared.
Here are some pictures:
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