Carnac is known for its rows of menhirs (standing stones) and dolmens (portal tombs), but before we started our hike to them, we made short tour in the town.

As said, Carnac is known for its sites of rows of standing stones (in some other parts of the world similar stones are placed in circles). The French term used for these rows is alignments, and there are three of them in Carnac: 1. Alignments of Menec consists of 1050 stones in 11 rows, and spans 1165 meters (the tallest stone is 4 meters high), 2. Alignments of Kermario consists of 1029 stones in 10 rows, with the tallest stone ‘Géant du Manio’ being more than 6 meters high, and 3.  Alignments of Kerlescan is the smallest and the best preserved one consisting of 555 stones in 13 rows. These are man-made formations, purpose of which is still not fully known, but hypotheses range from ritualistic functions to territorial markers, or elements of an ideological system, and they date back to European Middle Bronze Age. Also practically nothing is known about the people who erected these stones (their religion, social system, language, etc.) but they buried their dead, grew crops, and made pottery.

The Keriaval dolmen is an example of tombs with four funeral rooms, and it is owned by the state. This was not the last post about standing stones, there’s one more coming up about megaliths and moors of Saint-Just on our final day of the trip. The next post (Part VII) is about the hike from Carnac to and around the beach of Saint-Colomban — quite a different scenery from what we’d enjoyed so far.