All the rain that never fell this summer is falling now and will continue to fall for days yet. Which gives me time and excuse enough to work up my latest observations into a Grand Theory. In the course of the last few weeks I have been trying to make sense of the scant information [...]

We’re still up on Le Causse de Siran – and could be here for quite a while yet . . . It’s a big, heart-shaped expanse of featureless garrigue, ribbed with little gullies and sudden ravines – and at its widest it is three kilometers across. If the Peyro-Rousso dolmen marks its western border with [...]

I am re-writing this post in the light of a key piece of information that I had overlooked : a brief description of a dolmen on Le causse de Siran in a 1896 Essai that tallies with the dolmen I found. There are anything from 8 to 19 dolmens on ‘ les causses de Siran [...]

Nous sommes en plein cagnard. It’s scorching now from 10 to 6 – so any excursions on days off must happen at dawn or not at all. I don’t need an alarm in the summer here – most days start around sunrise. So it’s off at first light across the valley to the pretty little [...]

Diane Olivier, a Californian Plein Air artist with many years experience drawing the rugged landscapes of America and France, expressed genuine puzzlement recently here : how can I tell if a pile of stones really is a dolmen. And just this week a dinnerparty guest could barely conceal her disbelief that I had turned up [...]

If God had not decided to spend this Saturday morning on perfecting His juggling skills, with my four geostationary satellites – I would never have found the long-lost last two dolmens of Mousse. The three dolmens of Mousse have been causing grief to just about everyone who ever went looking for them, since the late [...]

Armed with Paul Ambert’s 1970 detailed description of the dolmen de Combe Violon  plus a printout of the area from Google Earth, I was fairly confident of finding this ‘ épave ‘ as he called it – a wreck. But after several hours of wading through waist-high box and spiny broom, kerm oak and rosemary, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]