FT261

Heading down to the far south west of France, down to the ancient, arid landscapes of Languedoc and Roussillon, most fortean travellers will be primed for the mysteries of Rennes-le-Château. It may therefore come as a surprise that this dusty country harbours hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Neolithic dolmens and standing stones. The gigantic monuments of Brittany we know about: but here, in the heat haze of the Midi? Yet leave the autoroute and soon they appear, towering monoliths (menhirs) and squat dolmens, often marking an ancient crossroads, and equally often rendered inaccessible by barbed wire.

And this landscape hides something that even Brittany cannot claim to offer: massive stone circles, exceeded in size, in one case at least, only by that of Avebury in England. Just standing there in the undergrowth, unvisited, obscure.

I had read about these cromlechs (as they are generally known in France) and, intrigued, decided to investigate them. They can be found on the Causse de Blandas in the département of Gard, north-west of Montpellier. A great limestone plateau, the Causse rises sudd­enly just to the south of the Cévennes. Driving there on the minor road from the town of Le Vigan, the landscape changes after Montdardier. From a verd­ant scene of oak and chestnut trees, it becomes a dry, stony, prickly place. It rarely rains on the Causse, and temperatures can be high. At up to 1,000m above sea level, it can also be windy, as my wife and I discovered.

We took a wrong turning or two on narrow, bumpy roads, but then, sudd­enly, just to one side of the D113, a couple of kilometres north-east of the village of Blandas itself, appeared our first circle, plainly visible in the scrub. At up to 120m across, the magnificent cromlech of Peyrarines is breathtaking, too large to capture properly in a photograph. It stands on somewhat raised ground, in a natural bowl formed by the surrounding hills, a circle of 40 or so stones varying in height from about 50cm to 1.8m surrounding a rather elegant, 2.15m-tall monolith. Dumpy, pyramidal blocks are interspersed with taller, more slender columns. Faces stare at you from the stones. Whether simulacra or sculpted, intended or a trick of the light, it is impossible to say. It must be said that most seem brooding, disapproving, even malevolent, and that the whole site has a slightly sinister atmosphere. One stone in particular has a distinctly menacing aspect: we quickly dubbed it the hobgoblin stone. Despite our excitement, this was not a place we wanted to spend much time in.

Our unease admittedly also had a more immediate human cause. Fenced off from the road by barbed wire, Peyrarines is clearly marked as private property. It is imprudent to trespass in France, and farmers can be trigger-happy, especially in the hunting season. We had even been pointedly told that local gossip labels the owner of the field where Peyrarines stands as méchant (“a nasty piece of work”). Finding out if that is true or not is hardly worth the risk. Admire from the road, and drive on.

We drove on to Blandas village, turned right onto the D843, and after 2km or so located a second circle, La Rigalderie, standing on the slope of a low hill rising to our right. Rigalderie is ever so slightly smaller than Peyrarines, coming in at around 106m in diameter. Its 22 generally lozenge-shaped stones also tend to be smaller, the tallest being around 1.55m high. Several of its stones still lie flat on the ground, while parts of the lower sect­ion of the cromlech seem to be missing altogether. The central stone is relatively puny: someone has topped it with a rock resembling a human head, giving it from some angles the aspect of a kneeling monk.

Despite the rather shocking assertion of modernity in the form of an electricity pylon placed on the summit just above the circle, La Rigalderie has none of the malevolent presence of Peyrarines. Rather than hobgoblin darkness, a lighter spirit of benevolent mischief seems to prevail here. The stone faces, too, seem more welcoming, inviting you to stay longer to join in the merriment. Or perhaps it’s just that, in stark contrast to Peyrarines, this site, with its thoughtfully placed gates, is freely open to the public.

And there our expedition faltered. The ruined remnants of a third circle were to be found, we had heard, out on the Causse near the village of Rogues. Disappointingly, however, we failed to locate them.

What we did discover on those days spent poking around old stones is that the circles stand embedded in a landscape rich in Neolithic monuments. Estimates vary, but in addition to the cromlechs there seem to be at least 55 standing stones and 25 dolmens on the Causse, weaving a complex pattern across its silent contours. A couple of hundred metres from Peyrarines, for instance, where the D113 intersects with the D513, you can find the Dolmen du Planàs. This structure is itself guarded by the richly grooved bulk of the Menhir de Serre de la Gleisa, rising in a field a few metres distant. Near La Rigalderie, also at an ancient crossroads, stand the twinned stones of the Menhir des Combes and the Menhir d’Avernat, their ragged, twisted blocks of dolomite contrasting with the limestone of the other monuments.

But for me at any rate the chief fascination of the area lies with the cromlechs themselves. Stone circles have long held me spellbound. I remember staying with relatives in Salisbury, and listening with rapt attention to their talk of Stonehenge. When we finally visited the great temple I was struck by a blissful sense of rightness and harmony, as if I belonged there. I must have been about nine.

Later in life, a similar feeling has often overcome me – even overwhelmed me – on visiting these places of power. I started to look for at least partial explan­ations of my experience, and found them in the works of John Michell and Paul Devereux. Each of these writers in his own way describes how Neolithic monuments can act as places of revelation, where the stones, their geometry, the heavens, the Earth, the four elements, ritual, music, all come together to lay bare the hidden, harmonious, perhaps eternal order behind the visible world. The builders of Stonehenge and the other circles were no shaggy primitives: they used that revelation to enchant human souls and imaginations, so that people lived a beautiful and deeply fulfilling myth. [1] Standing there today, intact and unchanging, the stones can still do their work, enchanting us in the same way they enchanted their builders. Then the passage of time disappears in a flash, and we stand there sharing the same revelation, dreaming the same dream.

If that can happen among the crowds at Stonehenge, how much more powerful may the effect be in the isolated, little-visited stone circles of Languedoc? It was this thought which had drawn me there. My eagerness to experience the cromlechs was fed further when I read that each of them had originally been paired with a second circle. These companions had been destroyed only recently, Peyrarines’s by roadworks and La Rigalderie’s when the electricity pylon was erected. The ruinous cromlech near Rogues had also apparently been one of a pair. What could this repeated duality have meant? Were the circles each dedicated to one element of a polarity: man/woman; day/night; Sun/Moon; summer/winter? Would there be a palpable difference in atmosphere between the relatively intact circle and the site of its ruined twin? Why was in each case only one destroyed? It was intriguing.

Unfortunately, these questions remain for the moment unanswered, as the second circle was in each case nowhere to be found. The mounds of rubble around the base of the pylon at La Rigalderie seemed to me no different from the mounds of rubble which are strewn over the whole landscape. I saw nothing indicating a second circle at Peyrarines. I do not wish to imply that they never existed, but my doubts about them grew.

I also found it strange that my researches uncovered no folklore associated with the circles. Which was odd, bearing in mind their size and visibility. Various standing stones nearby had their traditional histories (such as having been lobbed to their present site by giants or devils) and customs (serving as places where oaths were solemnised), but nothing of the sort was attached to the most remarkable monuments in the area.

When I began to look a little more closely at the recent history of the circles, it became clear that they had in fact gone undetected until the years immediately following World War II. Their rediscovery was the work of a remarkable woman named Adrienne Durand-Tullou (1914–2000), who dedicated her life to studying the Causse, its people, their beliefs and ways of life, and the ancient monuments that punctuate its landscape. At some point in their long history, the cromlechs’ stones had toppled – or been pushed – over, become obscured by the undergrowth, and then forgotten. It was Durand-Tullou who, in the course of her researches, recognised the significance of the fallen blocks. It was also Durand-Tullou who was responsible for restoring them (Peyrarines, for instance, was re-erected in the summer of 1972).

Clearly, no matter how meticulous her work was, the present placing of the stones cannot exactly reproduce their original arrangement. A certain amount of modification, however unintended, must have gone on. It is even possible, I learnt, that Durand-Tullou added some stones to Peyrarines, to fill in perceived gaps.

Similar modifications are still going on. When I visited it, La Rigalderie, for example, clearly had a stone standing at its centre. Yet in 1989 Durand-Tullou had noted that it “would appear that there was no central stone” there. [2]

Perhaps, then, even such ancient stones cannot really represent for us the unchanging endurance of realities. I thought of the legends attached to some circles (such as the Nine Ladies on Stanton Moor in Derbyshire) that they consist of people turned to stone for dancing on the Sabbath. Many of these megaliths, it seems, still dance their merry round, at Full Moon, at midday, or at other appointed times. Dancers change partners as new music is heard. New merry-makers join in. The stones, not for the first time, get their second wind and leap like lords.

The circles are perhaps no royal road back to past mindsets, no petrified Golden Age. But they may perform a wildly intricate dance, the cosmic dance of consciousness, forever changing, forever turning. We can join in if we are open to its strange rhythms and harmonies, and add our own steps. Adrienne Durand-Tullou joined in.

Perhaps one day all possible perm­utations of steps and partners will have been explored, all possible chords and discords will have been played, and all will have been integrated into the dance. Then everything that has been will be revealed at once.

But until that happens: tap those toes, wiggle those hips, and get down to the South of France.



I’d like to thank the members of staff of the Musée Cévenol, the Mairie, and the Tourist Office in Le Vigan. My especial thanks go to Pierre Valette.



Notes
1 See, for example, John Michell: The New View over Atlantis, Thames and Hudson, 1983; and Paul Devereux: Symbolic Landscapes: The Dreamtime Earth and Avebury’s Open Secrets, Gothic Image, Glastonbury, 1992.
2 Adrienne Durand-Tullou: Menhirs and Dolmens on the Causse, Traces, Le Vigan, 1989, p20.