Megalithic monuments may have been around for thousands of years, but they can still take you by surprise.

Heading south out of La Roche Jaune, in the Côte d’Armor département of Brittany, I was astonished to see a huge standing stone by the side of the road. The surprise was all the greater because I’d just checked the IGN Carte de Randonnée for nearby megalithic sites and had found none.

I was sure of the road we were on, and that we couldn’t be more than a kilometre or two south-west of La Roche Jaune. Yet the IGN map – usually so reliable at marking mehirs and dolmens – showed nothing.

And it’s not like this was a small stone. It stands around three metres high, perhaps more. And while one may talk in abstract terms about the phallic symbolism of standing stones, the connection seems especially clear here. This is enhanced by the pink granite – a feature of this part of the Breton coastline. And the stone has been broken at some point and the pieces cemented back in place to form the ‘head’ of the stone.

The cement looks recent. And the stone is very clean. And so my suspicions were somewhat, um, aroused. It is such a surprise to find a stone of this magnitude to easily visible from the road, and yet not marked on the IGN chart, that I do wonder if this is a fake.

French farmers are a canny lot. It wouldn’t be beyond them to erect some random slab of stone as a tourist attraction (which might also attract grants for maintenance of the patrimoine).

If anyone has any more information on this menhir, I’d be glad to hear it.

Update (12/01/2009): Martyn (aka TheCaptain) over at The Megalithic Portal managed to find a reference to this stone on the net. The Plouguiel page at Les Côtes du Nord de l’Armorique deals mostly with the Medieval period, but mentions that the area was populated for a long time before. The ancient people of this area left several traces, among them:

… menhir de la Roche Jaune, dont l’origine remonte au néolithique. Couché, presqu’entièrement recouvert de terre et oublié de tous, il fut découvert en 1991 puis redressé en janvier 1998.

Fallen, almost completely covered by earth and forgotten by all, the neolithic menhir was discovered in 1991 and ‘restored’ in 1998.

So it’s real. Well that’s a relief.