The search for this was a typical mix of research and luck – involving name confusion, lack of any toponymic help, misleading information (possibly deliberate) from old sources, help from a local man – and dogged determination.
And in the end it was my Mary that led us to it!
For more info and photos, go to Pierre des Couteaux dolmen page.
Is it so strange to have a favourite map? Like a special book or painting it may be rich in personal connections and memories – but it must also have its own autonomous beauty.
The old West Cork map – number 24 in the Suirbhéireacht Ordanáis (Ordinance Survey) is the one for me. I lived in it and with it for 25 years – as an unsuccessful hippy, and much later as a more convincing seakayaker.
Its scale is 1:126,720 or 1/2 inch to 1 mile. It was part of a resurvey of the entire country of Ireland begun in 1887 and completed in 1913, comprising over 18,000 maps. The new Discovery series is an anaemic shadow of the richly coloured and detailed earlier series – which was itself a reduced version of the original.
‘Irish Ordnance Survey began the world’s first large-scale mapping of an entire country in 1820. It took 22 years. It was a remarkable feat by remarkable men and the accuracy they attained is still marvelled at today. The process involved both innovation and ingenuity. For example, to establish an accurate “baseline” for the entire survey Lt. Colby developed a measuring system which incorporated two parallel bars of different types of metals.
Once the baseline was established, the surveyors used triangulation between mountain tops to create a framework of reference points for the entire country. Some of the sides of the primary triangles were over 150 kilometres in length. To spot points accurately at such great distances Lt. Col. Thomas Drummond devised the intensely bright limelight – which later became popular as a means of stage lighting.’
Every road and track, every stone wall and hedge, every river and stream from Fair Head to Mizen Head and from Howth Head to Slyne Head was surveyed and mapped with a level of precision never seen before.
‘Between 1857 and 1879 a scale of 1:500, or 10 foot to one mile, was introduced for many urban areas. But in the 1870s the Ordnance Survey stopped including interior walls of buildings in its surveys, except for important public buildings. Some other small features, such as flower beds and isolated trees, also disappeared.’ [OS Ireland]
Here in France a somewhat similar reduction has been taking place in the successive IGN map series – incomprehensible considering the level of technical sophistication we now possess. I have noted with regret, the ‘disappearance’ or displacement of megaliths in the new Série Bleue - but happily it is not all a one-way track.
A delightful feature of IGN’s GeoPortail.fr online mapping service is that as one zooms out from the detailed modern map one encounters the older 1967 version, with its mellower colours and dated fonts. It is usually at this ‘level’ that one finds the dolmens and menhirs, avens and grottes that had been omitted from the modern map. But just recently I found the process in reverse.
I went to visit a well-known dolmen just across the valley, at Villeneuve-Minervois. The problem was that it was well-known under two different names : the Dolmen du Palet de Roland , and the Dolmen de la Jargantière . Unfortunately neither name appeared on my older series paper map. What was marked there was Dolmen du Vieil Homme (which I’ve elsewhere seen as Dolmen de la Val d’Homps ). I had come across all these names separately, over a period of months – and for a while naively thought there must be a nest of dolmens over there.
So I was both amazed and delighted to find on arriving there – that there were two dolmens, a few hundred metres apart. The second one was not on my old map, nor on the GeoPortail.fr site – or at least not at the zoom level I’d looked at. There was a Roque Traucade alright, but it wasn’t until I zoomed in that the Dolmen Roquo Traoucado appeared. At this ‘level’ the Dolmen du Vieil Homme had disappeared, to be replaced with Dolmen du Palet de Roland . The difference between the two spellings of this ’split rock’ has political and cultural significance : the modern map has extricated the names from a nationalising, Parisian grip - and returned them to their regional Occitan origins.
Now that I have the actual dolmens sorted out, my problem remains – what do I call them? I would normally defer to The Captain at Megalithic Portal – except that he has one tagged as La Jagartiere (presumably based on Bruno Marc’s usually accurate guide-book, and the website www.dolmen3.free.fr). This spelling occurs solely at this site, while la Jargantière occurs in six online references. The other he calls Roque Traoucado – which is a cobbling of French and Occitan, and does not exist on either map. Incidentally, there seems to be no such place as la Jargantière on any map on- or off-line. It’s a word with no other connections – toponymical, etymological, or historical. To me it speaks of a Gargantua, a female giant – and gets my vote.
In addition, the French national guide to the region, Le Bison Futé, calls it them Les dolmens de la Vallée d’Homps et de Roquetraoucade. Unfortunately, the modern map spells it Val d’Houms – again an important return to the Occitan. Houms, by the way are olmes, which are elms. L’Homme Mort turns up so frequently in the maps that I began to worry – but it was the elm that died there, not the man.
The name-game continues when a search for the necessary nearby cave or grotte is started. For in the immediate vicinity there’s a rash of candidates : la grotte de la Gaougno and la grotte de Buffens, la Balme Pretchadouire, la Grotte du Figuier, and la Balme Sabatière. Not to leave out the Barrenc de Villegause – black spots on the modern map but absent from the older. To even things up, a number of unnamed grottes scattered to the NE of Caulnes are there on the old – but not marked on the new.
Note that caouno or caougno is Occitan or Catalan (cavern in English) while caune is the French – as in the name of that nearby village: Caunes), and balma is Occitan, while balme is a frenchified version. Barrenc however is one of our very own local words – and means aven (French) and avenc (Occitan) and which probably has a speleological equivalent in English. Think : ‘a vent’ as in a sudden large black vertical hole on a mountain -
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
And thus many hours may pass, shuffling the words about, furling and unfurling the maps – on a wet and windy weekend.
If you think names and dates and toponymy don’t matter (or they interest you as much as me) then this study is recommended :-
Landscapes of power in nineteenth century Ireland: Archaeology and Ordnance Survey maps. SMITH A.
The British Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland in the nineteenth-century was an official systematic survey which created a picture document of the landscape and the past. While the maps influenced the institutionalization of archaeology, the documenting of an archaeological record on the maps shaped their look and language. Within a setting of the political contest between British colonialism and Irish nationalism, both the Ordnance Survey maps and the archaeological past they recorded became powerful tools that helped to construct Irish identity and a sense of place and heritage.
Archaeological dialogues ISSN 1380-2038 1998, vol. 5, no 1, pp. 30-53 (2 p), pp. 69-84 Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Oh – and what to call the two dolmens? Whatever my personal preferences may be – I’m with the new série bleue cartographer who faced the same decision. Give regionalism its voice for one, and let popularism keep the other. The names have to be what are on the current map – the one you can buy at the local tabac, the one you can zoom in close to. All the other names don’t really exist – except in some layer of history.
So for some actual hard facts, photos and info – go to the Roquo Traoucado Dolmen Page, and the (silly, cod-historical) Palet de Roland Dolmen Page. (Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, never set foot here – let alone made this his bed). But that’s History for you – take part in writing it, or it’ll get written for you.
When I first started exploring this whole area around Mailhac, and learnt that an oppidum was not a Roman fort but a Chalcolithic hill settlement, and that there was not just one but three necropoli, and that there existed a cave by a spring, and that there was a dolmen there too, and that the whole affair had been evolving and developing for a thousand years – I realised that getting all the information and photos and maps for the whole complex was going to stretch my abilities at ‘blorganisation’.
And so it proved : there are now posts and pages that don’t seem to come in any order, nor seem shaped in any cohesive way. I’m more of a reader than a librarian or a methodical historian. I’m hoping the tags will sort it all out, and that the grouping of all the topics under a ‘parent page’ will gather most of it together.
And consistent with this inconsistency, I shall now introduce the writer who introduced me to the whole subject of protohistory – who, fittingly was not an archaeologist at all, but an American and a poet : Gustaf Sobin. The book is ‘Luminous Debris. Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc’. It was a propitious find in a Carcassonne second-hand bookshop. It is by turns dense, lively, academic, joyful – his chapter on Mailhacian pottery and its pictographs was exhilarating speculation and has inspired in me what I hope will be a life-long interest.
It sent me immediately to search the Internet – where I found references to the ‘vieux village ‘, and to the Grotte de Treille , and finally to the dolmen of Boun Marcou on a small hill called Trigodinnas, right next to Lou Cayla.
View from the chevet or headstone, to the foot.
For more on this go to Boun Marcou dolmen, Mailhac Page.
Up ’til this morning I was unaware of the existence of Fournès-Cabardès ( the difference, were you wondering, between è and é, is that between the vowel-sounds of ‘may’ and ‘egg’. Not a lot to us, but of great matter to the French. Say ‘may’ and your jaw drops – say ‘egg’ and your mouth widens. Crucial. If you live here).
I was living in happy ignorance also, that there were two megaliths close-by. But now that I have been there and seen them I am no longer happy – because They, the French mapmakers IGN, have got the pair of megaliths all wrong, back-asswards, vice-versa and widdershins.
The Captain, over at Megalithic Portal, of course had it right all along : the site to the west marked dolmen, is in fact a 4 metre long monolith, fallen half out of a fearsome-looking entrance hole to Hades.
While the Pierre Plantée (stretch the mouth just a leetel wider . . . ) with its massive cap-stone, and solitary orthostat, and S-W orientation, better merits the name dolmen.
I’m not sure how The Captain came upon the reference to Peyregat menhir – because there’s no such place in the region – but somewhere in the archives of the Carcassonne scientific society SESA of which I am a member, there are photos which I will unearth asap : Fournes-Cabardès – Menhir couché au lieudit Peyregat. Vues du nord-ouest et du sud-est, 8 x 11 cm, photographies de Germain Sicard prises le 9 mars 1897.
But for more modern photos and info on this impressive stone – look in the Peyregat Menhir Page.
For more of the same on the Fournès ( jaw just a leetel lower . . . ) dolmen – go to the Fournès Dolmen Page. Lesson concluded, you may relax now.
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.
We live in Stone Country. I have attempted to get beyond ‘limestone’ and ’sandstone’ and can just about tell my nummulithic from your oolithic – but I soon find myself in alien territory, where they speak like this : ‘ . . . the origin of the paleodoline is interpreted as resulting from a combination of Eocene synorogenic tectonics . . .’ It’s too late to learn a new language like this.
But I was delighted to discover that les lauses – thick flat slabs of schist that tile the roof of the 13th. C. Chapelle de Notre-Dame de Centeilles are phonoliths : they ‘ring’ when tapped. I had come to the little church only because there were prehistoric vestiges in the area, but the time spent tramping through the vines and the garrigue convinced me that this was a rather extraordinary place : there is an unusual amount of context – geographic and historic, and lithic. The sheer amount of stones around Centeilles is astonishing, and attests to a continuous inhabitation since neolithic times.
This was taken from the top of a walled area of stone 15 metres wide by twenty metres long. There is another in the background – also 4 metres high. They are all that remain of a neolithic settlement.
More ‘modern’ are the capitelles that cluster round the chapel, the dolmen, the well and the spring :
There are fourteen of these clochán, or beehive huts visible from the path. Usually they are isolated shelters for shepherds and in more recent times, for fieldworkers. Here their use ranges over the millennia from hermitages to pilgrim huts to transhumant herders’ lodgings during mediaeval Fairs.
See the Capitelles de Centeilles Page for more.
The information given on Quid for the Oppidum du Pic St-Martin is accurate – while the new IGN Seies Bleu map – and the www.geoportail.fr placing – is out by nearly 2 km. Its position is 2. 39′ 54″ E, 43. 20′ 11″ N and it is a most impressive structure. The site was occupied continuously from the Iron Age through to the arrival of the Visigoths. The earliest inhabitants were possibly the Ibères or the Ligures, but more certainly the Volques Tectosages [ a Celtic tribe that put up a fierce resistance to the invading Romans, and who were themselves an invading force from Middle Europe - the name translates best as Land-hungry Wolves ].
The scree slope rises about 300 feet from here to the walls.
More photos and info on the Pic St-Martin Hillfort Page
Quid is France’s Encyclopedia Britannica, on paper since 1967 and online since 1997. IGN is the Institute Géographique National – it began as an army mapping service in 1887 and went public in 1967. They are invaluable tools in researching old stones but they are not without weaknesses. This is what I found for Siran, a village nearby in the Minervois:
Cachette de fondeur de l’âge du Bronze à Centeilles. [Traces of Bronze Age smelting]
29 dolmens* et tumulus.
Habitat préhistorique à Centeilles, Ausine, Belvédère.
Champ des Morts.
Nécropole 1er âge du Fer à La Prade.
14 villas romaines, principalement : Najac, Saint-Michel de Montflaunez.
Oppidum du pic St-Martin occupé de l’âge du Fer au 6ème apr.J.-C.
Mosaïque gallo-romaine* à la chapelle de Centeilles.
Tombes wisigothiques à La Rouviole, Le Champ des Morts, Centeilles, Saint-Martin, Saint-Pierre des Troupeaux, Saint-Gontran.
And this is what the new IGN map says is there:
Centeilles seemed central to this rich and diverse little corner, and was one of the few from the list to be marked on the map, as was the Gallo-Roman fort [camp or oppidum] closeby. That confident red star looked a certain bet, so I set off this saturday to see what I could find – knowing that information on Quid could well be long out-of-date and that I could be beating around the bush all afternoon for nothing. But not suspecting that the map could get it so wrong.
The 13th.C. Chapelle de Notre-Dame-de-Centeilles was certainly there with its stone roof and holy well – as was a host of other fascinating structures and features [see following Posts & Pages] – and so were the remains of a massive emplacement deep in the wood where the map shows the red star. It wasn’t until I got home and compared this new map with the 1967 version that doubt set in about The Thing in the Wood. I now needed to persuade Jessi and Mary to come out on another hunt this sunday.
The story of this weekend’s two visits to Centeilles is complicated, so the photos about it all are over on the Pages section. Starting with the Not the Gallo-Roman Camp Page. And as fast as I can post them, the following will appear :-
The real Ancien Camp Gallo-Romain on the Pic St-Martin Hillfort Page.
The dolmen of Centeilles – or les Pierres Plantées, take your pick – on the Centeilles Dolmen Page.
The dolmen du Mourel des Fadas – on the Dolmen des Fadas Page.
The Chapelle de Notre-Dame de Centeilles – the extraordinary frescoes, its history, holy well and capitelles – on the Chapelle de Centeilles Page.
And the second earlier church at Centeilles [in many ways even more extraordinary] – on the Chapelle Ruinée Page. There was a third even earlier church here at one time – but it’s been lost . . .
And then there’s those Roman villas, and the visigoth necropoli, and the neolithic habitat here too, somewhere – but I need another visit or ten, for them.
I have yet to return empty-handed from a day of dolmen-hunting, even if I fail to find anything. The map may say ‘Pierre Droite’ but a tractor or a religion may have removed it.
I have searched repeatedly for these, and will continue until I find their ‘presence’ or the reason for their absence. These searches uncover places and reveal people: Germain, an old man with passionate memories of a megalithic necropolis discovered as a young man up on les Causses de La Planette - meeting him up in the hills has set in motion a whole new area of reseach.
This Easter, we went looking for le dolmen de Combe Violon above La Livinière, but a cold wet wind cut short the search. The dolmens de Mousse were not far away but again it was too cold to stay – even though we were close to hell. L’Enfer is a barren hillside of white jumbled rubble, a petrified torrent of shattered limestone that resolves into walls and tumuli and capitelles –
Just beyond is the hillside that contains les dolmens de Mousse and le grand dolmen de Lauriol – but not for us that day. I returned to the internet to research these dolmens – and discovered that someone else was up there that afternoon – Yves Le Pestipon had posted photos of them on a remarkable multi-author weblog called L’Astrée.net – an unfolding series of events and situations, writings and images – including many on megalithic culture.
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.
 | Aymard Robert on La Caouno de Moux |
| Aymard Robert on La Caouno de Moux |
 | Marc Shaw on Monte Baranta complex |
 | arbto on Mapping history, and naming tw… |
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