Carnac and Locmariaquer - mysterious colossi and tombs of the Stone Age | Northern France Part 20

At the end of our tour of northern France, let's go back to the Stone Age! We visit the famous Carnac standing stones.

More than 3000 menhirs in different sizes from 50 cm to 4 m run through the landscape in even alignments over almost 4 kilometers. They were created in the Stone Age around 7000 years ago. They are one of the most important testimonies of European prehistory.

Their purpose is an unsolved mystery to this day, there are only numerous guesses. Are they religious places of worship? Temple for a moon or sun cult? An astrological calendar for agriculture? Or even Roman legionaries who, according to legend, were petrified by God while trying to arrest Saint Cornelius? Aliens? We do not know it!
What is certain is that the area also served as a burial ground. Here we find dolmens, i.e. stone tombs, and tumuli, large burial mounds made of heaped earth.

Our walking tour begins at the Maison des Megaliths, a very informative museum on the alignments and the site as a whole. In the high season between April and September, the most important alignments of Carnac may only be entered with a guide. Unfortunately, there is currently no German or English-speaking tour and our language skills are not sufficient for a French-speaking tour. But the hike at the edge of the fence along the alignments is also very impressive, the view of the colossi is almost the same. There are also smaller fields and single menhirs that can be visited without a guide.

With amazement and awe we stand in the wide and silent heathland in front of the menhirs, which lead here between the gorse bushes from Carnac to the east to the coast. It is unbelievable that thousands of these heavy stones were set up here 7000 years ago using the most primitive means. The stones have been placed in descending order of size, and each arrangement ends in a more or less visible stone circle. A stone circle is a complex of very tightly packed blocks of stone.

We now walk along the three different menhir fields:
Ménec: The most famous menhir field in Carnac consists of over 1000 stones in 11 rows. The complex begins with a stone circle made up of 71 stone blocks.
Kermario: This stone field is the most visited in Carnac for its impressive monoliths (some more than three meters high). The view point at the old mill offers us the best overview of the alignments.
Kerlescan: With 555 stones in 13 rows, this complex is the smallest in Carnac and the best preserved. At the western end of the field lies a stone circle made up of 39 menhirs.

A very nice little detour is to visit the tumulus Saint-Michel. Here we can climb the impressive burial mound, the largest man-made mound in France. At its top we find a small picturesque chapel and we can enjoy a breathtaking view over the Gulf of Morbihan.

Then we visit the nearby megalithic site Locmariaquer.
Here we find the Grand Menhir Brisé, the large broken menhir. This is the largest monolith known from European prehistory, a granite colossus over 20 meters long and weighing 280 tons. It fell over, broke into 4 pieces and is still very impressive. It is almost unimaginable how such a monster was moved several kilometers to this place and put up with the extremely simple means available at the time!

Next to it is the tumulus Er Grah, a burial mound that was only restored in the last few decades and impresses with its enormous dimensions.

The "Table des Marchands" (Merchants' table) dolmen is also very interesting. You can enter it through a narrow passage and find richly decorated panels inside the small burial chamber. You can clearly see here that we are much bigger today than the people back then. The narrow corridor is not for the claustrophobic.

The trail through the megaliths of Carnac can be found here: https://www.komoot.de/tour/1118680543

This is the last part of our Northern France trip.☹️

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Travel in August 2022

#Carnac #Locmariaquer

Chapter:
00:00 Intro
00:39 Alignments of Carnac
02:14 Mound Saint-Michel
02:41 Alignments of Carnac
04:19 Giant of Manio
04:49 Alignments of Carnac
06:02 Locmariaquer
08:20 Outro