Bog Myrtle & Peat

Stones are heaped in the forest above Plouhinec. I found them beneath sprays of sweet chestnut leaves and the high-minded stems of oak and ash collected. As I approached, the shapes were only visible as shuttered glimpses of moss and heavy rock in the slight-light of a clearing. I made them out through holly-gaps – and given that I was already primed for the sound or movement of wild boar which lurk in these trees, I leaped to assume that the shapes were alive. Pausing for a second, I felt sure that I could see the flicker of a tail, or the restive work of an itch. Bigger than boar, they might have been bison, or the frightening enormity of aurochs brought together in rest beneath a glitter of sunlit leaves. In that moment, it would not have been out of place to smell the sweet crump of cud, or hear the movement of flies around eyes or dewy nostrils – it would not have been out of place to feel that sudden opportunist’s thrill which always accompanies the experience of finding something before it has found you. They were only stones, but I was minded to stalk those final few yards anyway.

The monstrous shapes are deeply set into the forest floor on the crest of a low-risen hill. They form a passageway in a semi-circle’s curve which runs for twenty metres from what must once have been a door. Most of this passageway is covered with flat boulders which have been lowered down to form a roof – but a few of these are missing. Half open to the sky and the overhead leaves, I could have crept into that passage from one of many convenient angles, but of course I crawled on all fours through the narrow, nipping doorway.

The soil was powdery and dry inside – the walls were clean and flaked with crumbled scabs. At one low point in the passageway, fallen leaves had gathered in a shallow mattress and they crunched as I waddled my way across them. Then at a far end and a definite stop, a heap of enormous black pinecones had mounded themselves like an offering of pitchers or skulls. One by one, they had tumbled through gaps in the roof overhead – and then protected from rain and the fog which sweeps north into this forest from the Bay of Biscay, they had slowly hardened and gone sharp. 

In Brittany, these megalithic tombs are called allées couvertes – and this one at Mané Bihan is almost five thousand years old. But photographs of its excavation in the 1920s seem to show a different place altogether, because there were no trees here a century ago. The black-and-white images show a man posing beside the tallest stone against a backdrop of heather, gorse and brilliant sun. It made me think of stone circles and chambered cairns in Galloway which are so often left to face the weather on open hills above the Solway. We can look into those monuments from miles away, and standing inside these lost enclosures, we watch the rain sweep in for half an hour before the first drop ever finds us. It follows that our monuments feel lost and lonely – abandoned to austerity, and perhaps we wonder why our ancestors chose to celebrate the world in such bleak and desolate places.

The difference is that while megalithic stones in Scotland and France were similarly cleared by centuries of change and deforestation, we have chosen to keep them clear – and now we mistake the open exposure of our stones as a cornerstone of their antiquity. We celebrate their haunting solitude as Stevenson did, with his description of “Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places / Standing Stones on the vacant wine-red moor,/ Hills of sheep, and the howes of the silent vanished races,/ And winds, austere and pure!”

It’s certainly true that silence and austerity are dispelled by a canopy of trees – but new and busy kinds of magic are restored with the dappled sway of treelight overhead – with the suspicion of wild black pigs and the musty mumble of truffles underfoot. In retrospect it’s obvious that the forest which nowadays casts such an atmospheric shadow upon Mané Bihan had not even begun to rise when this allée coverte was excavated; it was daft of me to imagine that I might find aurochs or bison there. In my defence, in the movement of such slabs of heavy time, even a century is nothing at all – and that former heather hill would have been preceded by something too. With and without the forest, these stones have seen it all – and this ancient-smelling forest just the latest of many here. 

Once I had taken my fill of that passageway, I climbed back up into the leaf-green light and sat on the stones for half an hour. A roe deer barked in the distance, and a turtle dove drolled endlessly from trees which led out towards a patchwork of tiny, overgrown fields where three or four bales of silage had been eked out of the turf. We’ll never know what these stones were for or why they were set into the ground on that low and simple hill. Even the silliest interpretation is viable because we can’t prove or disprove anything about their original purpose. Finding the cup of an acorn on the stone beside me, I held it in my hand, thinking that if oak trees had become extinct five thousand years ago, what would I be able to say for sure about the vast and tangled enormity of a forest if this crisp and empty shell was all I had to guide my guess?