The emotion which surrounded, at the beginning of the summer, the destruction of 39 small menhirs during the construction of a DIY store in Carnac (Morbihan), shows the general public’s attachment to prehistoric megaliths. While the Regional Commission for Heritage and Architecture (CRPA) of Brittany examines the extension of the list of Neolithic sites registered as historical monuments and at the very moment when UNESCO is preparing to label some of them them as part of the “world heritage of humanity”, a work details the specificities of fifty Breton places presenting remarkable menhirs and dolmens. “By establishing this list, we want to draw the attention of the general public to these threatened treasures,” say the authors, Pascal Lamour and Joëlle Chautems.
Love of stones? “It was passed on to me by my mountaineering parents,” she says, recalling her childhood vacations exploring the mountains of her native Switzerland. An orienteering enthusiast, she says she began to take an interest in megaliths during these competitions. “I’ve always had a connection with nature. But it was by observing more carefully these imposing stones erected by man, sometimes surrounded by trenches, or marked with streaks, that I realized that each had its own identity,” she continues.
“A multitude of astonishing stories surround them,” says Pascal Lamour, who has enjoyed collecting tales and legends concerning the main dolmens and menhirs of Brittany for twenty years. “What is disturbing is that the same myths are repeated all over the world: in Italy, in Norway, but also in Hawaii and Australia,” breathes Joëlle Chautems. The Swiss thinks that significant elements explain this. “What I have observed is that, throughout time, people have sought to position themselves in relation to reliefs, whether they are mountain peaks, valley bottoms or stones. Some of these sites exude a strength that I have experienced myself,” she notes.
When asked to describe what she means by this, the druidess evokes “a bodily sensation outside of any mental universe. A response of the senses that encompasses visual (these sites are beautiful, most of the time), smell (the sweet scent of lichen floats on the stone), touch (the texture of each mineral is different).” So many sensations that she says she finds exacerbated by the silence that generally surrounds these isolated places.
Joëlle Chautems, who dreamed of being a vulcanologist when she was a child, plans to resume mineralogy studies to better understand how the formation of stones, their chemistry, their color, create an influence on their environment. “To Cartesian minds who question this belief, I generally respond that it is no more irrational than praying to a god who we think is the creator of the universe,” she defends herself when we express a form of doubt about what she calls “lithotherapy”. Pascal Lamour mentions that “magmatic soils do not have the same geological properties as limestone. Clay soils produce wines that are very different from grape varieties that grow on land full of granite or schist. Not to mention the natural radioactivity of certain rocks…”.
This summer, Joëlle Chautems did not hesitate to drive 25 hours from Switzerland to discover the Scottish megaliths. “After passing Stonehenge, I headed north to see the circle of Brodgar on the main island of Orkney. This megalithic enclosure is a great place of pilgrimage that archaeologists continue to excavate. No matter how much we believe in the power of these stones, they nonetheless constitute an incredible heritage,” she concludes.