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Updated: June 5, 2025
In almost all countries where megalithic structures occur certain fixed types prevail; the dolmen is the most general of these, and it is clear that many of the other forms are simply developments of this. The occurrence of structures with a hole in one of the walls and of blocks with 'cup-markings' is usual over the whole of the megalithic area.
The dolmen-graves lie in great numbers on the hill at the foot of which the spring rises, and extend down into the valley. Each dolmen lies in the centre of a stone circle. This last is in some cases formed by very large slabs set on edge, but more often by two or three courses of rough oblong blocks. Many of the graves are badly damaged.
The excavation of a tumulus in the plain of Tarbes brought to light an enormous block of granite resting on blocks of quartz. The spaces between these blocks were filled in with rubble made of small stones cemented into one mass with clay. It contained a dozen sepulchral chambers. The large dolmen of Coreoro, near Plouharnel.
M. du Chatellier speaks of several megalithic monuments in Finistere, including a central dolmen and several lateral chambers. The chambered graves at Park Cwn in Wales, and at Uley in Gloucestershire, contain side chambers, those of the former with a covered passage between them, whilst in the latter the side chambers are grouped round a central apartment.
The long barrow of Moustoir-Carnac contained four separate chambers, the western one of which is a dolmen of the kind known as GROTTES DES FEES, and is supposed to be much older than the rest of the group.
There the old dolmen, beneath which the grey wolf that ate the two children of Tornic had its lair. For a mile back they had been treading my lady's land; they had only two more leagues to ride, and one of those was crumbling under each dogged footfall.
On the granite ceiling of the crypt beneath the dolmen of the Merchants, or as it is called in Brittany the DOL VARCHANT, is engraved the figure of a large animal supposed to have been a horse, but the head of which was unfortunately broken off at some remote date. We often meet with representations of hammers, sometimes with and sometimes without handle. Part of the Mane-Lud dolmen.
At first I attributed it to practical jokers, people dressed up; but a couple of nights' vigil in the haunted district soon dissipated that theory. "'You say district, I remarked. 'Are the houses close together in the same road or valley? "'In a valley, Krantz responded 'the Valley of Dolmen. It is ten miles from here. "'Dolmen! I murmured, 'why Dolmen?
Over the sandy, wind-swept common to the left the darkness brooded, the outlines of a broken bit of sea-wall, and of some giant boulders, said to be remains of a dolmen, emerging dimly therefrom like threatening phantoms; to the right moaned the long, grey sea, and in front was the waste of salt marshes and rocks, with the windlass of a ship once wrecked in the bay, projecting its huge outline among the uncertain shadows.
When, on January 28, 1873, I had the honor of reading a paper before the New York American Geographical Society on the coincidences that exist between the monuments, customs, religious rites, etc. of the prehistoric inhabitants of America and those of Asia and Egypt I pointed to the fact that sun circles, dolmen and tumuli, similar to the megalithic monuments of America, had been found to exist scattered through the islands of the Pacific to Hindostan; over the plains of the peninsulas at the south of Asia, through the deserts of Arabia, to the northern parts of Africa; and that not only these rough monuments of a primitive age, but those of a far more advanced civilization were also to be seen in these same countries.
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