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.

I hadn’t expected them to be quite so close to the town. Heading out from the centre, we found ourselves at the visitor’s car park for the Le Ménec alignments almost immediately. A few stones peeked tantalisingly over the rise on the opposite side of the main road, but we resisted the urge to dive straight in. I’d waited 30 years for this: it had to be done properly.

After a fast visit to the visitor’s centre, to buy guide books, we took our first real look from the viewing platform on top of the building. It’s a staggering sight. For anyone accustomed to seeing standing stones alone or in ragged circles, to gaze on the meandering rows of Le Ménec almost beggars belief.

This is the most westerly alignment. The rows contain around 1,150 menhirs, with the standing stones diminishing in size and the lines edging closer together as you head east.

Like most of the Carnac alignments, Les Alignements du Ménec are closed off by a low, green fence. In peak months, you are allowed in only by arrangements and as part of guided tours. Out of season, however, you can wander freely around the main part of the Le Ménec alignments, from 9am to 5pm (in November, when we were there, that ruled out sunrise and sunset photographs). This protection may be irritating to some, and the locals were furious about it - many still are. But this entire area of the Morbihan département has a fragile ecosystem. Soil erosion is a particular problem. Having countless tourists tramping around the stones destroys the vegetation - particularly the heather and gorse - and that subsequently threatens to topple the stones. The restriction on access is a responsible measure to protect these monuments for the future.

The stones at the western end are truly huge. By the time you get to the road that splits the Ménec group, they are down to waist height. Even a casual examination reveals that the lines are far from orderly: suggestions that this monument was some kind of astronomical computer are hard to credit. True, the majority of the stones have been ‘restored’ to their current positions, primarily during the 19th Century, but such restoration would probably have tended to greater precision, rather than less. Whatever the function of the stones, they make an impressive statement in the landscape.

The eastern section of the Ménec alignments is not open to the public, but is less impressive anyway and quickly peters out.

We continued east, ignoring the small (and fenced off) Kérabus group and spent the next couple of hours at Les Alignements de Kermario. This is the longest of the alignments, with around 1,000 stones. Alas, it is entirely fenced off, though there is an astonishing view from the old, derelict windmill (fitted with a modern metal, and slightly wobbly, viewing platform) about two-thirds of the way along.

What struck me most about Kermario was the variety of shapes. Current thinking is that the shapes are, in fact, entirely arbitrary and random. Around 1764, the Comte de Caylus, one of the founders of archeology in France, attempted (without success) to read the stones as ciphers, as though each row was a line of text written in ancient symbols. Most archaeologists today accept that the shapes are the result of natural erosion, the stones having been quarried from surface locations, rather than mined.

For this trip, we were staying in a gite just outside Erdeven. On our way back, we stumbled across the Kerzerho alignments, on the south-east of the town - utterly unmissable because the road cuts through one end, isolating a handful of stones on the south-west side. Passing by the site you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a quarry, or the yard of a particularly ambitious monumental mason. The stones, many of them very big, appear jumbled at first, as though abandoned or unfinished. Seeing the alignment takes a bit of effort.

There’s no fence here. We found children playing happily on some of the stones, which seemed oddly appropriate. Perhaps that’s because, for me, one of the most compelling impressions created by these monuments is one of joy and optimism. They are the work of people who contemplated the future with hope and confidence, I feel. That’s an entirely emotional response, of course, based on no intellectual foundation. As such, it cannot be denied!

The main group comprises around 165 menhirs, but the proximity to the road and the park-like surroundings don’t make for an auspicious location. The same was true of the the Carnac Le Ménec and Kermario alignments. They’re not exactly McMegaliths , but it’s difficult to achieve a sense of wonder and entrancement with trucks roaring past.

We spotted some more standing stones across a field and found ourselves face to face with the vast menhirs of the Alignements de la Table du Sacrifice. These were among the largest and most impressive standing stones we would see on the whole trip. They form another alignment that winds down a wooded path to the ‘table’ itself - a recumbent stone next to another large menhir. These are on a path that, at the time we arrived, was being used by cows going in to be milked. At other times, it’s used by ramblers - one of many route de randonnée in the area. The path, bordered by gnarly oaks, appeared ancient - you could easily picture yourself in medieval times. We wanted to explore more, but the light was failing. We swore we would return.