Petrified soldiers, a place to ask the local Saint Cornely to save sick animals, a fertility cult focus? The world-renowned megalithic alignments have attracted explanation, intrigue and awe. Over 2700 standing stones (Breton menhir) are aligned east-west in series of rows 3km long. From massive granite slabs over 4m high to lesser stones 0.5m high they stride across heath and through woodland, interspersed with passage tombs (Breton dolmen) and hard-to-see oval settings of stone (Breton cromlech) which seem to mark alignment terminals.
Today's World Heritage Site has restricted access. Soil erosion has now been arrested and vegetation is regenerating following years of recreational use. In exploring the best preserved le Menec alignment we see the reduction of stone size eastward and at its western terminal the cromlech is lost amongst a group of farm buildings. Many of the original stones are lost. Others have been reset. The monument is muchdiluted and divorced from the complex of burial tombs and individual menhir, which characterize this region.
Dates and dating bring sense to this prehistoric complex. Local excavation of tomb and stone through to association of burials, grave gifts and scientific dating focus on a record of activity in the 4th millennium BC, the Neolithic (New Stone Age) world of prehistoric farming communities. Ancestor worship, gift giving and taking and the model of a gigantic lunar observatory provide a current range of explanation. Claims are made for the alignments as predictors of eclipses. A now fallen giant menhir acted as a lunar foresight. Current archaeological vogue places gathering, ritual activity and procession through a prepared landscape as a specially seductive treatment for Carnac.
Whatever our views from legend to moonshine, the considered attempt at explanation from AD1897 still resonates...'without a doubt, this region was a religious center to which one came on pilgrimage from far distant places, or brought the bodies of rich and powerful, military or religious, leaders... an intellectual center, and a trading center between people from the North and South ...Iberia ..northern Europe...Ireland'.
