Jane

It’s quite close the the road, in the grounds of the restaurant de la Mont de Cordes (which has a very nice looking menu) where we asked for directions.

It was just 30 ms away from the eatery, cut into the top of small rocky rise. Bounias was even bigger than Castelets! The portal was arched at the same angle as the interior walls. The interior height is about 9 feet tall – imagine that 9 feet deep and rock cut! – and I paced it back for 14 long strides. An astonishing place! So HUGE and so hidden! There are no signs to it at all.

We had to trespass to get to it by squeezing under a barbed wire fence. We had anticipated asking at a farmhouse but huge locked metal gates – padlocked and topped with more barbed wire indicated that visitors should fuck right off. Nervously, aware of farmers with short tempers and shotguns, we sought out a path through the low, spiky bushes to the top of the hillock where the map showed the monument is. We found it and it’s quite trashed. This one was not rock cut, which might account for the fact that I’d read somewhere it was called the dolmen de Coutignargues, rather than hypogee.

A deep pit had been dug and lined with drystone walling, which today only survives in places. Some large stones, perhaps capstones or portal stones, lay haphazardly here and there.

Delighted to have found it despite its condition we decided not to hang around. As we descended our trespassing became all too real...

La Crau is a flat plain to the east of Arles, a landscape much beloved of Vincent van Gogh: rich farmland criss-crossed by canals, farmtracks and a railway line. To the north east are the Alpilles, a chain of limestone mountains, rich in bauxite. The first mountain is the Mont de Cordes which rises solitary from the plain and was once an island, and it’s overlooked by another limestone ridge of Montmajour, on which was built a huge ugly fortress of an abbey, which dominates the view. The area is not only significant for me from a Vincent van Gogh point of view, but also because it holds a number of important, secret, prehistoric sites. As we were to discover many of these were ‘acces interdit’.

There are five monuments in the so-called Arles-Fontvieille group (because they lie beteen Arles and Fontvieille): the grotte des Fees on the Mont de Cordes, the grotte de Bounias, the grotte de la source, the dolmen de Coutignargues and the grotte du Castelets. They are variously referred to as grottes, hypogees or dolmens in the various literature I can find (which isn’t much).

However, in what literature I can find, this seems to be a very important group of monuments which has been largely forgotten.

Glyn Daniel calls them ‘among the largest and most impressive chamber tombs in France’ which have yielded grave goods of ‘a rich a very important character’.

It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when you’re faced with it! We’d seen a picture of it printed on the label of a bottle of beer the night before and been mightily amused. The reality of it is that it’s quite small – about 5’3”. Though how much the silly christians removed from its original size to fashion it into this bizarre cross is impossible to tell.

We set out early to find the allee couverte du Bois-Couturier near Guiry-en-Vexin. They have maps to show you how to find it at the prehistory museum in Guiry. You have to walk about 20 minutes through a forest, on reasonably good clearly marked paths, to find it. But when you have you’ll love it!

It was rediscovered in 1915 and excavated until 1919: 200 skeletons found as well as polished stone axes, tools and ceramic shards. It’s 8 ms long and 2 ms wide – I thought the proportions seemed quite odd compared with many allee couvertes we’d seen. Essentially it’s a sunken box entirely lined with drystone walling and covered with 4 capstones.

The most astonishing thing about it is the round and lovely porthole in the portal stone – quite perfect! I crawled through it and into the tomb. I sat inside to consider that that the round blocking stone ‘door’ was discovered during excavation, and in superb condition. It now lives in the nearby prehistory museum. It looks like a great saucepan lid, complete with handle.

This is a ‘Hollywood’ site by any standards.

La Pierre Turquaise is a big league A-list ‘Hollywood’ megalithic site! Nestled into mature oak forest, and with acorns raining down all around us, we sat drinking tea from our flasks and smoking a small cigar to help us relax and admire this lovely place. In 1842 it was nearly broken up to help pave Paris, would you believe and in 1985 it suffered a horrific explosive attack which badly damaged it. One of the stones was sheared off and the top piece lies near the allee couverte.

It’s 10.6 ms long and nearly 2 ms wide and despite the 1985 attack still has 2 mighty capstones. Its calm woodland setting reminded us of some of the hunebedden in NL. Hard hats required though, to protect yourself from all those falling acorns. That, or bring a piglet!

Just a few fields away from La Pierre Plate is the allee couverte de Blanc Val, which has lost all its capstones and now lies in a scrubby patch of thyme and weeds at the edge of a field near Presles.

Blanc Val has a complete set of internal orthostats lining what is essentially a stone box. At one end, the bottom half of the portal stone is still visible, with the semicircle of what was once a porthole entrance. Blanc Val is not a thrilling monument to see, but the fact that it’s still here and that traces of cement on it shows that someone recently gave a toss about it is good enough for me.

You can drive quite close on a dirt track on the edge of the woodland and take a path in. It’s quite near a ‘Poney-Club’. I don’t remember a signpost but this grid ref is correct.

It lies in the thick woodland of the Foret Domenial L’Isle Adam, and is a sunken length of megalithic drystone walling between orthostats, still bearing the weight of four capstones. At the portal end, a carved stone has a kennel hole in it which presumably once had a blocking stone. All round the allee couverte, which is fenced for protection, wild strawberry plants formed a carpet underfoot. A very nice monument.

In The Megalithic European, Julian pays little more than a double page spread of lip-service to the long, glorious island of Langeland off the southern coast of Fyn in Denmark, almost certainly due to lack of space in the book and time in the field.

The thing that doesn’t come over in Julian’s commentary is the sheer variety, intensity and close proximity of monument after monument in this small finger of land. It took us two days to do it justice.

The bridges to get there are mercifully toll-free and the rolling countryside on the island is more enchanting even than the rest of Denmark. Langeland is home to scores of bird species and hares and deer abound. The main town on the island is Rudkøbing which felt very strongly like a far less bleak Kirkwall.

It was Moth’s birthday and while we were waiting for our friends to join us for some lunch, we quickly zipped out to see Bjerrebygaard dolmen.

We arrived in blazing sunshine and galloped over the muddy field to reach the stunning monument, cluster of large stones, dolmens with giant capstones and six monster, gnarled ‘pantomime’ oak trees sticking out of a large mound. Very dramatic.

We spent some time enjoying it until the sky in the northwest darkened suddenly and a wall of weather closed in. We made it back to the car just in time as a full-on blizzard of hailstones pelted down.

Its pretty remote up here on the beautiful Djursland peninsula, just north west of Århus, but quite gorgeous. It’s the most beautiful part of Denmark I had yet seen. I wanted to see Poskær Stenhus – surely the most picturesque place in TME!

As we arrived the sun came out unbroken and I scampered about the monument like a happy bunny. Moth climbed the Tinghulen to get some height some photos and I, after speaking to a woman tending her horses (who, with the horse she currently tended had once lived in Lambourn) sat and found the view where the light was just right for me to paint.

Poskær Stenhus is essentially the skeleton of a monument exactly like Groenhøj – gorgeous pink kerbstones, bit of a passage, nice chamber complete with capstone, bob’s yer uncle. But the setting here is so very fabbie.

Rolling fields and hills, great views, green pasture, heathy bits – oooh! And the nicest thing it’s that somehow its all on a human scale. Nothing here is grand or majestic or mighty. It’s all rather comfortable and nice. I like that.

It should be noted that at Poskær Stenhus visitors will find excellent toilets, so for once, ladies, you don’t need to pee in the open and risk mooning as passers-by.

I even managed to make a sketch here. Happy Jane.

Groenhøj chambered tomb, near Horsens, is a perfect pincushion of a monument, not unlike the Great Cairn on Porth Hellick Down, Scilly, but bigger.

It has a continuous ring of handsome kerbstones and a good high grassy mound. Like so many of the monuments in Denmark, the stones are lovely sparkly pink and grey. It has a very narrow corridor which I probably could have wriggled through to reach the chamber but as it was wet underhoof and I was wearing my only clean pair of jeans so I didn’t bother. At its 1940 excavation, thousands of pottery sherds were unearthed here, the breaking of which was some kind of ritual associated with the use of the mound.

Today, under blue skies with big fluffy clouds and chaffinches darting around in the trees Groenhøj looked very ‘hygge’ (Danish for cosy).

We went to seek out what Dyer describes as: ‘a fine round dolmen with a central burial chamber and a ring of kerbstones’, the Baronens Høj. He should have just said: ‘it’s f*cking ace, Jane!‘

The setting, the construction, the character and the fact that the sun came out while we were there lifted my heart! What a beautiful place. It perches like a little crown 25 feet above the sea in a clearing which it shares with an old farmhouse.

It reminded me of Innisidgen on Scilly which ‘feels’ the same. Its immediate neighbour, the old farmhouse was that very distinctive shade of Danish yellow and its thatch was thickly covered in moss. When the sun came out it glowed green and bright – it felt like it was the first time I’d seen Denmark in colour. That was it. Time to get the paints out. At bloody last!