Megaliths

Brittany is an area of the world which is exceptionally rich in the stone structures which are collectively known as megaliths.
These megaliths fall into various categories, some of which are more familiar than others:

Menhirs: Stones set vertically into the ground (one third below the surface and two thirds above) ranging in height from a few centimetres to several metres.

Dolmens: Also known as stone tables, these typically consist of two vertical stones set in the ground supporting a horizontal stone balanced across them.

Allées Couvertes: These are effectively a series of dolmens placed beside each other to produce a corridor-like space inside.

Cairns and Tumuli: Tumuli are dolmens covered over with earth, sometimes to form a pyramid-like shape; and cairns are composed of stones piled up around dolmen-type openings to create small rooms or chambers in their interior.

Alignments: Alignments consist of a series of menhirs arranged in a line, or in a circle. Sometimes these alignments are complex, consisting of a series of concentric rings, around a stone, or dolmen, or a tumulus; or menhirs arranged in parallel lines.

What Do We Know About the Megaliths?

Beyond the fact that they exist, we know very ­little for certain about the megaliths.
Who built them? How were they built? What were they for? Many people have tried to provide answers to these questions; but before accepting the current explanations it is worth stopping to remember just how difficult it is to see into the past.

For example, we know from written evidence that in Roman times Brittany was a thriving part of the empire, and that Carhaix was a prosperous Roman city complete with paved roads, town houses, baths, law courts, military barracks, a forum, city walls, etc. A visitor to the town today would be hard-pressed to find a single trace of all this activity – even though it was in full swing just sixteen hundred years ago.

Current estimates of the age of the megaliths make them six or seven thousand years old. In five thousand years time, when the Roman remains will be of the same age as the megaliths are now, and if all written records of ancient Rome have been lost, it is unlikely that researchers of that time would be able to piece together the details of life in Roman Brittany – or even to guess that such a thing as the Roman occupation of Brittany had ever occurred.

The same problem faces us today in trying to understand why and how the megaliths were built, and how they fitted into the overall pattern of life at that time. We have a few thousand stones to study, some broken pieces of pottery, some bones and some stone axe heads; logically, any guess that we make about the origin and purpose of the megaliths, based on such scanty evidence, does not have much chance of being correct.

Where are They?

Menhirs and dolmens are scattered all over Brittany; the greatest concentration of cairns and tumuli is around the coast. The better preserved and most striking megaliths are clearly marked on the blue IGN maps, and most communes still have at least one such example. It is also quite common to come across stones in the woods and fields that in all probability were once part of a megalithic structure.

It is estimated that there are still over a thousand standing in the Breton countryside, excluding those that are part of alignments.

Carnac has more such remains than anywhere else – including over two and a half thousand standing stones arranged in a series of complex alignments.

Why the Megaliths Pose a Problem to Historians

Most of us have, in the course of life – whether we did well at school or not – picked up an idea about the history of civilisation: before modern times there were the Middle Ages; before that, the Roman Empire; and before the Romans the Ancient Greeks. The Ancient Greeks owed their culture to Bronze Age heroes remembered in mythology and in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.

These early Greeks were descended from barbarous Celts who migrated across Asia until they reached the Mediterranean and made contact with the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia – and it is from this meeting that modern civilisation has evolved.

One problem with this Mediterranean-oriented view of world history is that it fails to provide a convincing explanation for such striking archaeological remains as Brittany’s megaliths.

If it had been Breton (instead of Roman and Greek) historians who had been responsible for shaping our ideas of history, then it is unlikely that they would have devised a theory that described the inhabitants of this peninsular 6000 years ago as either uncivilised or technologically backward.

At the very least, it would require a high level of social organisation, stability of government, clarity of purpose, and technological know-how to move and position even the remains that have survived to the present time.
The idea that the people who constructed the megaliths were primitive, stone-age people, living in caves and scratching a living from hunting and gathering, does not come from an impartial study of these stones, it is derived from a pre-conceived idea of world history, that took no account of their existence.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that Brittany’s menhirs and dolmens bear a striking resemblance to remains found in other parts of the world – not only in Wales, Ireland, and South-West England, but also in South America, West Africa, India and the Far East, implying the existence of a global culture, not acknowledged in most histories of the world.
Also, although bones and human remains have been found inside many dolmens and tumuli, there is no proof that the main purpose of the megaliths was to act as burial chambers. And even if the dolmens were built as burial chambers, this does not help to provide an explanation for the thousands of stones that have been so carefully arranged around Carnac, for example. The truth is that 6000 years ago (or longer) there were things going on in Brittany that we do not understand and which we cannot explain: a state of affairs which makes historians feel very uncomfortable.

Archaeological Research into the Megaliths

The singularity of Brittany’s megaliths resulted in them receiving an exceptional amount of attention in the early days of archaeological research. With the benefit of hindsight, this is now regarded as being unfortunate – the enthusiastic amateurs who sifted through the soil around the foot of the megaliths in the nineteenth century no doubt missed material that may have been detected by the more sophisticated researchers of modern times, if the sites had been left undisturbed.

Archeologists realised at the outset that they could divine very little from the stones themselves, and therefore turned their attention to searching the ground around them; in the assumption that the people who built the megaliths would have left some debris around and about. Pieces of pottery, axe heads, bones, etc. were indeed found inside or close to most of the megaliths that were investigated and it has been possible to assign a date to these relics: bones, and other organic material can be dated using carbon dating, and artefacts such as pottery and axe heads can be dated by comparing them with similar items found in other sites.

This work has led to approximate dates being assigned to the various megaliths:
Cairns: The stone cairns are believed to date back to around 4,700 BC
Tumuli: The tumuli are believed to be more recent than the cairns – dating back to around 4000 BC
Menhirs and Dolmens: The oldest menhirs and dolmens are believed to be at least as old as the oldest cairns, but it is thought that new menhirs were still being erected up until 2000 BC.
Allées Couvertes: The famous allées couvertes above the Daoulas gorge are believed to date back to 3200 BC and it is thought that structures of this sort were still being built up until around 2000 BC.

It must be borne in mind that these dates are based on highly circumstantial evidence: there is no proof that the people who left these relics in and around the megaliths were the people who actually built them.

Folklore & the Megaliths

Apart from archaeological evidence, the only clue that we have to the purpose and origin of the megaliths comes from the oral traditions of the region: i.e. from folklore passed from one generation to the next over successive centuries.
Over the course of six and a half thousand years which have seen countless wars and several migrations one could not expect this folklore to have been preserved intact, but, on the other hand, in the absence of any other information about the megaliths, it should perhaps be treated with more respect than has so far been the case.

Breton folklore with respect to the megaliths comes in many different forms: healing properties have been attributed to certain stones – in particular pressing one’s chest against (or hugging) a menhir, or sitting on certain dolmens, is believed to restore lost fertility; many dolmens have traditions associated with them that help young women to find a husband; and it is a commonly-held belief that the stones increase the fertility of the soil – crops grow better in a field that contains a menhir, for example, than elsewhere.

It is likely that these traditions have existed for thousands of years and that it is largely due to them that the megaliths have survived intact up to the present time – unlike the Roman buildings which commanded no such respect.

Another branch of folklore provides explanations for the origins of the megaliths. A famous example relates to the Roche-aux-Fées in Ille et Vilaine: ‘The Fairy Queen sent off her fairies to collect suitable stones from a nearby outcrop of granite. The fairies gathered the stones in their aprons and carried them back to the Queen. When she had enough she sent word to those who had not yet returned that the work was finished; and they dropped their stones just wherever they happened to be.’ This explains why the ground between the Roche-aux-Fées and the quarry from which its stones come is littered with huge chunks of granite – from the same quarry.

In many cultures around the world there is a belief that stones were once able to fly; this is reflected in the local belief that on the night of the Winter Solstice the menhirs rise out of the ground, exposing the treasure hidden beneath them, and then fly off to the nearest water source from which they drink. Once their thirst has been quenched they fly back to their resting places and settle back into the ground in exactly the same position as before.

Up until the advent of archaeology, most people outside of Brittany assumed that the megaliths had been built by the Druids – the ancient megaliths fit into the pattern of sacred places which were used by the Celts before the Romans came to Brittany; menhirs, for example may have been regarded as conductors helping to balance the energy of the earth with the energy in the air. However, it now seems clear that the Druids themselves were not responsible for constructing Brittany’s megaliths, nearly all of which pre-date their era by at least 2000 years; and Bretons themselves never regarded them as being anything to do with building the megaliths – which were universally regarded as the homes of the Korrigans.

The biggest threat to the future of the megaliths is the fact that, perhaps for the first time since they were built, they are no longer seen as having any practical use: obviously their original builders, whoever they might have been, had a very clear purpose in mind when they went to the trouble of moving and positioning such huge stones; the Celts who lived in Brittany before and during the Roman times regarded the stones as sacred sites, intrinsic to their religion, and ,in the Christian era, although denigrated by the established Church, the stones retained their mystical appeal and were regarded as a potential source of fertility and healing by the common people.

These beliefs have not survived the upheavals that have taken place in the countryside over the past few decades and this explains why at least a third of Brittany’s megaliths have been uprooted and cast aside over the past hundred years. Where they are being preserved, it is often as a tourist or heritage site rather than as part of everyday life. Anyone who has a menhir or dolmen close to where they live, will, however, know that they still represent one of the most interesting features of the local landscape, and that when one is out walking, it is surprising how much more often one is drawn to visit the local megalith than any other landmark. There is something truly extraordinary about these ancient constructions, which cannot help but make one stop and think about the people who built them, the life they led, and how it compares to the life we lead today. For this reason alone, they deserve to be preserved, and, hopefully, as Brittany emerges from the turmoil caused by the depopulation that has taken place over recent decades, the twenty-first century inhabitants of the region will place the safeguarding of the surviving megaliths towards the top of their list of priorities.

1000 Years of Persecution…
The beliefs attached to the megaliths in common folklore are certainly pre-Christian in origin and are regarded by the Church as being the remnants of a pagan religion. Jealous of their power over their congregations, Breton priests have therefore spent much of the past thousand years trying to dissuade their parishioners from having anything to do with the megaliths and convincing them that the traditional beliefs associated with them are a form of devil worship that will lead to hell.
This explains the confused nature of many Breton fairy stories in which the Devil and the Virgin Mary now feature alongside korrigans, giants and huge serpents.

You Cannot Tell the Age of a Megalith…
People who are not expert in this field often assume that it ought to be a simple matter for modern science to determine the exact age of each specific megalith.
This is not the case and there is, in fact, no known technique that will give even the slightest indication of when a particular stone was quarried, moved, or set in place.
As far as science is concerned, a stone that one sees in a field could have been placed there a hundred years ago, or a hundred thousand years ago. Similarly, it may be possible, by matching the composition of the rocks to determine where a particular stone was quarried, but it is not possible to tell when. Nor is it possible to tell how many times a stone was moved before being placed in its current position.
It is for these reasons that modern experts have been unable to completely dispel ideas that the megaliths are not stone-age in origin but date back to a far older, pre-Atlantean civilisation.

Word Origins…
It may appear that the modern study of megaliths uses a vocabulary drawn from the language of the people of the land in which these stones are most prolific – i.e. from Breton, but this assumption probably obscures the truth.
Bretons traditionally regarded the stones as being the homes of the Korrigans and the fairies. Their names for them reflected this belief: Ty ar Gorrigued, Ty ar Gorrigared, Ty ar Boudigued, etc., all being variations on ‘home of the fairies’. Some names included the word lec’h hinting at the existence of a cave or grotto and these probably referred to the structures that we now call dolmens: Ti-liac’h-ar-C’horiged, home/grotto of the Korrigans. Dolmen means table-stone (dol=taol=table, men=stone) and originally referred to the flat stone on the top of the dolmen. Menhir means tall or long stone (men=stone, hir=long); smaller standing stones were often referred to as ‘peulven’ (peul=post, ven=maen=stone).

Written by Gareth Lewis, first published in the Central Brittany Journal November 2005