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Updated: June 22, 2025
Centuries old, some of these massive walls must be often constructed doubtless from older monuments of dim religious purpose, just as some of the gate-posts were once menhirs and monoliths. The villagers have their rugged old churches, to which they resort for baptisms and burials, but on Sundays they go in greater numbers to the chapel or meeting-house.
Dolmens are often "houses of dwarfs," a name perhaps suggested or at least helped by the small holes cut in some of them; they are "huts" or "caves of fairies," they are "kitchens" or "forges of the devil," while menhirs are called his arrows, and cromlechs his cauldrons. In France we have stones of various saints, while in England many monuments are connected with King Arthur.
Under the name of megalithic monuments we include TUMULI, DOLMENS, CROMLECHS, MENHIRS, and COVERED AVENUES. It may at first sight appear strange to include tumuli amongst stone monuments, but they almost always enclose a dolmen, a cist, or a crypt communicating with the outside by a covered passage.
The Saxons were determined to-day to go farther afield than their walks had hitherto taken them. The local guide-book mentioned some prehistoric menhirs and a chambered barrow on the top of Red Ridge, a distant hill, so they had fixed that as their Mecca.
In Brittany and in Scotland these cup-like sculptures are found on rocks and menhirs, on the walls of sepulchral chambers, on stones forming the sides of KISTVAENS, accompanied in many instances with radiated circles, which do not, however, help us to understand them better.
The historian speaks of such monuments in the earliest of existing records; Homer refers to them in the Iliad, and in the Bible we find it related that the Lord ordered Joshua to set up twelve stones in memory of the crossing of the Jordan by the Israelites. Alignments are groups of menhirs set up in one or wore rows.
There is nothing therefore to show that they were erected so as to face the direction of the sun-rise, or of any particular planet's. We will now pass on to the numerous stone cromlechs which are to be found, frequently in proximity to the menhirs and table-stones.
The great broken menhir of Locmariaker, with Caesar's table. Some archaeologists in view of the shape of certain menhirs and the superstitions connected with then, think they must be phallic monuments.
The neighbouring island of Corsica also contains important megalithic remains. They consist of thirteen dolmens, forty-one menhirs, two alignements, and a cromlech. They fall geographically into two groups, one in the extreme north and the other in the extreme south of the island. The stones used are chiefly granite and gneiss.
Taking the different stones in order, the menhirs are large upright stones varying in height from 2 or 3 ft. to 12 or 14 ft., but in exceptional instances rising to a more considerable elevation, the great monolith at Nartiang, in the Jaintia Hills, being 27 ft. high, and 2 1/2 ft. thick. A photograph of this stone has been included.
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