Megalithic holiday week: May 2010

If you’ve been following these posts and pages then you’ll know that we are happily established in the midst of a lot of old stones in the south of France. And while I’m a relatively recent arrival to the online community of stone-seekers, Mary and I are old hands at the holiday business.

We’ve been running an open house for all sorts of courses and speciality weeks for six years now : yoga teachers from the UK come with their groups and we cook for them – painting groups from San Francisco, cookery groups from Cork, Cathar researchers from Dublin – walkers, botanists and birdwatchers : and that’s not counting our own painting and mosaic groups. We have a big pool, great food – and the wine is free.

For 2010 we are offering a week of dolmen and menhir exploration here in one of the lesser-known megalithic centres of southern France. From Saturday May 22 to Saturday May 29 our guest house/art retreat is open to all, on a flexible-stay basis.

More info, on the Megalithic holiday page.

The last vestiges of the once-great Barroubio dolmen

It seems obvious to us all now – the search for a megalith begins with the internet. But for earlier prehistorians the task meant painstaking research through various local libraries, plus time-consuming correspondance and encounters with local inhabitants.

Had it not been for a solitary mention in a 1927 publication, and a chance meeting with a local historian, I would never have found this sad remnant of what must once have been a fine and sizeable dolmen.

For more info and photos, see Barroubio dolmen Page.

Saved from obscurity: Dolmen de la Pierre des Couteaux

Few websites mention this dolmen. No current megalithic website – in English or French – seems aware of its existence. But it was discovered, along with the nearby dolmen du Roc Gris, back in 1896, by Monsieur Miquel of Barroubio.

Other archeologists have visited during the 20th. century – but judging by its overgrown state, it seemed likely to be lost to obscurity. My next visit will be with axe and secateur.

The little valley where the two dolmens of La Roueyre are sited, is a particularly sheltered and benign location. With its sunny aspect, good soil and protection from the Tramontane wind – it is a favored corner of the Minervois. Little surprise therefore that I found three portions of Roman pottery during my search: the base and the side of a large and heavy dolium or storage vat, and the bottom tip of an amphora.

For more details and photos, see La Pierre des Couteaux dolmen Page.

La Pierre des Couteaux, or Mère de Dieu dolmen

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 now established as La Mère de Dieu or more commonly, Le Roc Gris dolmen page.

Autumn 2009 Info/Update: Selling Old Stones.

This is a new post, after a long gap. I’ll retain it as a Page, on the right – for those who may have wondered why nothing has appeared since December 2008. It’s just a brief explication/justification for the absence of posts, and the reason for the changed look.

The effects of the world financial crisis were felt here, as everywhere else. With fuel prices soaring, and the prospect of a difficult year ahead for our specialist holiday business, we decided to start economising and localising. My spare time went into expanding the kitchen garden, and beginning a much larger one with friends in the village. I spent more time working and connecting with our vigneron friends who were already suffering the effects of a collapse in wine-prices.

Dolmen-hunting and hill-walking took a rest: I was more concerned with trucking in horse-manure and helping in the vineyards.

I don’t believe for a moment that we are out of the woods : the global financial mess has a long way to run. But we have survived another year (in fact guest and course numbers were up!)  and fuel prices are reasonable. So this autumn the hunt for dolmens and menhirs, grottes et oppida, has recommenced.

And I have not been idle in terms of research and meetings and discussions : the documents I have unearthed, and the people I’ve encountered have led to a great number of hitherto ‘known’ but ‘lost’ megaliths: some recently visited, while others remain as tantalising possibilities. There are many more old stones here in our small corner of the world than I ever imagined.

Two further notes of importance:

1. The look of the site: I think that photos are as important as words, and that for many people, big clear images are valuable. Few people are willing to put themselves through an assault course just to see a sad pair of stones on a blistering hillside, and others are unable.

Without the ‘noir’ background, the website is less ‘dramatic-looking’. But the image size can now be 50% bigger – 750 pixels wide compared to 495. To my eye, it’s a better mix of images and words – and with the ‘flexible-width’ format of this early WordPress theme I like the way it fills the screen.

2. There will be advertising : but only our own. WordPress dot com is blessedly free of ads, and it’s a wonder how they provide such a service for free.

But I can’t justify, to my family, the time and money spent on hunting old stones without there being some return. There will be a low-key but frequent reminders, in posts but not on the permanent Pages, that we are organising ‘tailored tours’ of the megalithic sites of our region. These will be low-cost, all-inclusive breaks and weeks for groups of keen individuals or for mixed-interest holidays for family + friends, where good food and pool-side lounging are as important as archaeology.

We will be as low-cost as Ryanair (who fly in here from just about every corner of Ireland and the UK) – but a lot less brash. But be prepared for some regular low-impact soft-selling.

Lastly, my Post & Page system: this has evolved from the early posts, into the style I shall continue with. The posts introduce a protohistoric site or topic, with a paragraph and a photo. The site or subject will simultaneously appear as a permanent Page in the column, with more info and all the photos. It means there’ll be some duplication, but also no need to search the archives – everything of importance will be in the Page list.

Trepanning: religion or science

A quarter of a century has passed and the young Jean Guilaine [sporting a Rastafarian knitted hat on one of his first digs up at the Alaric dolmen site] is now a lofty eminence, a Professeur de la College de France. And Henri Duday, who went to school in Carcassonne with the man who rebuilt and still lives in the old Lime-Kiln house – he has become a polymath of the medical/forensic/anthropologic/archaeologic world with an ever-expanding department at the University of Toulouse. But still no-one has returned to Alaric mountain to reopen la Caouno de Moux, and explore the story of the 100 skeletons and the head with the hole.

And may never return. The conviction is steadily growing in me that humanity may have reached Peak Knowledge – just as we have reached or indeed passed Peak Oil. I fear that we have extracted the maximum amount of oil from the ground, and, with the collapse of the global financial system, we have extracted the most information we will ever get from the planet. There will probably never again be sufficient money to fund all the research we would like into areas such as archaeology and anthropology – and that we have blown our chances of ever finding out what happened, here in my little village in the Corbières.

Was trepanation part of a religious rite as one French writer thinks - ‘One of the strangest practices, which may also be linked to a religious aspect, was the trepanation  practiced on the Grandes Causses.  It should be noted that trepanations were performed on both the dead and the living, and individuals of all ages, which strengthens the religious hypothesis : the hole in the skull is intended to allow the escape of the spirit.’

Or was this an extreme surgical intervention? Was there an excessive amount of manganese or lead in the trepanned skull? Or in the bones of the other 100 remains?

Was Alaric mountain – which dominates the immediate horizon of the protohistoric mining communities  of the mineral-rich Minervois Hills, just as the Pic du Canigou looming behind at the Pyrennean periphery dominates the wider horizon – were these considered  special places – of surgery, of healing?

It is more than likely we will never know, now.

Mapping history, and naming two dolmens.

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, n^o 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.

Dolmen de Boun Marcou

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.

Le Grand Dolmen de Lauriol

The first post in months : I plead – two months without internet or telephone; road-fuel heading towards the millionaires-only level; family dramas featuring a broken foot and a serious bi-polar episode – oh and a global financial meltdown. I am the schoolboy with five too many excuses. Any one of these would have been enough to cause a suspension of this blog. But it does mean that the ‘historic events’ that are now engulfing the world are taking precedence over the ‘prehistoric events’ I’ve been exploring locally. I have started writing under a different banner – www.bloodyparadise.wordpress.com – in parallel to this.

The tide of crises has receded for the moment and so, as the brilliant summer weather segues into a glorious autumn, I feel ready to sally forth on my old stone hunt – now behind the wheel of a resuscitated but frugal ‘87 Peugeot 205 diesel (the Grey Rat) rather than the thirsty ‘87 Renault Trafic nine-seater ( the ‘Van de Pays’, or ‘Blue Whale’ as some groups call the beast.)

We explored two dolmens today: one is marked on the IGN Blue Series map at Lauriol but the other, less than a kilometre away at Mousse, is not.

Lauriol dolmen with Alaric in the distance

For more on this and the nearby Mousse dolmens, go to the respective Pages, right.

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.