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Where it's at
Scattered around the town of Carnac on the south coast
of Brittany are hundreds of stones dating back further than
Knossus, the Pyramids, Stonehenge or the Egyptian temples
of the same name at Karnak, that constitute Carnac as Europe's
most important prehistoric site. Nothing can quite prepare
you for the feeling of mysticism that surrounds some of the
more impressive formations - there used to be a lot of people
holding their hands over rocks to tap into their 'energy'
but that's long gone with the burgeoning fame of the area.
History of megaliths
There are 10,000 or so standing stones around Carnac, estimated
by one researcher to have taken between 500,000 and one million
days to erect - all by an ancient culture that arose during
the Neolithic period between 4500 and 2000 BC and based
its livelihood on agriculture and herding. They left behind
several types of megaliths (the word comes from the Greek
for big (megas) stones (lithos) as their enduring legacy:
menhirs - stones between 3ft and 70ft high, weighing
up to 200 tonnes and planted upright; dolmens (dol
means table) stone burial chambers either standing alone or
accessible through a narrow passage and tumuli; earth
mounds covered in dolmens. Some are engraved with popular
motifs of axes and horns. The most famous are the four great
alignments of menhirs: Le Ménec, Kermario, Kerlescan
and Le Petit Ménec.
Myth and mysteries
Local legend says that Carnac's standing stones are Roman
soldiers turned to stone by Pope Cornelius. Some nineteenth
century writers speculated that it's linked to the mythical
civilisation of Atlantis and its people of gigantic stature.
The theory that best stands up to mathematical investigation
is that the nearby menhir of Locmariaquer and the Carnac
stones were an observatory for the motions of the stars -
like a three dimensional graph. Solitary rocks have been interpreted
as anything from phallic symbols to indicators of burial sites
nearby. Although it may prove impossible to discover the true
meaning of the stones because so many have been moved or used
as ready-quarried stone, research is coming on at such a pace
that the local museum quite often finds itself out of date! |
