Wednesday 2 July 2014

Brittany Holiday Part 2 - We Stumble Upon a Megalith

Gosh I hope you're not fed up with all these holiday pics!

To tell you the truth, I love sharing my photos and I know you enjoy them from your lovely comments (thank you!) but these posts are as much for me as I'm pretty rubbish at printing out photos and organising albums.....

So here goes....Brittany Holiday Part 2....

An overnight stop at a lovely aire at Locmariaquer on the South Coast led to a long walk along the La Falaise beach....


Chris demonstrating how quickly the tide comes in......


Lots of seaweed and rock pools....



and a jelly fish.........



As we returned from the beach, we spotted this menhir or standing stone and went to investigate.....


As we got closer we could see there were several large stones or megaliths on the ground. Chris said he thought it was a dolmen which I remembered was a some sort of ancient tomb....


After some research later on, I discovered that this place is Les Pierres Plates (the flat stones....makes sense!).....a neolithic burial chamber. 


Chris and Spencer were keen to investigate further.......


It was fascinating and very atmospheric.......so old.....around 3000 BC.....


Chris discovered a decorated pillar.....


......so beautiful.......but not yet deciphered......looks like a maze or map?


I found this photo which shows Les Pierres Plates from above.....pretty impressive.....

Courtesy of http://locmariaquer.info/f10f_pierplat.htm

Apparently many of these stone dolmens would have been covered in small stones or earth but weather over time has worn these away and now just the stone burial chambers are left.


Les Pierres Plates have really piqued my interest and I'd love to visit some of the many other megaliths that are found in Brittany.

To be continued......Part 3 coming up soon.....hooray!.....(it will be the last part!)

Maggie xx

3 comments:

  1. Oh how cool to get to explore the burial chamber! What a neat find.

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  2. Fascinating! I went to Central America years ago and explored some ruins down there. I think I could have been an archaeologist. I find it all so interesting. Those burial chambers are amazing. How they built things like that back then when they didn't even have a back hoe! LOL!

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  3. VERY interesting! Thank you for sharing! So old and mysterious, right?

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