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.

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.

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.

This was the day Trish dubbed me ‘Megalith Man’ – a superhero with all the special powers of … a rock. Oh well…

We started early with a drive to Locmariaquer, situated on a small peninsula that frames the west side of the Gulf of Morbihan. Our objective was one of the most famous sites of the region – indeed, one of the most famous megaliths in the world – Le Grand Menhir Brisé. ‘Big Broken Stone’ might not sound like much of an attraction – DisneyWorld doesn’t have a great deal to worry about – but there is a certain magnificence to the idea of stone age man raising a 280-tonne, 20-metre high stone. Whatever they were celebrating, they obviously felt it deeply.

Of course, it was shut. Being one of the most famous sites, it’s kept behind a fence, with entry through the visitor centre (and a fee of 5 € a head). We were there an hour before opening time (10am in the off-season). No matter: there’s plenty to see in this area.

First, we took a look in the nearby cemetery. This wasn’t always a graveyard – somewhere under those bones is a Roman amphitheatre. Tucked in one corner is a large grave monument with a crucifix carved on to the front of what looks, for all the world, like a menhir. It’s a Victorian-era grave. Maybe the ‘standing stone’ is just a stylised tribute to the region, or maybe it really is a menhir, stolen for the purpose.

We drove a short while to a nearby dolmen, chosen at random. By a stroke of luck, we had stumbled on one of the best of its type. The Dolmen des Pierres Plates is close to the beach, its covering stones visible among the dunes but the passageway and chamber still mostly underground. It is a rare type, with the passage angled, turning left through about 60 degrees after a couple of metres.

The site’s keepers have allowed a few holes to appear between the capstones and the ground, so some daylight penetrates at strategic places. But I was glad to have a couple of torches with me, especially as I had to crouch very low.

One shaft of daylight strikes a beautifully carved stone. There are other carvings too. There is a side chamber just beyond the turn in the passageway, and a large (but thin) stone nearly blocks the end of the passage creating a chamber behind it.

I spent a long time down there, shooting pictures with a combination of flash, the meagre daylight and ‘painting’ selected stones with the light from the torch.

Trish loved it too, especially the carvings. But Zola, our dog, wanted nothing to do with it. The reluctance to enter a dolmen, that we’d seen at Mané Kerioned, became out-and-out refusal. This was strange behaviour for him. He’s an outstanding guard dog. Wherever we walk, he insists on taking point duty, walking ahead of us to fend off any danger. And he’s not afraid of confined spaces or the dark. He had no hesitation in running in and around the derelict German fortifications on the beach near our gite, even when the tide was starting to lap at their openings. But no amount of cajoling or dragging would get him into that dolmen. He’s not afraid of Nazi ghosts but obviously has to draw the line somewhere…

On the way back to Locmariaquer, we stopped to photograph a single standing stone and the tumulus de Mané-er-H’roueg. The latter is hidden along a narrow lane between houses (the wall in this lane, at one point, looks to have been made from a menhir). The tumulus has the appearance of a quarry. There’s a stone staircase (looks relatively modern) leading to the burial chamber itself. This boasts some simple carving but is otherwise fairly bland. It is some way underground, however, and you do get a sense of the weight of stone above you. Zola was happy to come down the steps but point-blank refused to enter the chamber.

Then back to Le Grand Menhir Brisé. The guide books say that visits are by guided tour. Once again, however, we benefited from visiting out of season. We were the only people there and could wander freely – visite libre.

The Grand Menhir, even broken into four pieces, is impressively huge. There is no telling when it was toppled, though current thinking is that it might have been within a few hundred years of being raised. Fairly recent excavations have revealed signs of a number of other menhirs raised in a line with the big one. It may be part of one of these that is now a capstone in the Tables des Marchands dolmen that stands just yards from the Grand Menhir. Another part of this same stone (identified by the carvings on the two pieces, which match up like a jigsaw) is to be found in the dolmen on Gavrinis island, 4km away. And the large rock that caps the Er-Grah tumulus, also alongside the Grand Menhir, may be a third piece from the same stone.

This raises the fascinating idea that neolithic man placed no great value in the stones themselves – that while their function may have been sacred, the stones themselves were not. It also demonstrates that we cannot regard megalithic society, and its monuments, as a single, consistent entity. If it was neolithic people who toppled the Grand Menhir, what was their reason? Was there a change in religion? Or was it more social or political? If the stones were raised as a function of the status and powers of a priestly class, perhaps that class lost its status. This is all speculation, as much else about this period. But we must be careful not to get too dewy-eyed and mystical about these things, because it’s possible that the original owners and users of these monuments were not nearly so romantic.

The Table des Marchands dolmen is also impressively large. The sun was still low and cast interesting patterns inside the large burial chamber – one of the few dolmens in which one can happily stand upright. There is some carving, most notably on the large stele opposite the entrance, covered with a crosier (shepherd’s crook) motif. A nearby sign asks you not to touch this stone – which we obeyed, though we temporarily removed the sign to take pictures – one of the advantages of being there alone!

The site is also home to the Er-Grah tumulus – basically a big pile of stones. This remained largely undiscovered until recently. The main section, with its burial chamber (which is not open, so you can’t go in) has been known about for some time – at least since the 19th Century (although it had already been plundered by then). But in 1991, excavators started to uncover more of the tumulus, and by the following year they had revealed a structure 140 metres long! And that’s after a significant amount of it had disappeared: the north end of the tumulus was known as Er Vinglé – the Breton word for ‘quarry’ because that’s how it had been used – as a source of stones.

These three monuments are important sites and a visit is obligatory if you’re in the area and haven’t been before. But as I mentioned before, this is theme-park archeology, a site so carefully and perfectly preserved that it has become a museum exhibit, robbed of atmosphere. I was glad we visited. I doubt we’d go again.

In the afternoon, we drove to Carnac’s Kerlescan alignments. This is the most easterly of what are regarded the ‘main’ sets of stones -by which I guess they mean those in need of protecting with a fence. Fortunately, the gate is left open during the day and you’re free to wander around. At the western end of the group, lines of stones form three sides of a near-rectangle, the fourth being occupied by what’s left (which isn’t much) of a long barrow. As usual, the standing stones at the western end of the lines are huge, diminishing and converging as you move east. Although there’s a riding school right up against the Kerlescan site (and some of the stones seem to have been moved to make way for it), the surrounding woodland makes this a very peaceful and picturesque place.

Once again, however, Zola had moments of doubt. He was profoundly suspicious of the large standing stones you see at the left-hand end of the row in the photo (above right). He wouldn’t go near them.

The photography was challenging, with lots of fast-moving cumulus making for highly unpredictable light. I found myself shooting into sun a great deal, and discovered just how much my 18-70mm Nikkor lens likes to flare at the least opportunity.

The gorse and heather are especially thick here – which I discovered every time I knelt to take a shot.

We walked around the riding school and along a footpath that took us deep into the woods to find Le Géant du Manio and Le Quadrilatère de Crucuno (or du Manio, as some have it). It’s the latter you find first and the effect is magical. One moment you are enjoying a walk in the woods: the next, you are faced with a strange, inscrutable construction of obviously ancient provenance. It helped that the sun was getting very low now, so we saw the Quadrilatère in veiled and dappled light.

The low stones create a rectangle that looks like an arena for some arcane ceremony. In fact, it’s believed that these are the retaining stones for a long-gone tumulus. Whatever the explanation, there is a definite sense that one is on sacred ground.

The Quadrilatère had so stolen my attention that I missed seeing the ‘Giant’ at first – which is surprising given that it stands some 6.5m high! It is the tallest stone in the Carnac group. It is given a respectful space, the trees having been cleared back to form an open area stretching from the Quadrilatère. At first, this bare ground appeared disconcertingly like a parade ground, or perhaps a car park. After we had spent a little while there, however, contemplating the stone in the golden, broken light coming through the trees, this open space took on a more ceremonial aspect.

It does make the setting somewhat boring for photography, however. We were joined by another couple. The husband busied himself taking snaps while the wife complained that they had missed the light because it was behind the trees. They left. Soon after, faint shafts of sunlight began hitting the menhir. I moved into the surrounding woodland to get my shots, having to use some relatively low shutter speeds. Fortunately, I was using a monopod. I think these may be among the best shots I got on this trip. I’m still working on them but will post a note as soon as I add them to the portfolio. They place the menhir very much in the context of the landscape, so much so that it is not immediately obvious, and has to be discovered.

Walking back to the car, we found that the light had become very rich indeed. I fired off some more shots of the Kerlescan stones, now in a much more subtle mood. It’s obvious that I will have to revisit these sites many times, in different seasons and different lights.

Things weren’t going well. Here’s a technical tip for you: if you decide to take your desktop Mac with you on holiday, and opt for the cordless keyboard and mouse, first check that you haven’t switched off Bluetooth. Logging into a Mac without a keyboard is problematic. I won’t bore you with the details, but the solution involved buying a USB keyboard and borrowing a USB mouse. It was on our way back from the shop that we found the Mané Kerioned dolmens.

They are by a main road, on a rise nearly surrounded (as so much is in this part of Brittany) by beautiful pine forest. Two of the dolmens are on the surface, their covering tumuli having disappeared. They have that massive, Flintstone-like quality: although never intended to be seen this way, they have a wonderfully sculptural solidity that tempts you into reading significance into the form. This is a mistake, of course. They are like that for practical, structural reasons.

A squeal of delight told me that Trish had discovered something interesting. It was the third dolmen, which is still underground. I joined her in the small burial chamber, its roof so low that Trish (at 5ft 1.5in tall) could only just stand near-upright in one spot – in all other places she had to crouch. What had delighted her was finding carvings on a number of the stones. Indeed, there is something about these engraved surfaces that adds a special dimension to the monuments. They are like a message, a direct connection between us and the people who felt compelled to grind them into the stones’ surfaces several thousand years ago. Inside the dolmen, you could forget about the nearby road and slip back those many millennia.

Zola wasn’t impressed. He’s our breton spaniel, a profoundly bolshy and uppity hound who would normally be scampering all over the place. But he seemed reluctant to enter the dolmen – Trish found herself dragging him inside. We didn’t think much about it … until a day or two later.

We had the site pretty much to ourselves – something that would be repeated throughout the trip and another good reason for going out of season. We were also impressed by the easy access to these sites. Mané Kerioned is regarded as one of the best megalithic sites in the region, certainly among the best of the dolmens. Yet there is no fence, no fee, no permission required.

In the afternoon, we decided on a quick tour of the Quiberon peninsula (Presqu’île de Quiberon). The object of the trip wasn’t strictly megalithic – just general sightseeing. We found a few menhirs along the way, of course, usually near the road and therefore enjoying all the auspicious atmosphere of a fire hydrant. But worth documenting all the same.

We also came across some derelict German blockhouses from the Second World War. These are littered all over this coastline (much of which remains in military use). They reminded me of the ancient monuments we had come here to see: although their function is known, unlike standing stones, they sit there with the same kind of monumental imperviousness.

My good friend Doug Selway is an artist who has produced some striking work – painting and printmaking – based on the military constructions at Orford Ness. Thinking about his work and seeing these monolithic relics made me decide to start a companion project to my photos of ancient sites – working title, ‘Modern Megaliths’. These images will be posted on my professional photography website.

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…

It’s about time I photographed this standing stone. Not only is it just down the road, within easy walking distance, it’s also on land owned by friends of ours – so we’ve passed it many times.

The menhir is clearly signposted from the village. You crest a hill with, to the north, a small ancient-looking wood, full of boulders and the occasional cow. The menhir is on the south side of the road, across a field and on the edge of another small wood.

It’s a large stone, nestled among ivy-covered boulders and rocky outcrops, so it’s easy to imagine there might be other, unrecognised stones within the wood. The creators of these monuments often chose sites with an eerie or auspicious feel, so it’s possible that the arrangement of the boulders is as significant as the standing stone itself.

I hurried down to the stone because it was a beautiful All Hallow’s Eve day. The sun was setting in a clear, wintry sky. Perfect, I thought. Actually, I was wrong. The sun was already behind some trees, and only faint traces of it remained on the stone. So I’m going to have to revisit this one – perhaps many times.

If you visit this stone, please look out for the horses. The owners often have two ponies in this field. If you see electric fencing or tapes, please treat them with respect – for your own sake as much as the animals’.

This is, in fact, a perfect location to base yourself if you want to explore the many megalithic sites in the area. The owners operate three self-catering holiday cottages (gites) – see here for details. They are set within beautiful grounds which include a number of other stones that may be boulders, though some look remarkably like small menhirs.

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!