I’ve lost count of how many times I looked at the sign and thought, “I must take a look one day”. Then the sign disappeared.

It wasn’t much of a sign, to be sure. Crudely painted, it gave the impression the menhir was the kind of tourist attraction you might find on Craggy Island or some down-at-heel English seaside town – the kind where you pay £5 to guess the weight of a sheep. I suspected I might find the menhir to be a pile of rubble or just a slightly overlarge boulder. And yet, the sign called to me every time we went shopping at Super U in Gorron. It was, after all, right next to the small industrial estate that holds the supermarket and a scattering of light industry.

We’d been told that the path to the menhir was strewn with rubbish – an unpleasant walk. And until recently, that was probably true. But the reason the sign has disappeared is that the whole area has been cleaned up. There are the beginnings of a new car park next to the main Ambrieres road. From there, you walk across a a picnic area and into a patch of woodland. The industrial area next door is largely invisible, though clearly audible during work hours.

The path curves around as it leads into increasingly picturesque countryside. You might be tempted, as I was, to continue following it, down a lane bordered by old and dense bocage hedging, full of mature trees. In fact, to find the menhir, you have to turn off, through a gap in the bocage (currently with no signposting) and take a narrow track that leads along a row of trees on the other side of which is a small stream.

The menhir is soon visible. It stands in the field on the opposite side of the stream, but someone has thoughtfully provided a small wooden footbridge. The field is used for cattle, so there’s a single-strand electric fence – and you need to pick your path carefully.

The standing stone is huge – perhaps 3m high. It stands hard by the stream. And although it’s still quite close to that industrial estate, and right on the edge of the town, the setting is tranquil and timeless.

The lighting was imperfect on this first visit. We turned up at 16:30 on a October afternoon. The stone was in shade from the surrounding trees and the sun was lighting a patch of the field beyond rather too brightly. I need to revisit earlier in the day. But I will: this site is only eight minutes from home. I’ve got a feeling it will become a regular haunt.

Back at the car park, I noticed that the house across the road, perched on a rise in the terrain and maybe 300m from the stone, is called ‘La Roche’ (the rock). Presumably, the name is much older than the house and might stand some investigation. At the roadside, there’s a calvary – a Christian cross. These are a common sight in France, and while the Christian church is known to have usurped many pagan sites, one shouldn’t read too much into the presence of the cross. Local councils often erect them as a way of using up the year’s budget, and this one appears to date from 2006!

This is what started it. A spur-of-the-moment visit to this passage grave rekindled my fascination with megalithic sites.

A friend told me about it. “It’s in a really beautiful spot,” he said. He was right.

From Brecé, we’d had to navigate increasingly narrow roads down a series of shallow valleys. You park the car in a wide spot in the road and walk 50m down a lane created by two bocage hedges, then skirt a small wood. The tomb appears suddenly, nestled into the edge of this wood, almost as if carved into the land. Passing through the entrance you find a chamber that crosses the entrance passageway to make a T-shape. This chamber is perhaps 5-6m long in total.

A sign at the site dates the tomb to 2400 BCE.

The site is better enjoyed from the outside, though. It somehow makes the woodland feel ancient and profoundly peaceful.

Standing stones and circles have always exercised a strange attraction for me. Back in the mists of time – no, not that far back, but when I was at art school, we visited a number of sites in Derbyshire, including the famous Arbor Low. I was hooked – by the monumental strangeness of the megaliths themselves, their harmonious relationship with the landscape and the general spookiness of what one imagined took place at these sites.

I read, and was thoroughly convinced by, View Over Atlantis – sold on its message that ancient man possessed knowledge, insights and powers that we have since lost.

I’ve grown up a lot since then. I tried to re-read the book and found it embarrassingly new age, intellectually flaky and entirely unconvincing. But the stones still exert some kind of power over me, something I’d been ignoring.

We now live in rural Normandy. There are menhirs and dolmens everywhere. Our friends, just down the road, have a standing stone in their field. There’s another a few hundred metres from the supermarket where we do our weekly shop. So this is my new personal project – to document and explore the stones and their relationship to the landscape.