A dolmen with no history

The Dolmen de Palats is deep in the Corbières, that wild and rumpled area of hills 50 miles wide and 50 deep which begins just south of our village and extends to the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was not high on my list of Old Stones, being just two slabs leaning against eachother – as photographed by Bruno Marc in his excellent guide to the Dolmens and Menhirs of Languedoc-Roussillon. However, the visit was well worth the alarmingly pricey diesel and the precipitously twisty backroads.

Continue reading on the Dolmen de Palats Page.

La Clape necropolis at Laroque de Fa

This hunt could have gone disastrously wrong: with my enthusiastic daughter visiting from Ireland, and my unenthusiastic wife, I nearly managed to have us stumbling around the wrong mountain all afternoon. For, when doing anything involving maps and the wilds, it is generally advisable to know where you’re actually starting from . . .

Fortunately this time, despite starting from the wrong place and aiming at the wrong place, with Jessi’s unquenchable enthusiasm plus Mary’s unerring sense of direction plus a lot of luck, we got to the dolmens.

This is La Clape in the middle-distance : it’s occitan for a stoney hill. There are 8 dolmens scattered around this acre or two of limestone and box-shrub, according to Bruno Marc in his excellent ‘Guide to Dolmens & Menhirs of Languedoc-Roussillion’ – but we only found six.

How to get there plus lots more photos and text, on the La Clape Necropolis page, right column.

man-stone and woman-cave

Drive to Lagrasse and spend a morning there: ‘L’un des plus beaux villages de France’ with an abbey rebuilt by Nimphridius under Charlemagne in 779. It was the temporal and spiritual centre of all Languedoc for many centuries, holding sway from Albi to Zaragoza. Then drive out on the D3, turning left to Tournissan. The lower menhir is on the left before the village. Turn right in the village for Talairan and at the first juntion go right on a metalled lane for 2km. The upper menhir stands atop a small hill – and possibly a tumulus – on the right about 100 metres after the tarmac ends. On the IGN map its location is 2. 38′ 37″ E , 43. 4′ 12″ N. or DD 2.643611 E 43.070000 N

Down here in the Aude we are not over-burdened with standing-stones. Passage-graves R Us – but Pierres Droites? Or Plantées? We have a few – and some of them among the biggest – but this is not Tall Stone Country.

All the more surprising then to find two menhirs in the one small valley. The better known one stands in the valley bottom – unusual enough – and by the roadside, rather than a more isolated spot. The valley is small and this route must have been the only way out, as it leads east between two hills towards the river Orbieu and Lagrasse.

This lesser known menhir stands on a small hill, and is directly due south of the first. There is a path kept clear all the way up the hill to it. Neither menhirs are marked on any map. However they are both in full sight of the Le Roc Troué – the Holed Rock which is marked and is situated at 43.089444 N 2.664166 E . It is a large and dramatic cavern high up in the face of a prominent rock outcrop.

In the foreground is one of the wells [with modern surround] and diectly behind is Le Roc.

The valley has other remarkable features: in line with the two menhirs, due north, is another rock outcrop – this time distinguished by its strong red colouring. There is a captured spring at this place called Terre Rouge. Other wells can be seen high up above the valley floor in the middle of fields – attesting to an unusual water-table. Such abundance of water and such rich oxide soil make this valley very fertile.

Terre Rouge in middle distance – with Alaric mountain behind.

Less than a mile from the two menhirs is a place called Les Morts : The Dead. At the summit of a small hillock, among trees and scrub is a tomb. Monks of the Middle Ages lived in a Priory close by and in Lagrasse, and the entire valley would have been worked by them. It is unusual to find a solitary tomb, set apart like this.

The stone stands 2.5 metres tall with its flat faces roughly east & west. It ‘points’ north at 30 degrees, straight at the lower menhir.

I came to hear about this beautiful stone from a friend. She had been told about it by a sourcier. Not a wizard – this is the local man who locates water for farmers and vignerons. He also believes in ley-lines and fertility stones . . . And for those women who cannot conceive when they wish, he suggests visits to this menhir. My friend wanted a baby, and visited the stone often. It is in a beautiful place, in a beautiful valley. The existence of a well-trodden path is significant.

Elsewhere in Europe stones were toppled or broken by the Catholic church in their zeal to eradicate traces of former beliefs. But you can’t erase a vast gaping hole in a cliff, and you can’t stop women wanting children. And so perhaps they let stand a ‘pagan’ stone or two, thinking “well, if the women believe in it, and if it helps bring more babies . . . “

The name of the water-diviner, le sourcier ? Labitte. It is the word for the male appendage.

menhir possibilities

These days France is enjoying two of its favourite pastimes – after food and wine – le rugby and la politique. This weekend at the little bergerie in the wilds, there was going to be a good deal of both – with three major matches, and the looming local elections. Our friends were in the thick of it – but there was just time enough for Ivan to recall the location of a menhir, not ten minutes walk from the house.

It’s on a scruffy non-descript hillock that runs down to the magnificent gorge du Sou – that’s the little river that runs through Sarah’s land – or the gorge du Caune Pont, as the IGN map has it.

Ivan was born in Termes, a pretty Cathar village sacked by Simon de Montfort in 13th. C. and has always known about the stone – but not if it had ever been upright. The garrigue is sparse on this hill-without-a-name, but still it took a while to find it. Time enough to see that it was the only rock on the entire ridge – though there were sufficient limestone slabs below in the gorge to fill Brittany. It is 2 m. long and 1m. wide, and stands knee-high. Its orientation is 320 NW/SE pretty much facing the gorge and Roc de Fenne Prenz. [See Page on La Fenne Prenz] And while this may be purely subjective – the shape is very symmetrical and . . . well . . . shapely. I can’t think of a big stone more like a flint spear-head than this.

In a landscape of stone like the Corbieres Hills, or the upland ‘causses’ of the Minervois there are a number of sites, half-remembered/half-lost – or grottes missing their corresponding dolmen, and dolmen standing whose grottes have got buried in garrigue. It’s been an idea for a while now – that a group of keen people might come and stay – and explore some of these possible vestiges.

Returning to this one: it is not marked or named, and it’s not standing up. So is it a menhir? I have posted it as a fallen one, on the Megalithic Portal site – and named it after the nearest thing: Moulintour. Its coordinates, using the excellent French GeoPortail site, are: 2.34′26″ E, 42.59′07″ N. Or in decimal degrees: 2.573888, 42.985277

With Ireland, Wales and England winning, and his political campaign faltering, it was not the best of weekends for Ivan. Fortunately Sarah roasted a huge leg of lamb and there was lots of wine.

a weekend in the country

We think we live in the country. That is until we leave our little village on the plain and venture 40 minutes south into Les Hautes Corbières, to stay with friends in a renovated bergerie in its own valley. Here wild boars outnumber humans ten-to-one, and eagles cruise the thermals.

I was expecting to make a 2 hour trek, following the excellent guide to ‘Dolmens et Menhirs en Languedoc et Roussillon’ by Bruno Marc. It turned out that the dolmen de la Porteille was just 45 minutes from the house – and though not fully signposted from our end, it was a glorious ramble on yet another sunlit day.

The bright light almost overwhelms the photos with contrast.

It’s orientation is 245. The coordinates given on the Megalithic Portal put it about 500 metres across the valley to the NE. Using the French GeoPortail.fr site, I make its coordinates 2.35′57″ E, 42.59′48″ N or in decimal degrees: 2.599166, 42.996666

This is peering down into what is quite a deep cavity. The stone on the left side seems less an orthostat than a natural flat slab, making this almost a fissure tomb. It measures 3 m. long outside [2 m. inside] and 60 cm. wide inside. It’s 1.5 m. deep.

The dense maquis conceals the fact that we are on the crest of a ridge with views of holm-oak covered hills all around. But it was no surprise to find that Pic du Canigou, the sacred mountain of the eastern Pyrenees, was also in sight. Developments in prehistoric funerary practice and ceramics came as much from the Iberian south, as from east across the Mediterranean [or from the Alps]. This region was and is a crossroads of cultures.

And it was no surprise either to discover there was a grotte de Matthias not many minutes further down the slope. The conjunction of cave and dolmen is repeated all over the region. A later post will examine this relationship.

deep in the Corbieres

We have walked around Nitable Roc many times with friends who live just below it. This time, armed with information from a local teacher and a big Maglite, I wanted to explore the tunnel beneath Roc de Fenne Prenz – the rock of the pregnant woman. It’s just visible as a thin column on the right flank of Nitable, lower down, below the last steep cliff.

The name is corrupt occitan: femna – woman feme – female
prenh – pregnant prensòia – with child

From certain angles the rock has that form. It lies close to the GR 36 at the most dramatic point where the path skirts the cliff-edge. A tunnel passes right through the cliff, under la Fenne-Prenz. The fertility cult that grew around the rock requires a woman to crawl on hands and knees the 20 metres from west to east, as a ritual of reenactment of the birth-journey, towards the rising sun.

For more photos of the tunnel, and the Gorge – go to the Fenne Prenz page.

The Alaric Dolmen

Dolmens can never really be found, because they can never really be lost. But they can be misplaced or forgotten as the memory of them fades, in the minds of villagers who are ageing and dying. And in our region where nearly all do still live in villages, and in a country whose population is ageing and dying at an increasing rate – this could mean a serious loss to our collective knowledge.

Today I found one – again. It is not on any map, nor in any book. But if I asked any old person in the village of Moux ‘Where’s the old tomb on Mont Alaric?’ – they’d all know. Roughly. The young wouldn’t, and couldn’t care less.

For the last month that ‘roughly’ has had me scouring the stoney slopes of Alaric in vain. Until today. Armed with further information – from the local vigneron who ‘first’ found it in 1956 as a lad of 16 – and whose hazy recollections had me lacerating my legs scrambling through the spiny garrigue for hours in completely the wrong area – I felt sure I was homing in on it today.

The thrill of sighting it as I leaned out over a limestone cliff, was immense. As he had warned: ‘Il n’y a pas grande gueule . . .’ – it was nothing to shout about, compared to the sophisticated architecture of the Saint-Eugène or Pépieux ‘allées couvertes‘ – being as I estimate just a slightly extended ‘dolmen simple‘ – at 4 metres it might even be a ‘dolmen à couloir’ or passage-grave : but it was enough for me. It was my first Find.

Note: More photos and the complete text on the Alaric dolmen & cave page  >>