“You made me walk all this way just to see a ROCK?”
My 5-year-old son is normally a very sweet-tempered lad, but this time his patience was running thin and I couldn’t blame him.
Yes, I was making him walk a lot to look at rocks. But these rocks — called megaliths — were mystical.
Between 5,000 and 2,000 B.C., the natives of Brittany, France, went rock nutty. Just like up north at England’s Stonehenge, they gathered rocks — big, tall jagged ones, short fat ones, smooth ones, rough ones, and placed them in all kinds of configurations across the countryside.
No one really knows why they erected them. There are some clues — maybe they were burial houses, territorial markers, altars for sacrifice, fields of phallic symbols.
What you’ll see divides into these categories: “menhirs,” which are simply the upright stones ranging from 1 to 60 feet high and weighing a few hundred pounds to a few tons; “dolmens,” which are thought to be burial chambers, some engraved with designs; and “tumuli,” earth mounds covering dolmens. One common formation is an alignment, which are parallel lines of menhirs going for a long distance and ending in a “cromlech,” which is a semicircle of stones.
There are dozens of sites in Brittany at which to see these formations — I visited two. One is at the town of Carnac, the site considered to be “the best-known of the Breton megalithic monuments. . . . astonishing lines of huge standing stones,” according to an extremely earnest and informative (if somewhat technical) book called “Megalithic Brittany” by Aubrey Burl.
At first, I must confess, this megalith meandering seems silly. I mean, after all, it’s a bunch of rocks.
But they grow on you. In Carnac, the formations are fenced in, but you have clear views of them. Row after row, silent, stern, immovable. There seems to be great method to the seeming madness of it all, as they line up and seem to be there for a purpose.
There’s an excellent museum at the Carnac site (actually there are three huge, separate sites there), which reveals, through its collection of axes, flint tools, pottery, weapons and the like, how the people of prehistoric Brittany lived when they weren’t erecting massive ritual stone formations.
After a fair amount of walking and whining (on the part of my child), we moved on from Carnac to the megaliths at Alignment de Kerzero just a few kilometers to the northwest. This was a truly delightful encounter. These stones are not fenced, and some of them are huge, up to 20 feet high and more.
It was late in the afternoon and there were only a few people milling about. These rocks were definitely growing on me. There was just something rather haunting and touching at the same time about standing next to one, hearing silence and feeling a slight breeze. Such a statement of brute power, elegant in its simplicity.
A dirt footpath leads you through the formations, and eventually the stones break up and peter out and the path gets bigger, and you can stroll through acres of farmland and forest. When you return to the megaliths, you realize that they give off such a powerful sense of home, and purpose. We’re here, and nothing’s gonna change that.
I let my son climb on a big rock when we got back — and as I watched him eagerly scoot up, I realized that maybe the formations were really created to be one giant playground.
