Carnac stones

Interesting facts

With more than 3,000 standing stones, Carnac holds the largest collection of its kind in the world.

Polished jade axes found in the great burial mounds near Carnac were made from stone quarried in the Italian Alps.

Necklaces of green callaïs from the mounds came from south-western Iberia, probably carried by boat across the Bay of Biscay.

Some of the jade axeheads are up to 46 cm long and may have taken more than a thousand hours to polish.

The Saint-Michel tumulus is about 12 metres high and needed roughly 35,000 cubic metres of stone and earth.

The three main alignments together follow a contour line about 20 metres above sea level.

The nearby Kercado dolmen, built around 4600 BC, still keeps its original cairn and was used for about 3,000 years.

At Crucuno, 21 menhirs form a rectangle with sides in a 3-4-5 ratio, its diagonal aligned to the midsummer sunrise.

The Manio Giant, a single menhir over 6.5 metres tall, was set upright again around 1900 by the archaeologist Zacharie Le Rouzic.

In 1834 Francis Ronalds surveyed the stones and drew them with his patented perspective-tracing instrument, making the first accurate pictures of many.

Why it is worth it

Some three thousand granite stones stand in rows across the heath and pine woods north of Carnac, on the south coast of Brittany, and they were raised by Neolithic farming communities, most probably around 3300 BC, with parts of the ensemble perhaps going back as far as 4500 BC. No one has settled what the lines were for. What is certain is the scale of the effort: the stones were split from the granite outcrops that once broke the surface all over this corner of Morbihan, and set upright in patterns that still hold after more than five millennia.

The ensemble is really several fields laid end to end. At Le Ménec, eleven rows converge over roughly 1,165 metres, some 1,100 stones in all, rising to giants of about four metres at the western end. Kermario, the "house of the dead" in Breton, carries just over a thousand stones in ten rows that spread like a fan for about 1.3 kilometres. Kerlescan is smaller and more compact, 555 stones in thirteen lines ending in a ring of 39 stones, and further east the Petit-Ménec group lies deep in the trees under moss and ivy — the most atmospheric of all, because it has never been tidied into a landscape. At Le Ménec the tallest stones gather at the western end, and the rows are best read standing there and looking east down the lines.

The rows are only one layer of a much denser prehistoric landscape. The Saint-Michel tumulus just east of the town, a mound of earth and stone some 125 metres long raised over burial chambers in the 5th millennium BC, yielded polished axes of jade and other prestige goods when it was excavated. Dolmens, single menhirs and further mounds are scattered through the surrounding parishes, and in 2025 UNESCO inscribed the Carnac stones together with around 550 monuments across 28 communes of Morbihan as a World Heritage Site. Folklore has always tried to explain the rows: one Christian legend says they are pagan soldiers turned to stone while chasing Pope Cornelius, and a local Arthurian variant makes them a Roman legion petrified by Merlin.

To let the heath recover from trampling, the main alignments have been fenced since 1991. Low winter light and the absence of crowds make that season the best time to see the lines as they really are.

Getting there

The alignments begin on the northern edge of Carnac; the nearest larger town is Lanester, next to Lorient, about 27 km away. The closest airport is Lorient Bretagne Sud (LRT), roughly 33 km by road; the larger Rennes–Saint-Jacques Airport (RNS) is about 114 km away. By rail, the nearest main station is Auray, about 12 km from Carnac, with BreizhGo buses on to the town (extra services in high season). Drivers follow the D768 from Auray towards Quiberon and then the D119 to Carnac; a municipal car park lies off Allée des Alouettes, north of the Ménec rows. Wear closed shoes; the ground is uneven and not suited to pushchairs.

From the encyclopaedia

The Carnac stones are an exceptionally dense collection of megalithic sites near the south coast of Brittany in northwestern France, consisting of stone alignments (rows), dolmens, tumuli, and single menhirs. More than 3,000 prehistoric standing stones were hewn from local granite and erected by the pre-Celtic people of Brittany and form the largest such collection in the world. Most of the stones are within the Breton municipality of Carnac, but some to the east are within neighboring La Trinité-sur-Mer. Numerous megaliths and tumuli are also found in the surrounding areas, such as at Locmariaquer and Arzon, and on islands in the Gulf of Morbihan. The stones were erected at some stage during the Neolithic period, probably around 3300 BC, but some may date to as early as 4500 BC.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Carnac stones

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia