There is a certain frisson that comes from being in the presence of antiquity. Standing by a menhir, or gazing on an ancient relic, connects us with the past. But from where does this excitement originate?

It can’t be a purely aesthetic buzz. Certainly, we may find beauty in the artefacts of the past. Yet I’m sure that the visitors to the display of Chinese terracotta warriors in Hamburg obtained the same pleasure from them as those who saw the figures in London - even though the ones in Germany turned out to be fakes.

Would they have been so thrilled if they had known the figures were modern copies? Almost certainly not. That’s in spite of the fact that their experience of them was in no way affected. The figures were behind glass. The only contact was visual. And a faithfully executed replica is likely to be visually indistinguishable from the original. It has the same physical effect, then - so the difference must be emotional.

Take another example. In our village, there is an old well, hidden down a short lane quite close to the church. The church itself is modern by local standards - mid 19th century. But there was a priory built near this spot in the 12th century and the place has had holy connections ever since.

Marking the well is a standing stone, maybe 2m high. It is formed from granite, but then so is everything around here, including our house. Standing stones conform to no rigid design guidelines, but the shape is sufficiently menhir-like. But is it a real standing stone?

What does that even mean? If you take the attitude that a menhir is a form of expression, a signifier, then anything that looks like a menhir and gives the same emotional response as a menhir must qualify as one. You might reasonably insist on the stone having been selected and positioned back in the neolithic period. Of course, many ‘real’ standing stones have been moved since - does that affect their authenticity?

I haven’t yet discovered if the ‘menhir’ is ancient. A local guidebook for the church simply mentions about the well: ‘Une stèle de granit faite d’un bloc au naturel et une croix rustique le signalent depuis quelques années’. That’s a tad ambiguous. Maybe it’s just the rustic cross that has been there ‘quelques années’.

If the ‘menhir’ is modern (if we apply that ‘quelques années’ description, it probably dates it to the 1950s) then we could regard it not as a fake or replica standing stone, but as a continuation of an ancient tradition of marking significant or auspicious sites this way. That would make it a real menhir, albeit a fairly new one.

When you’re entranced by the mysteries of the neolithic age, held by the puzzles its people have left for us, it’s all too easy to wander into the realm of fantasy. Those who long for a return to the ‘golden age’ of our pagan forebears often describe it as a time of harmony between man and nature, as a simpler and purer age in which mankind possessed powers and knowledge long lost to the dubious virtues of science and (what is frequently dismissed as) ‘civilisation’.

Hmm, really?

It was a simpler age, certainly - in the sense that amputating a leg is ’simpler’ than a course of antibiotics. It was purer if purity is defined in lack of options. And that oft-lauded harmony with nature? Maybe people then simply had no choice. You lived closer to nature because there was nowhere else to be. You were more strictly ruled by the seasons because a lack of technology left you powerless to act otherwise.

There is much evidence that life then was indeed, in Thomas Hobbes’ famous phrase, “nasty, brutish and short”. Preserved bogmen from various ages have shown the high prevalence of disease and ailments such as tooth abscesses. Life expectancy was probably less than half of what we can reasonably expect today. Violence was common, both in war and in ritual. And there is little evidence - and no reason to expect - any form of intellectual activity outside of the rigid and narrow confines of their religious and social systems.

Frankly, I wouldn’t swap one week of my life today for a lifetime back then. Today I enjoy long hours of leisure with incredible choice of how to spend it, the ability to travel and experience cultures outside my own, centuries’ worth of accumulated knowledge and art (and the ability to discover and encounter it - not least because of modern technology such as the internet and cars), true comfort in which to enjoy these things, the safety net of a (mostly) peaceful society, my health supported by modern medicine (knowledge and technology again). Stephen Fry has said that people often imagine that he might have been happier living in the 18th Century, but that he actually prefers to live right now, at the culmination of mankind’s development. I couldn’t agree more.

If we ever hope to understand the lives, abilities, dreams and challenges of stone-age man, we have to be careful not to look backwards through a dark filter of our own prejudices and desires. It seems to me that so many portrayals of a pagan golden age are rooted more in the inadequacies, fears and prejudices of today’s neo-pagans - for example, that their dismissal of modern science and technology stems from the fact that it leaves little room for their fantasies.

Or perhaps ‘beliefs’ would have been both a kinder and more accurate term there. Because what they actually propose is a form of faith.

I would never rule out the possibility that standing stones and circles are somehow connected to a form of ‘earth energy’. Dowsing does seem to work, sometimes, though I’ve never seen a truly rigid test (all ‘evidence’ I’ve seen is anecdotal or impossible to analyse rationally and failures are rarely reported). And there certainly are plenty of mysteries connected with ancient people and the relics they left behind.

But the same can be said for the artefacts, phenomena and beliefs of any religion. Christians, for example, dismiss the need for proof in much the same way that neo-pagans and new-agers dismiss science as being ‘inadequate’ for testing or validating the powers and capabilities in which they believe. It is the failing of science, they claim, that we cannot detect or measure earth spirits or the charges running along ley lines.

Yet without some degree of rationality, without some kind of reliable yardstick, we can never have any confidence that what we believe is actually anything like the truth. I would rather be certain of a few things than put my faith in a great number of unverifiable hunches. And science is the only way we have of reaching a reasonable level of certainty.

Investigating the possibility of so far unexplained phenomena is both valid and fun. To simply believe in them is lazy. To defend them against conflicting evidence, gathered within a rational, self-correcting and logical framework (such is science) is feeble-minded.

But then dismissing science as being inadequate or wrong leaves one free to indulge in magic. Today’s neo-pagans project their own desires and fears onto the monuments of the past. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to them that this brings them no closer to the people of ancient times: in fact, it creates another barrier, masking what little we actually know beneath a veneer of fantasy. You only have to look at today’s Druids to see a theme-park version of neolithic man.

The mystery is important to me, and is what draws me to these sites. Maybe there are powers at work here, but without knowing what they are, any speculation is worthless - worse, it almost guarantees that you cannot get closer to the truth of these sites and monuments because you are imposing on them fabrications of your own. These sites are mysterious because we don’t know. For me, that’s more powerful an attraction than any magic.

We always knew the heads were there. They shared our bedroom every night, quiet, unseen. Finally, we decided they should be uncovered.

Our house is old: it was built around 1500 during what is known, in this part of Normandy, as L’Epoque Anglaise (the English Era). Although the property spent part of its recent history as a near ruin, some original features remain. The massive granite blocks that surround the main door and window are carved with a decorative roll and each is surmounted by a carving depicting an inverted shield carrying a fleur-de-lys. The main window is covered by an iron grille in the middle of which is another fleur-de-lys, this time inside an inverted heart. The wooden roof wall plates are carved with a line of tooth-like dentilles. And there are stone seats and a granite sink in the living room.

The main room also boasts a huge fireplace - 2.6m wide and more than 1m deep, with the front edge of the overhanging chimney being one gigantic (though worryingly cracked) piece of granite. This is supported on two huge granite corbels that run back through the wall. Each corbel is about 40cm wide, nearly 50cm deep and more than 1.5m long, so that it pokes out of the wall on the outside of the house to achieve its cantilevering effect.

Part of the house collapsed long ago, and one disused corbel now lies abandoned in the garden, for all the world like a fallen menhir.

All the corbels are carved with a kind of fluting effect. The detail on the right-hand corbel supporting the fireplace is less ornate than the one on the left. In fact, it looks unfinished. This, we thought, is consistent with the rest of the carving. Flanking the fireplace, on the uprights supporting the corbels, are carved heads - unquestionably the best original features in the house. Until now.

The head on the left shows a classically Norman face. A band across the forehead makes it look as though he might be wearing a soldier’s helmet. The feature on the right-hand side, however, is somewhat cruder. There are no facial features - just what we took to be a deeply cleft chin. Again, we thought it was unfinished. We were wrong.

A visit from a local historian put us right. The head on the left, he said, was that of the seigneur, the master of the house. The feature on the right (image, left) represents his lady, but not her face - it is, in fact, a depiction of a far more intimate part of her body. Apparently, the seigneur’s memento would once have had a similarly bawdy embellishment, with the stone below the head carrying a large phallus. This has since been reduced, by people in a more prudish age, to a mere stump.

There are two more heads, but in the 11 years we’ve owned the house we had only barely glimpsed them once or twice. They also flank a fireplace - in the bedroom. By the way, the number of fireplaces (there’s another in the kitchen, a fourth in one of the barns and yet another in the boulangerie), the size of the granite blocks and above all the carving tell us that the house was built by a wealthy man.

The bedroom fireplace lacks a chimney - that disappeared many generations ago. And the heads - at least in all the time we’ve owned the house - had been hidden behind a large bed with built-in wardrobes. We’d never much liked the bed, but it was very French and very useful. Finally, though, we’ve got rid of it and have taken our first proper look at the carved heads. And they’re even better than we imagined - finer, indeed, than those of the main fireplace downstairs.

This time, the seigneur (see first picture) is clearly on the right-hand side, because that head has a beard. (Although, having seen some of the locals, maybe that’s not such a reliable guide.) And, luckily for him, his phallus is intact (see right), if a tad, um, stylised.

And unlike in the salon, his companion has a face (last picture, below). In fact, the head on the left-hand side of the fireplace looks remarkably similar to the one in the same location downstairs. So there’s some debate about where this fireplace depicts two males or whether the crudity of the carving and the stylised representation means that it’s hard to tell male from female (apart from when they show beards and genitals).

Anyway, we’re pleased to have finally met our guests - or maybe we’re their guests, as they were here first and will no doubt outlast us.

(Footnote: Yes, I know this has nothing to do with megaliths, but I will use this blog, from time to time, to talk about other items of historical interest in the region.)