We hadn’t intended to visit Le Petit Ménec – and that would have been a huge mistake.

Most of the guide books, if they mention it at all, treat it as the least important of the Carnac alignments. Then we bought the Michelin guide to Brittany.

A quick aside here about guide books. It’s terribly important to find one that matches your way of travelling and your outlook. A couple of months before making this trip, we’d bought the Rough Guide to Brittany and Normandy. And we found it both irritating and useless. It’s written for young backpackers and so spends a lot of its time telling you how to get there and how to stay cheaply (irrelevant to us). Worse, it shares all the prejudices of youth – deeming places ‘boring’ or worthless if they don’t offer facile distractions. It assumes you can’t possibly want to go somewhere that doesn’t have a bar, club or shops.

The Michelin guide is far more adult. It assumes you are driving and it concentrates on telling you what there is to see and appreciate. It is, as far as I’m concerned, the best guide for the region.

And what it said was: don’t miss Le Petit Ménec. I couldn’t agree more.

This is the most easterly, and among the smallest of the alignments. It is not well signposted – you have to hunt for it down small, forest lanes. In November, the woodland was beautiful, still in its autumn colours picked out by a sharp winter light. On this morning, the sky was cloudless, though winter was making its presence felt by the sharpness of the air.

We arrived at the north end of the alignments, from where they curve east-south-east. There is no car park, just a rough lay-by. Nor is there a fence. Indeed, it has the feel of private land and the path through the alignments seems to be a favourite route for cyclists and locals making their daily walk. Mind you, that’s an assumption based on the very few people we saw there.

The standing stones – few of which are any appreciable size – run down the edge of the woodland, and so are mostly under a canopy of trees (don’t bother looking for the stones on Google Maps – they’re invisible under the foliage). This makes for a very peaceful, contemplative setting. After the initial group, the space, bounded by old, dry-stone walls, opens out and the number of rows increases. This area gave the impression of an arena, a defined area populated by a subdued crowd of stones and skinny trees. Trish and I each felt that the stones looked like a gathering of people upon whose silent and mysterious ceremony we had stumbled. Kind of like the way a bar-room falls silent when a stranger enters. But the effect was not hostile: it was as though they were simply waiting patiently and politely for us to leave.

Someone had had a bonfire here, a ring of small rocks enclosed the ashes (and the twisted remains of a bicycle wheel and some empty beer cans). The setting imbued even this act of littering with a ceremonial veneer.

While the size and number of the standing stones in the main alignments, at Le Ménec and Kermario, boast of the importance of those sites, Le Petit Ménec was the place where we had the strongest emotional response, a place where the inscrutable and mysterious significance of the stones was felt rather than demanded. And, mixed with the young trees, surrounded by woodland, and with no fence or obvious signs of restoration or management, this was the alignment most in harmony with the landscape. Even Zola was happy among these stones (although he’s on guard duty in the picture, right).

Le Petit Ménec was the only megalithic site we visited during the day. It was enough. It was the best. It was the highlight of this trip. Don’t miss it.

Just a few weeks after deciding to embark on this project I found myself at ground zero for megaliths. Carnac.

We like to holiday in Brittany during autumn or winter. On a previous visit, we mooted the idea of driving up to Carnac, but were too busy.  It was a disappointment as visiting the alignments had been a dream for 30 years.

When I first became interested in megalithic sites, as part of an art school project back in 1977, I read about Carnac and its thousands of stones arranged in mysterious rows with both fascination and despair. The despair came from knowing I would never see them. For a working class boy living in Cheshire, the idea of travelling to France just to visit some stones was too fantastic. Now I live about 3.5 hours drive away (3 hours if I drive like a Frenchman) and have at last realised that dream.

I will blog about the sites we visited and sights we saw in subsequent postings – with some pix, once I’ve finished working on them. But first, a general impression.

I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, the main Carnac alignments are now fenced-off, but in the off-season you can stroll freely about the main part of Le Ménec and Kerlescan. And Le Petit Ménec isn’t fenced and is possibly the most beautiful and moving of the monuments.

Other sites weren’t so impressive and my advice to anyone new to the area would be to seek out the more remote and less-visited sites. Le Grand Menhir Brisé, for example, notwithstanding its astonishing size (albeit broken into four pieces) and the accompanying cairns, is in a carefully manicured enclosure, with hedge and visitor centre, hemmed in by modern housing, and feels like a bland piece of sculpture in a small, municipal park. All sense of mystery, any intimation that this may once have been an auspicious place, has been eradicated. It’s like a neolithic theme park. I called it ‘MegalithWorld’ but Trish, my wife, came up with the better, if more savage, ‘McMegalith’. We encountered a few McMegaliths – perhaps a reflection of just how common they are in this area.

Far more interesting, more intimate and infinitely more spooky was the nearby dolmen of ‘Les Pierres Plates’ – but more of that later.

For now, another couple of bits of advice for new visitors:

• The best maps are IGN’s ‘Carte de Randonnée’ series. These are 1:25,000 scale (1cm = 250m). They are designed for walkers and are much more useful than the same organisation’s ‘Carte de Promenade’ (1:100,000). IGN, by the way, is the French equivalent, near enough, of the Ordnance Survey.
• Even at this scale, not everything is marked, so keep your eyes peeled. We went on a walk from the Kerzerho alignments at Erdeven to the dolmens of Mané-Braz (highly recommended) and found a few stones not marked on the chart.
• Autumn is a good time to visit. With the leaves off the trees, you get better light on the monuments, there are fewer grockles to get in the way of your pictures, and you can stroll freely about the fenced-off alignments at Carnac.
• Buy ‘Le Guide des Mégalithes du Morbihan’ by Gabriel le Cam (published by Coop Breizh) if you have even just basic french. It’s a good visual guide to the sites, with at least one photo of each. It’s not so hot at pinpointing where each site is, so you’ll need to cross-reference with a map or another guide, but it gives you an excellent idea of what to expect at each site, and therefore lets you prioritise more easily.

That last point is important. There are so many menhirs and dolmens in this area that you become blasé – and picky. We found ourselves spotting megaliths while driving and thinking, ‘nah, not good enough’. The locals practically use them as doorstops. In fact, new ones are being discovered all the time, much to the annoyance of developers and individuals who want to build houses.

In France, having your house built to order is very common. You buy a patch of land and have a bungalow (‘pavillon’) built on it. That is, unless the digger unearths a dolmen or menhir, at which point all building work stops and an area of one hectare around the discovered rock becomes protected. That’s good, of course, though it does mean (in a country where breaking the rules is the national sport) that builders are motivated to just bulldoze the site and tell no-one.

All the same, for the megalith hunter, there’s more than enough to entrance and amaze you on the ‘Côte des Mégalithes’. About which, more later…