online: 23 march 2009 modified: 15, 23 march 2009 14 march 2009 megaliths
at Carnac
...sitting on a broken piece of wall, possibly made of stones cut or taken from some of the thousands of megaliths (large stones set upright in long rows) at Carnac, southern Brittany... said to be the largest megaliths site (or graveyard?) in the world... erected about 6000 years ago...
...my first impresssion is of the vastness and the roughness of these rows of stones, some of several British tons (a ton is almost equal to a metric tonne) and varying from half, to one-and-half, of the height of a modern human (a few are much taller)... and vast in number (several hundred stones in each of three or four sites over several kilometres) and nearly all uncarved - mostly of the accidental shapes that boulders acquire in natural processes of physical evolution, weathering, and the growth of mosses etc...
...as i sit here before a megalith that is a little over human height (which two or three people with outstretched arms could encircle)... it looks to me as if weighs several tons...
...but these remarks are secondary to the stones themselves... and to the largely unknown thoughts and purposes of the people who erected them perhaps 4 to 7 thousand years ago...
...a small boy picks up a stone with a cry of triumph but a woman tells him to drop it... a bumble bee flies about my feet... other people wander by, taking photographs, gazing at stones, and looking as if none of us fit in the speechless quiet induced by these works or actions of our ancestors (perhaps only 250 generations ago)...
...yes the simplicity of the idea (of erecting rows of hundreds of longish stones, and their lack of immediately evident purpose) seems to quieten thought and puts me into a zen-like silence... as if in the presence of something strange, though it was our own ancestors who erected such standing stones as these... all over the earth... but not elsewhere in such numbers as at Carnac...
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