In the morning, M. Durassier took me on a tour of the major megalithic alignments at Carnac, near the coast. There are four large groups — from west to east, Ménec, Kérabus, Kermario and Kerlescan. In between Kermario and Kerlescan there is a strange quadrilateral assembly of stones, tightly spaced, unlike anything I’ve seen in the U.K., and near it is the largest of the menhirs, an immense phallic stone called “le géant de Mario”. Every stone I’ve seen so far has been the same sort of granite, though most are coated with so much lichen that it’s hard to see the texture. Nothing resembles the bluestone in Wiltshire sites.
The quadrilateral structure and the giant are buried deep in forest, reached by a maze of footpaths so complicated that I got lost trying to return, and emerged on the wrong road, forcing my host to wait patiently while I hitchhiked the long way around. The major alignments end with a massive dolmen, but apart from this one, structures that look funerary are distributed in a rough circular pattern at some distance from the alignments. Solitary menhirs seem to be scattered randomly.
The whole experience is completely unlike visiting megalithic sites in Britain, which are usually in open country. There’s nothing in the U.K. that resembles these vast gridiron arrangements of stones. They defy interpretation by intuition. With circular structures you can easily imagine some kind of function. Many human activities draw us into circles . . . dancing, prayer, politics, trade, feasting, drama. Theories are concocted from many possible choices. But what in hell do you do in a huge grid of parallel stones? Play tag? And what is best done with feats of engineering and construction that would be ambitious even for a modern farming community? Where the menhirs secluded in forest when they were first built? Did farmers let their cows graze among the stones, as they did until very recently? The compounded mysteries leave the visitor without much to say.
My reading in this area has been woefully inadequate. I’ve read shelf-fulls of books and truckloads of papers on British prehistory, but practically nothing on Brittany or France, and this failure must be corrected as soon as I get home. I had naïvely assumed that what I knew of British prehistory could be reproduced in general principles on the Continent. Not so.
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