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.

Standing Stones and Swimming Pools

If you’ve followed any of these recent posts and pages then you’ll know that we are happily situated 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, we [Mary & 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.

So we are proposing a week of stone-chasing around one of the lesser-known but still fascinating megalithic centres of southern France.

UPDATE NOTE    I’ve made a fixed page for this post and moved the rest of it over to the Megalithic Holiday in Languedoc Page. So for more info on this holiday offer, please look in the right-hand column.

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.

Shopping for dolmens

Today I set out with this little shopping list :

Quarante (village in Minervois-Herault)
Vestiges préhistoriques et antiques

* Habitats chalcolithiques : Bel Air, Fontanche.
* Dolmen de Pech Ménel.
* Cromlech de Malviés.
* Cachette de fondeur (fin âge du Bronze) à Bellevue.
* 35 villas romaines principalement : Pech Ménel, La Massale, Saint-Fréchoux, Les Clapiers, Parazols, Les Sèmièges, La Condamine de Rivière, Les Commandeurs, La Barreire.
* Tombes wisigothiques : Souloumiac, Parazols, Grange Haute, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, Saint-Fréchoux.
* Les Huyères : ancien fief seigneurial ; cimetière abandonné, 3 silos.
* Nécropole à incinération du type “Champ d’Urnes” du 1er âge du Fer au lieu dit Recobre (35 tombes, mobilier au musée de Narbonne).

But I have learnt to take all this with a large pinch of ‘hand-crafted’ salt from Gruissan.
I set out with high hopes – while fully concious that half of this guff has been cobbled together from old documents, and that in the land-rush of the 1970’s any old stone that happened to be sitting in a field growing lichen was bulldozered into the ditch to make way for the Great New Wines of Languedoc.

Now that the grants have dried up – and so have some of the French (they are no longer drinking three times their body-weight in wine per annum – man, woman and child) – it may be too late.
I only managed to find one of these sites.

The dig at Pech Ménel

And even if it was a dismal collection of stones, and even if I did have to cross vineyards to interview every person I saw on the landscape, only to hear that No: they had never heard of any neolithic site, or stone alignment, or dolmen, or prehistoric settlement, and that they had a) Lived here all their lives or b) Just moved to the area …. it didn’t matter. The day was sunny and calm and just about every heap of stones spoke volumes about mediaeval toil – and never mind the prehistory.

Three capitelles at Fontanche – field stones cleared and structured as shelters.

So: no cromlech at Malvies today – and there was no one in at the Chateau to ask. But a stone circle down here in the Midi – now that is worth going back for.
No visible neolithic habitat, either, at Bel-Air. As for Fontanche, this wine-domain seemed deserted – yet there, parked in a weedy courtyard was a beautifully restored 1960’s BMW 600 series . . . There wasn’t time to explore the Iron Age necropolis at “the place called ‘Recobre’” with its Urn-field vestiges. But now that I know the lie of the land I’ll be able to make more focussed enquiries.
While the under-30’s with paid jobs were stacked up over the thermal-ridges in their paragliders, and the retired over 60’s were reliving their cycling-club heydays, in packs of bulgey yellow lycra [this is France-Partout, au weekend] the poor vignerons are still hard at work, pruning the vines or cleaning vats – and answering idiot questions from foreigners about old stones. Yes – there was a dolmen. And a dig had started last summer and the man to ask was an historian I’d come across before – Jacques Gatorze, of Cessenon.

I had forgotten how awful a dig looks : the steel pegs, the string and the plastic. I rather wish I hadn’t come across it like this: a crime-scene in the undergrowth.
Perhaps I am a Romantic, and not the Classicist I pretend to be.

More on the Pech Ménel dolmen page >

Hunting for the Allee Couverte du Bois de Monsieur

There are few people to be seen out on the Causses of the Minervois or the hills of the Corbières, at this, or any other time of the year. In twelve months one might encounter a dozen other walkers. It’s a real and rare pleasure to be out in the wilds on my own. But I have to remind myself that I am not alone: there are others out there, and they are dangerous. Some may be five times my weight, and angry. Some may weigh less than me, but they are armed and stupid. Between the wild boars and the hunters, I’m at risk. The autumn/winter season is not over ’til the end of this month.

A hunter’s stand above Assignan

There are one and a half million chasseurs in France. In the 2006/2007 season they killed 466,352 sangliers out of a population of over a million. The mortality rate is decreasing (for humans, that is) – from 40 per year to 25 recently. All of them hunters. Of 142 people wounded – 12 were non-hunters. Two weeks ago, not far from here, a hunter panicked when a boar charged him. He killed his companion with an accidental blast. In 2005, Claude Rossetti of Montlaur three villages away, was killed while gathering mushrooms on Alaric mountain. He was shot accidentally by an ex-gendarme who was out hunting alone, illegally, on a day when boar-hunting is forbidden. One son, Sylvain, has started a national movement called Partageons La Nature – Share Nature, in an effort to bring an end to unnecessary death and injury.

cartridge cases below the shooting platform

His other son, Claude, wrote recently about the shooting in understandable – if barely intelligible – anger : – ‘ pour son acte heroique il a ete condamne a 6 mois de prison ferme amenageable ( autrement dit RIEN ) dans l’ aude il n y a pas de jour de non chasse quand ce n’est pas le petit c’est le gros gibier et en plus on chasse partout route chemin garrigue public prive et meme a n importe quelle heure du jour ou de la nuit dans l aude si lon n est pas chasseur on est rien . . . ‘
‘ there’s no day when there’s no hunting . . . ‘ – ‘ they’re hunting anywhere public land private land . . . at any time of the day or night . . . ‘ – ‘ if you’re not a hunter here – you’re nobody . . . ‘
The rules governing la chasse au sanglier have been tightened following this and other incidents – spot-checks for permits, and regulation orange vests and hats. But it is a macho culture where drinking plays a big role. I keep alert, fear the guns more than the tusks, and look forward to March.

Meanwhile there is the joy of being out in this landscape with such stones.

a borie or stone shelter in the causses of Minervois

This is all that remains of the Allée Couverte du Bois de Monsieur :-

Do you really want directions?
OK. Drive out of Agel on the D20, past Le Moulin de Madame. Somewhere along here the road turns into the D128. Fork L onto the D26 and go thru the hamlet of La Roueyre and on past La Grotte du Gourp des Boeufs, where the road morphs into the D177. You can do all this without knowing any of this – basically you’ve just gone from Agel to Assignan. The dolmen is in the far corner of the last vineyard on the left, down the track on the left after the pond above the village. It lies at 2.52′40″ E , 43.23′50″ N.

I came here armed with just one sentence gleaned from a 1962 ‘account of the activities of a member of the Societé d’ Etudes Scientifiques de l’Aude‘. In a paper he gave on the prehistoric relics of the region, he noted four sad, forgotten and neglected dolmens in the Minervois. One of them was the Allée Couverte du Bois de Monsieur, 500 metres off the Assignan to Coulouma road, on a ‘petit mamelon.’
Now, every maquis-covered bump in this landscape could be described as a ‘little breast’. So I assiduously fossicked over all the more likely ones – before doing the sensible thing : ask a local. The local turned out to be Monsieur Donnadieu, the mayor of Pardailhan (not of Donnadieu, which is a hameau nearby). And a font of information on all things historical in the neighbourhood. I managed to stem the flow with a promise to return soon – and got back up the road to a hill that resembled no breast I had ever known.
The dolmen is not marked on any map. The Bois de Monsieur is not mentioned on any plan cadastral. The breast at best is but a chest.
And the Allée Couverte – is just one last large orthostat surrounded by a heap of jumbled slabs. From the angle of the sun the dolmen is facing SW.
Move along now, folks. Nothing more to see.

Necropolis at Bois Bas

Bois Bas is a farm at the end of a narrow winding road high up on the Causse above Minerve. It’s a maze – and an amazing place. Twelve dolmens and five diaclases, or fissure tombs on less than one acre. And all in a near-trackless jungle of maquis : holm-oak, box, spiney juniper and rock. Lots of rock. Terraces and pavements and slabs and piles of blinding-white limestone – any of which might be a tomb.

The farm was bought by a co-operative or commune of ten, a year ago – they are carrying on from where the old owners left off: a big herd of goats, a handful of sheep, and some cows. They are modernising the dairy, and extending the campsite, with earth-closets. There are ensuite rooms to rent, a restaurant, a pool, and a stage for the weekly music and drama gigs. It’s ecological and not political – and while they don’t mind the odd dolmaniac turning up, they are busy and likely to get busier with the season. Park carefully, and ask for permission & directions at the main house.

The maquis covers most of this headland that slopes south of the farm towards the cliffs of the Gorges de la Cesse. Skirt two meadows and go through a gate and the low-growing woodland begins. A cart-track runs south: pass the first junction, leading off left, and continue a couple of minutes ’til you see two small piles of stones on your left. You leave the track here to enter the maquis. The owners have no wish to tart the site up, so you’ll need to sharpen up your ‘trackers’ eyes to spot the unobtrusive signs they have placed by the side of the path, and in the crooks of branches – indicating where there are ‘interesting events’. Some are no more than a jumble of rocks half-buried in the undergrowth, where a half-visible orthostat and a compass-alignment are all you have to help identify it. Others are breath-taking in their massiveness. Most are within a few paces of the main path – others lie beyond. It is easy to become disorientated as you duck and weave between the dense dwarf-oaks. And it’s easy to find yourself deep in a thicket standing on a pile of rocks that lured you on, only to leave you disappointed, and lost.

Bruno Marc has written extensively about megaliths in Languedoc-Roussillon, and he has numbered twelve here, with a further three north of the farmhouse. I only found eight this time, and five diaclases – before stumbling suddenly out of the dense maquis onto the rock-ledge above the gorge. To go from ten-metre-visibility, to 500 metres of empty air, and a drop nearly as much – is stunning. The necropolis merits a good day – so pack lunch and sit out up high on warm rock- before plunging back in for more.

For more photos, descriptions and short video – go to Bois Bas page >>

The problem with being dead

.. . . is firstly that we begin to smell. Nothing new there, you might think, since under-arm deodorants are still a long way off in 2008 BC or ANE (avant notre ère) but where nos amis, les animaux are concerned – then it becomes a matter for public concern. It’s no good just leaving us out on the patio, to be dealt with later – the pong will attract our four-legged friends, and those with more fur and sharper teeth. We don’t mind hunting them (after a healthy vegan/fruitarian week) but they shouldn’t be encouraged to hang around the encampment, snacking on our grandchildren.

Another problem about being dead is that we lose our looks. The jolly wrinkled smiles of us grandparents turn quickly into parchment-yellow grimaces – which impacts on our nearest and dearest and may give rise to dedicated help-lines, and an entire mission-focussed social sevice department one day. So ok there are that lot across the waters we’ve heard about who like to have their grandpappys and granmas propped up at the table every evening, but really – haven’t we all done our stint of child-minding, when you young parents head off to the camp-fire disco? Surely we’ve earned our rest. We’d like you all to remember us at our least-worst, surely?

Then there’s the restlessness. You’re tired of all that getting up in the middle of the night for a piss, or a cup of hot-chocolate. You need to think that when we’re gone – we’re gone for good. You don’t really want us wandering back . . . in the dead of night . . . looking for something to snack on. Now I have no problem with revenants dining out on the living (well that fat lot down the valley are just asking for it, aren’t they?) – and kosher or halal doesn’t come into it – rather it’s just bad form to go eating your own. It’s simply not the way a modern-thinking clan behaves, always looking over its shoulder at the way its recent-dead might carry on.

And another problem with the dead is our memory. Well – we may not have been the sharpest flints in the tribe, those last few years (it’s one thing to forget your spectacles – but to forget that spectacles haven’t even been invented yet . . . ) – but who knows how long the dead bear grudges? There’s time enough, when you’ve got eternity to measure against, to wait for a good moment to settle a score or two.

So what’s to do with us smelly old unappealing vindictive restless dead? Well – you could try putting me under the soil – but unless you’ve suddenly got the hang of this new-fangled ‘agriculture’ and can hang onto your top-soil for more than a couple of years- then you’re going to be seeing me sooner than you thought. And if you’re thinking of getting rid of me completely with that old ‘air-burial’ trick – I won’t have it! The birds and beasts would cart me off wholesale – and where’s the respect for your ancestors in that?

No. What we’d like is a proper funeral, under a decent-sized stone (big enough to keep us in and the fanged-ones out, and just bigger than them-next-door, if you can afford it . . .) and with a bit of a knees-up. It livens up those dull winter days, when that new-fangled ‘harvest’ of yours is ‘in’, and you can’t be arsed to go hunting because ‘it’s too cold’ or ‘I’ll trade something in for it’  – Oh no – we didn’t have it so easy in our day, you know . . .

So what do we do with our dead? Will it be inhumation, or cremation? The jury is still out, the dead are still muttering, and I haven’t made my mind up yet.

Disappearing dolmens

We’re losing dolmens. Every year around here, dolmens go missing. It’s no joke: one day there are two on a map plus a menhir – and then on the new map there are none – just the menhir.

Last week we found one of them – but it too is disappearing fast. Few people go there, no signs point the way, and the paths are no longer trodden by human foot. The tracks are beaten by wild boars and are closing over with dwarf box and juniper.

The table measured 100 cm square, the right orthostat 80 cm wide by 40 cm showing above earth & rubble; the left 80 x 30 visible. It was hard to make out how far the foot extended: the length cannot have been much more than 1 metre. un dolmen simple

Note: complete text, more photos and a couple of videos, on the Bel Soleil dolmen 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  >>