July 21, 2025
I am traveling with my friend Susan. You know you have a good travel buddy when you both get excited about spending the day looking at rocks. Today, we spent the day driving from one end to the other of an area of Brittany known for its stone structures—the Alignements Du Carnac.
Alignements de Petite Menec
The stones in this alignment consist of 101 menhirs (individual stones), arranged in 10 rows. Seven of them are oriented to the east, and the last three are oriented northeast.
These stones date back to approximately 4800 to 3000 BCE According to experts, these stones represent the last phase of the Neolithic era (era of polished stone).
The stones of Carnac consist of more than 3,000 prehistoric standing stones, hewn from local granite and erected by the pre-Celtic people of Brittany, forming the most extensive such collection in the world.
It is safe to say that no one truly knows the what or why of the stones.
Recent preventive excavations in the vicinity of Carnac have yielded dates that range for the most part between 4,800 and 3,500 BCE. But it isn’t easy to be precise. Despite their actual age, modern beliefs associate them with 1st-century CE Roman and later Christian occupations.
A Christian legend associated with the stones held that they were pagan soldiers in pursuit of Pope Cornelius when he turned them to stone.
Alignment of Kerlescan
This alignment is enormous, but a fence surrounds the entire site. The site consists of thirteen rows with 555 stones.
In Brittany, local versions of the Arthurian cycle include the Carnac Stones. This tradition claims that the reason they stand in such perfectly straight lines is that they are a Roman legion turned to stone by Merlin the Wizard.
Some theories of the stones are that they served as astronomical observations aligning with celestial events like solstices and equinoxes.
Geant Et Quadrilatere Du Manio – The Giant of Du Manio
Menhirs vary in height from knee high to taller than the average human. The most impressive of all, Le Géant du Manio, stands around 20 feet tall.
Alignments of Menec
There is a small, but not particularly impressive, museum at the Memec site called the Maison des Mégalithes. You drive through almost one mile of the largest menhir field with 1099 stones to get to the Maison. It is absolutely impossible to capture the majesty and the feeling of being overwhelmed with the size of the site.
Personal Details:
Three days at Hotel La Maison OBONO Hotel. The service was excellent. The one dinner I ate in the dining room was fabulous, and their wine selection excellent. I ate Brittany oysters as often as possible.