Ty ar Chorriket is a prehistoric burial chamber in Brittany, constructed in the arc boutee style, like a house of cards. There are only five of these still known to exist in France. This one's the best (I think!)
Giant menhirs and a couple of lovely dolmens: a short film
To the north and west of Brest in Brittany, at the most westerly tip of France, can be found some of the tallest menhirs still standing in Europe. We visited some of the these giant tapering stones in October 2009 and here's a three minute film wot I made.
The Penmarch peninsula, on the very far bottom left of the sticky-out bit of Brittany, is exceptionally rich in prehistoric monuments, perhaps only second to the Carnac area in their frequency and variety.
We tried to use only our road maps, whatever road signs we stumbled across and a 1984 edition of Burl's 'Megalithic Brittany' to find our way around. But they weren't good enough. There is so much here you need a really good guide if you can one. We eventually found a copy of 'La Bretagne des Megaliths', by Pierre-Roland Giot, published by Editions OUEST-FRANCE (Itineraires de Decouvertes), (ISBN 978-2-7373-4236-3) in a supermarket the day before we came home. Too late to help us, but we bought it anyway. It's in French, but as a complete gazetteer it'll be enough in combination with the blue maps to get you around so you don't miss stuff.
In the fields by a bucolic lane near Plomeur, the Kerugou dolmen is actually a dinky T-shaped passage grave with two chambers at the far end of the passage. Its still got one capstone up which looks at first sight like two because of the way it has been restored. The whole monument stands proud; the lane passing it is at a lower level than the field its in so as you approach it looks much bigger than it actually is.
I noticed a strange smooth round cylindrical stone right next the monument lying on its side. It was in the unmistakeable shape of a giant penis. None of the books or info I can find about this site mentions it at all. Very weird.
It's in a very dramatic setting, right up on a little headland, sticking out between two wide sandy beaches popular with surfers. It's next to a massive concrete structure which was probably some kind of war emplacement. As well as a central passage it's got five chambers; they're a bit difficult to 'read' as the monument is in some state of disrepair, but it's well worth going to see it for it's gorgeous seaside location alone.
Now clearly 'La Musee Prehistorique' is not in itself a prehistoric monument, but the sheer number of prehistoric monuments which have been saved and re-erected in its grounds make it worthy of inclusion on the website – and not just as a 'facility'.
I'm not going to list them all, because there are so many – cists, menhirs, dolmens, stele, and get this, the complete restoration of an entire allee couverte which was saved from destruction and rebuilt here, stone by stone.
Address:
Musée de la Préhistoire Finistérienne
657 Rue du Musée Préhistorique
Pors Carn
29132 Penmarc'h
There are so many menhirs around Penmarc'h that I was beginning to suffer from menhir-fatigue. I now only wanted to see the biggest or most spectacular in some way. And so we found the Kerscaven menhir.
It's at the far side of a field which is clearly marked 'Private Property' so we didn't venture too close, but even from a distance we could see it was really big – 9 ms tall - and dramatic. It has a wider splaying top, down which run deep ridges formed from weathering. From the side you can see it's actually wedge shaped. Whether it was originally like this, or it is just weathering that has caused this wedge shape is hard to tell.
At Quélarn, near Plobannalec, we found a complex site with all kinds of monuments going on: cists, chambers, and dolmens abound. There are three passage graves, all of which are quite trashed, and it takes some imagination to 'rebuild' them in your mind.
There are zillions of other menhirs and some very sexy dolmens near Plobannalec such as Tronval, Rue Jules Ferry, Kervadol, and Kervignon. But we missed them as we didn't have a good enough map, nor the aforementioned ace bookie by Pierre-Roland Giot. So plentiful are they that most don't have road signs.
I thought we'd have trouble finding the Kerfland alignment.
I think in the end we stumbled across the Kerfland alignment – I know we asked at a farm and an old blokey told us to go left and left again, pointing roughly in the direstion we needed to go. There might have been a sign; anyway, we found them down a path off a narrow lane and they were well worth it.
Among the trees stand 3 tall menhirs about 3 or 4ms tall stand very close together, perhaps on 1 or 2ms apart. Each stone was a broad flat blade, weathered at the top and they were lined up in a row, narrow edge to narrow edge. They reminded me a lot of the stones at Stenness.
Paddling in the marsh at the back of dunes, alongside egrets and herons, the menhir du Lehan stands 6.5ms tall. It would be a pretty ordinary sort of menhir anywhere else around here, but with its feet in the water it looked great.
This handsome beast is six metres tall (although it seems taller) and standing, somehow, among flat bedrock outcrops. We could get right up to it, and today it was glowing warm with sunshine. It's an absolute beauty, really chunky and thick. It feels sooo heavy. How they hell they cut it, moved it and raised it I can't imagine. Nearby on some of the outcrops are cup marks.
This blog by no means charts all the monuments you can see in such a small area. Grab yourself a copy of Pierre-Roland Giot's book and check out the rest for yourself.
When out and about in Brittany I recommend not only Aubrey Burl's 'Megalithic Brittany' (we have the 1984 edition ) but also you must get a copy of Pierre-Roland Giot''s 'La Bretagne des Megaliths' published by Editions OUEST-FRANCE (Itineraires de Decouvertes), (ISBN 978-2-7373-4236-3). It's a complete inventory of all Brittany's prehistoric sites. In French.
If you imagine the far west of Brittany as a trident of peninsulas reaching out into the Atlantic, the middle prong is the Crozon peninsula. Like pretty much the rest of Brittany, it is stuffed full of Neolithic monuments of the highest quality and diversity and with one or two surprises.
We began at the far end, the most western tip of Crozon, early in the morning to see the Lagatjar alignments.
Here 84 bright white quartzy stones of varying shapes are lined up on their parade ground, a sandy heath by the sea. The tallest is 2.5ms, but on average about they're about 1.8ms. The principal alignment is about 200ms long running NE to SW and has two shorter rows running away from it to the west. It feels incomplete (was this once a quadrilateral? Did the lines run further – I bet they did) but no less beautiful or impressive for that.
They don't overwhelm the visitor like the squillions of stones Carnac, instead they invite you to almost be part of them, to line up with them and join in the fun.. The whole shebang is on a human scale and had an ambience of Callanish about it. And with the bright sunshine casting long shadows on the dewy grass it felt very like this monument was something to do with telling the time, the seasons and calendars.
They are worth the trip out as far west as this. Absolute magic.
On a spectacular high rocky, heathy promentary facing west once stood some more alignments at Lostmarch. Now there are very few left, but enough to interest the more anorakky megalith-hunter, including a couple of very large menhirs. The beach to the south was obviously a favourite with surfers, catching the great Atlantic rollers. The whole place reminded me a lot of Rhossili on the Gower.
As we were driving east along the Crozon peninisula, close to the village of Telgruc sur mer, I noticed a 'dolmen' marked on the map and as we approached, we even had the luxury of a road sign. The sign took us to Pen an Run dolmen.
This is a very simple and small dolmen of three stones holding up a capstone. It sits on a small bank at the laneside in the hedgerow on the edge of a pretty hamlet near the main road.
Like at Poulyot we saw the sign but couldn't immediately see it. Moth noticed something lurking 50ms away from the laneside to the right at the edge of a field of tall maize (I thought it was old farm equipment) but he got out to have a closer look. And there it was.
A tight group of uprights leaning inwards like the swords of the three musketeers support a really square and flat capstone, just like a rustic table. It was richly veined with quartzy stripes, which is surely the reason why this stone was selected for this purpose.
There is another dolmen at St Nic, but (grrr!) we didn't know, so we missed it.
On the way to Douarnenez, where we intended to stop and find a 'tabac' with a telly on so we could watch the Singapore Grand Prix, we took a short detour to see the menhir at Ste Barbe.
Now isolated on a lonely crossroads (it stands in the middle of the crossroads) this menhir of about 2.5ms tall is a rounded pillar. It is probably quite different from its original form, and felt very much to us as if it had been tinkered with, rounded and sculpted into a more innocuous stele than a heathen menhir of the 'old' religion. That's happened a lot to many stones in Brittany.
After watching Lewis Hamilton win (hurrah) the Singapore GP, it was back to the business of megalithing. Our first pit stop was to see something very unusual indeed near Poullan sur Mer.
The allée couverte of Ty ar Chorriket, near the hamlet of Lesconil, is built in a very unusual style of which only half a dozen or so examples are known. This 'arc boutée' style involves two rows of slabs leaned in towards each other to form a tent-like structure or house of cards, perhaps in the way that Ray Mears might build a forest bivouac.
Six or seven large triangular(ish) slabs down each side lean in to form a dramatic passage 12ms long. It's even got some of its original kerbstones and enough of its barrow material left to get a really good impression of its spectacular size.
I liked to think that the pointy tops of the stones might have protruded through the top of the barrow. Now how cool would that have been to see?
It's about 12ms long and with five large capstones the largest over 2ms long, and still has plenty of mound, which we liked.
Don't be confused by the interchangability of its name. Many places round here have multiple names, both French and Breton, but also folkloric names. Kerbalanec is the name of the hamlet on the road sign, and in one or two books we've got. Aubrey Burl in his 1984 edition of 'Megalithic Brittany' calls it Kerbanalec, as does the blokey on the Megalithes Breton website: http://megalithes-breton.fr
A short drive south would take us to the megalithic wonderland of the Penmarc'h peninsula. It is perhaps only second to the Carnac area as the place mostly densely peppered with ancient monuments.
What's quite a lot like Cornwall, but with fewer people, nicer cheese, empty roads, better weather and bigger megaliths? Brittany, of course!
The very far west of Brittany, Finistere, literally 'Land's End', is the place to find giants. Specifically, giant menhirs. After a while, any menhir smaller than about four metres tall, which anywhere else in the world would impress you, in Finistere you find yourself thinking 'Pah, what a pathetic tiddler.' Size matters around these parts.
At six and half metres tall with a rounded profile this monster stands proud on a little rise of land surrounded by huge fields, which today are inhabited by a nervous flock of partridges which exploded noisily out of the field next to it.
You can drive right up to it, the lane runs right past it.
Just east of the little town of Porspoder and you enter the land of the giants where around every corner, there seems to be another monster menhir. Take Kerhouezel…
The menhir of Kerhouezel has many names. I've also seen it called Kerdelvas, and in our 1984 edition of 'Megalithic Brittany' Aubrey Burl calls it Kerreneur. Well, whatever it's called it's another six and half metre whopper, very slim with four rounded sides and a gracefully tapering top.
The pair of menhirs at a fork in the road near St Denec are each individually relatively small for round here. One measures 3.2m, and the second 3.1m, but add that up and you have a total befitting of Finsterian menhirs! Small and pointy, they reminded us strongly of The Pipers. There's also a fallen one of a measly 2.7ms, so once this was almost certainly an alignment.
This is a very nice pair of menhirs standing 60ms apart in the same field. One measures 4ms and the second 3.9ms. Slender, finely and evenly shaped all the way to the top, like most of the menhirs here, each one seems to have four distinct sides.
Less than 500ms away from the menhirs Mesdoun, I spotted another 'dolmen'sign at the roadside. After having seen what was beginning to feel like a million menhirs in a matter of minutes (such is their frequency) the sight of a dolmen was too good to miss.There are so many monuments round here that not all, indeed not even 50%, of them are marked on the map, so we got into the habit of reading every road sign for clues. This was the Poulyot dolmen.
But back to the menhirs. We'd deliberately left seeing the biggest until last and now it was time to face the monsters. The biggest pair of all, in fact!
Kergadiou menhirs are a pair: the standing one (or should I say towering?) is 8.75ms tall and an utter beast! Some books say it's the second tallest menhir in Brittany.
Eighty metres away in the same field, its partially fallen twin is no less impressive. Lying like a beached whale at perhaps 25 degrees, like a giant sundial, it is an unbelievable 11ms long - 11ms! It is less of a menhir and more of a runway on an aircraft carrier. It simply invites you to run up its flat surface and stand on the summit from where there's a good 4m drop to the ground.
Oh la la, it's big. Very big. They say the tallest still standing menhir in the world. And I can believe it. It's 9.5ms, for goodness sake! That's 31 feet in old money. And it used to be taller still! A lightning strike a couple of centuries ago knocked 2ms off the top apparently. Quite apart from its sheer dizzying height, it is a curious shape; not even and slender like most of the menhirs, but wider than it is thick.
It has two curious sticky-outy hemispherical lumps carved on either side, each about the size of half a football. Each is at about belly height. I could well imagine superstitious people wanting to increase their fecundity coming to the menhir to rub their abdomens on the lumps in the hope of getting babies. They'd have been better off just having sex…
Habitat: Commonly sighted in fields round Oxfordshire and Wiltshire. Distribution: Widespread; occasional migrations to overwinter in Africa or other hot climes. Characteristics: A tall, blonde, opinionated bird with feisty temper when provoked. Prone to spells of gloom during winter months. Usually sporting dark plumage, except for golden head, can often spotted with sketchbook and brushes near megalithic sites. Feeding habits: Easily tempted with cheese (any variety) or a nice cup of tea. Unfeasibly fond of curry. Behaviour: Unpredictable, approach cautiously. Responds very favourably to flattery. Abhors: slugs, invisible sky gods, Tories, the Daily Mail, bigots, eggs, the cold, walking and timewasting. Adores: a man called Moth, painting, live music, furry creatures, tea administered frequently, hot places, cheese, writing crap poetry, David Attenborough, Ernest Shackleton, Vincent van Gogh and the English language. Want more?: see her website.
Big old rocks I find appealling
Their secrets they are not revealing
Some are chambers, some are tombs
Hidden in valleys and in combes
Some are said to act like clocks
With shadows cast out from their rocks
I like the way they just survive
When I visit, I feel alive
So I chase my rocks around the maps
Round England, Ireland and France, perhaps
But there ain't nothin' that I liked so much
As to see the Hunebedden, dem is Dutch.
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