Carnac – standing stones in Brittany

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Thursday 11.3.2010 day 149
Carnac - standing stones in Brittany
We drove from Paris to Carnac today. Once we got to Carnac we checked into our wonderful hotel with fantastic views across the river. We then went to the Carnac Alignments a Neolithic site that is 6,000 years old. Legion has that the stones were Roman legionaries turned to stone and local belief had them to be Magical stones. From 1830 onward the French started to buy and preserving the megaliths. This site has about 4 thousand stones and goes over 4 km the tallest stone it about 6 meters high. We then drove to the nearby site des megaliths de locmariaquer which dates back 6,500 years and stands at the entrance to the gulf of the Morbithan. Here there is 20.6 meter stone that weighs about 280 tonnes, this is the biggest know megalith in Europe but it has now fallen and it broken with the fall. There are also burial chambers here as well. Between the two sites we saw a group of people excavating an area. We went to the info centre and got a book about the area to do more reading.

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Comments

[Michael Bott]

Standing with Stones
Hello there. If you have more than a passing interest in standing stones, stone circles and other megalithic sites, may I recommend the DVD 'Standing with Stones'? It is billed as a "Journey through megalithic Britain & Ireland" and, as far as I know, is the only film available about the ancient megalithic sites beyond Stonehenge. There is more information at http://standingstones.tv