Our first visit to the megalithic spectacular that is Carnac, the largest megalithic site in the world, in southern Brittany.<\/p>\n
There are literally thousands of stone monuments (>3,000 in the Carnac area alone) : Dolmens; Burial Mounds; Standing stones & vast alignments – spread over 4 square kilometers.<\/p>\n
Indeed Carnac is only apart of the vast ‘stone forest’ that pervades a lot of Brittany. <\/p>\n
Within the Carnac environs they are located across 3 main sites – Le M\u00e9nec, Kermario, Kerlascan – and a fourth much smaller site Le Petit M\u00e9nec. It is believed that the 4 sites were once part of a single and gigantic group.<\/p>\n
We only had time to visit Le M\u00e9nec and that still took nearly a whole day to cover with its 11 converging rows of 1,100 menhirs spread across 1km. Intriguingly the megaliths’ height decreases from west to east in each site.<\/p>\n
Very little of the pre-Celtic tribes who erected them between 6000BC and 2000BC is known and so the purpose of these megaliths is not really understood.<\/p>\n
The traditional belief, until recent years, was that they were a huge necropolis and that each stone represented a leader.<\/p>\n
The new school of researchers, however, believes that the alignments were not linked to the cult of the dead but were part of a gigantic system of astronomical tools, sort of ‘observatories’ that predicted and recorded planets movements (the megaliths are indeed aligned with the solstices sunsets.)<\/p>\n
So in the end the “experts” can’t really agree on what exact purpose they served – although those other famous Bretons Asterix and Obelix may have the answer for us \ud83d\ude42 …<\/p>\n
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