Alignments in Brittany
We went to Bretagne (Brittany) for five days with Jamie and Hervé and Valerie and Yves. We had a fabulous time relaxing and walking along the ocean to the west and a calm bay to the east. Jamie and Hervé have a beautiful house there, in the town of Saint-Pierre-Quiberon - we just love being there.
An added bonus is that we get to indulge our love of menhirs, megaliths, dolmens, alignments and other evidences of the Celtic civilization that existed in this area over 5,000 years ago. A few miles north of here is Carnac, the site of the biggest and most complete alignment (prehistoric rows of stones) in the world. Post on Carnac, 2018. This trip Jamie and Hervé pointed us to a smaller but very interesting alignment about twenty minutes away, so off we went. It did not disappoint!
The alignments at Erdeven are much smaller than Carnac but have the distinct advantage of being accessible to anyone who wants to walk among them; Carnac is fenced to keep people out in an effort to restore the area to a more original condition. Here is a overview of part of the Erdeven alignment:
Notice that we are up close and personal with the menhirs here. Also notice that some of them have fallen over and not been set upright. When originally discovered, almost all the menhirs had fallen. The presents a challenge to the archaeologists, of course. They would like to restore it as closely as possible to their original position, so a great deal of work goes on to find those original positions and erect the menhirs to them.
In the course of that research, archaeologists found that thousands of stones were gone. In fact, evidence indicates that this alignment was once about 1.2 miles (2 km) long and, like Carnac, stretched along an east-west axis. Also like Carnac, the stones started small on the eastern end and became larger as the lines came west, so that this - the most western reach of the original alignments - contains the largest of them. And these menhirs are huge - many exceed ten or twelve feet and weigh many tons.
A few more pictures of the Erdeven alignments…
Not far from the Erdeven alignments (and probably part of them in the past) were a few HUGE menhirs.
About eight or ten people were hanging about these menhirs, leaning up against them, lying on them, just touching them, and I understand that. It’s a way to connect to the people who, 6,000 years ago, felt it was important to quarry these stones, bring them to this site and erect them, for reasons completely unknown to us.
At the end of the Carnac tour, the guide says, “If you ask when these alignments were created, we can tell you. If you ask how they were created, we can tell you. If you ask why they were created, we cannot tell you.” As Laurie said when we first saw the Carnac alignments, ‘It’s nice that there are still some mysteries in the world.”
After a hard morning of menhir-looking, it was lunch time. We found a creperie (remember, crepes are an invention of Bretagne) and had a very nice meal, finishing with this one: a crepe with a caramel-beurre-salé (caramel, butter and salt - a Bretagne specialty) topping. What a way to end an excellent expedition.
