Jane
Do you know the way to Champ Vermeil?
This one’s easy to find with its handy roadside sign. Others round here aren’t so simple...
Image credit: Moth Clark
Doesn’t look like much as you approach it, but look out for the biggest olive tree and you’ll have found it
Image credit: Moth Clark
Don’t mistake these capstones for natural limestone outcrops.
Image credit: Moth Clark
I’m sitting in the rock cut entrance. There are seven giant capstones topping the monument behind me.
Image credit: Moth Clark
The grotte is cut into the rocky rise with the trees on top, on the right
Image credit: Moth Clark
The entrance has a lovely carved portal stone
Image credit: Moth Clark
There are rock cut steps leading down into the chamber
Image credit: Moth Clark
It’s a whopper inside. At full stretch (and I’m 5’8” tall) I could only just reach the capstones.
Image credit: Moth Clark
this is the only signposted monument of the Arles Fontvieille group. Look out for this sign at the side of the D17, just east of the Abbey de Montmajour and go down the little path. The hypogee is RIGHT by the road on the right.
Image credit: Moth Clark
The Grotte des Fees is somewhere up there on those rocky, remote, inaccessible slopes.
The rock cut steps, looking out of the entrance
Image credit: Glyn Daniel, 1960
from Glyn Daniel’s 1960 book ‘The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of France‘
Image credit: Glyn Daniel
A human vertebrae, complete with arrowhead sticking into it which was discovered at the hypogee.
Image credit: Moth Clark
diagram from Glyn Daniel’s 1960 book ‘The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of France’.
Image credit: Glyn Daniel
