In France, as in England, and indeed most countries [Stones] are usually connected in the popular belief with fairies or with demons - and in England, with Robin Hood. In France this latter personage is replaced by Gargantua, a name made generally celebrated by the extraordinary romance of Rabelais. A cromlech near the village of Toury, in Britany, is called Gargantua's stone; a not uncommon name for the single stone or menhir is palet de Gargantua (Gargantua's quoit).

A very common name for cromlechs among the peasantry of France is fairies' tables, or devils' tables, and in one or two instances they have obtained the name of Caesar's table; the covered alleys, or more complicated cromlechs, are similarly named fairies; grottos, or fairy rocks. The single stones are sometimes called fairies' or devils' seats.

The prohibition to worship stones occurring so frequently in the earlier Christian ecclesiastical laws and ordinances, relates no doubt to these druidical monuments, and was often the cause of their destruction. Traces of this worship still remain.

In some instances people passed through the druidical monuments for trial, or for purification, or as a mode of defensive charm. It is still a practice among the peasantry at Columbiers, in France, for young girls who want husbands, to climb upon the cromlech called the Pierre-levee, place there a piece of money, and then jump down. At Guerande, with the same object, they despose in the crevices of a Celtic monument bits of rose-coloured wool tied with tinsel. The women of Croisic dance round a menhir. It is the popular belief in Anjou that the fairies, as they decended the mountains spinning by the way, brought down the druidical stones in their aprons, and placed them as they are now found.

In the Cornouaille district of Brittany, where pagan ceremonies still linger in most force, there is a custom which Villemarque believes to be Druidical. In June the youths and maidens above sixteen years of age assemble at some lichen-clad dolmen, the young men wearing green ears of corn in their hats, and the girls having flowers of flax in their bosoms. The flowers are deposited on the dolmen, and from the manner in which they remain or wither the young lovers believe they can divine the constancy of their selected partner. The whole party then dance round the dolmen, and at sunset return to their villages, each young man holding his partner by the tip of the little finger. At whatever time this practice originated, it may be presumed the dolmen was not then considered a sepulchre, as we cannot suppose the youthful population of a district assembled to deposit the offerings of love on a tomb, or to disturb the dwellings of the dead with their joyous revelry.