Grand menhir brisé d'Er Grah - Locmariaquer, Morbihan, FRA - Megalithic Monuments on Waymarking.com

The Large Broken Menhir of Er Grah, or Men ar hroëc'h which means "Stone of the Fairy" in Breton, located on the territory of the municipality of Locmariaquer, in Morbihan, is a menhir of exceptional dimensions, the largest Europe: 18.5 m high when erected (20.4 m part in the earth included), 3 m wide, estimated mass of 280 t.

This menhir, whose erection dates back to the middle of the 5th millennium BC. AD is now on the ground and shattered into four pieces. It stood in the middle of a monumental ensemble exceptionally associating, in the same place, the three families of megalithic monuments:

the tumulus of Er Grah,
the cairn of the Merchant's Table,
the great broken menhir.

According to the prehistorian Charles-Tanguy Le Roux, the results of the latest archaeological excavations show that the menhir was not solitary: it was connected to an alignment of pits containing 18 other menhirs, discovered at the back of the "Table des Marchand" . This alignment suggests the existence of an ancient complex of raised stones, erected in single file, which were aligned, from the largest to the smallest, for more than 55 meters in a north direction from the base of the Large menhir but the area beyond the current road has not been excavated4. The pits are associated with post hole wedges which could be the elements of the scaffolding intended to cut and lift these large menhirs.

Cut in orthogneiss, the closest deposits of which are between 10 and 20 km, it was probably rafted through the Gulf of Morbihan (with very strong currents), after having crossed the estuary of the rivers of Vannes and Auray.

In his Notes from a trip to western France (1837), archaeologist Prosper Mérimée observes and takes notes on the large broken menhir. Among these notes, he notes that the menhir seemed to be sunk only 3 or 4 feet into the ground, and remains perplexed as to the conditions of its fall, as the base has turned to the side opposite the three other fragments. He also notes that no small chip seems to have been caused by the shock of the break / fall. At the time of its passage, the inhabitants claim to have never seen it erected, and that it is probably lightning that will have destroyed it.

For a long time the hypothesis prevailed that this monolith, too big, broke during its erection. The hypotheses on the fall of the menhir varied between lightning, human action or ruin by a phenomenon of progressive erosion. The most probable hypothesis, the engineer Francis Bougis thinks that the local earthquakes would have first inclined the stone before causing it to fall at a time which could go back to the end of the Neolithic. We do not know the reason for the fall of the others around 4300 BC. A reuse of one of them in Gavrinis and on the Merchants' Table is proven by a split engraving. But no section of the large menhir has been reused.

Rear Admiral Paul Réveillère (author in particular of the book “Enigmes de la nature” and which defined the French as “Celtized megalithians”) within the framework of the Universal Exhibition of 1900 in Paris proposed to glue and erect in new this broken menhir This recovery (like so many other menhirs and antiquities) was also considered in 1904 by Mr. Le Rouzic. The attractiveness would be increased without harming its archaeological value.

It has been classified as a historical monument since 1889.

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Type: Menhir Number: 4.00 Parking: Not Listed Size: Not listed Source: Not listed Purpose: Not listed

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Date Logged Log User Rating   09/19/2021 sara et gege visited it