Menhir de Guernangoué
MonumentHidden Treasure
Menhir de Guernangoué, located in Roudouallec (Département 56), is a historic monument. The monument is currently closed to visitors.
Key facts
- Type
- autre
- Location
- Roudouallec, Département 56, Bretagne
- Visit
- Closed to visitors
- GPS
- 48.1458, -3.6939
- Mérimée Reference
- PA00091648
A stone sentinel erected since Neolithic times in the heart of Morbihan, the Guernangoué menhir stands watch over the Roudouallec moors, a striking and raw testimony to a megalithic civilisation that sculpted the Breton landscape over 5,000 years ago.
History
At the bend in a sunken lane in the commune of Roudouallec, in the Morbihan hinterland, stands the menhir of Guernangoué: a solitary granite monolith that pierces the sky with quiet authority, a direct legacy of the megalith builders who populated inland Brittany during the Neolithic period. Listed as a Historic Monument since 1925, it is part of the constellation of standing stones that make the Armorican peninsula one of the densest megalithic areas in the world. What sets the Guernangoué menhir apart from the major tourist centres like Carnac and Locmariaquer is precisely its isolation. Planted in a landscape of hedged farmland and soft moorland, far from the flow of visitors, it offers an intimate encounter with Breton prehistory. Here, stone speaks in silence, without intermediaries or museographic staging. The colossal effort involved in extracting, transporting and erecting such a block by peasant societies in the 5th or 4th millennium BC is easy to understand. The granite of which it is made, the king of Armorican subsoils, has the characteristic bluish-grey hue of the massifs of Central Brittany. Its surface, patinated by thousands of years of Atlantic weathering, is colonised by yellow and grey lichens, giving it a natural polychromy of great beauty. Photographers will particularly appreciate the low-angled light of autumn mornings, which reveals every asperity in the rock and dramatises the silhouette of the monolith. A visit to the Guernangoué menhir is an ideal part of a wider exploration of Cornouaille in Morbihan and the nearby Montagnes Noires. Roudouallec, a modest village with an authentically Breton atmosphere, is a good starting point for anyone wishing to explore this region, where the memory of the Neolithic period can be seen at every step, in the fields, under the embankments and beside the streams.
Architecture
The Guernangoué menhir belongs to the category of isolated menhirs, the most basic and perhaps the most mysterious form of megalithic architecture. Unlike the alignments at Carnac or the cromlech complexes, it is a single monolith, planted vertically in the ground with no visible association with other stones. Its general shape, typical of Armorican menhirs in the Morbihan hinterland, is that of a shaft with a slightly ovoid cross-section, wider at the base and gradually narrowing towards the top, in a tapering profile that prehistorians sometimes refer to as a "betyle". Extracted from the Armorican granite massifs that are abundant in Central Brittany, the block has a grainy texture characteristic of two-mica granite, the material of choice for megalith builders in Morbihan for its robustness and local availability. The surface has not undergone any elaborate cutting: only minimal roughing was required to adapt the natural shape of the rock to the desired slenderness. Centuries of exposure to Atlantic rains and alternating freezing and thawing have given the rock a patina, enriching it with a multicoloured lichenic covering that is now one of its most remarkable visual attractions. The precise dimensions of the Guernangoué menhir are not recorded in the available published sources, but the isolated menhirs in this sector of the Montagnes Noires and Cornouaille morbihannaise generally reach between two and four metres in height above ground, with a total mass of several tonnes once the portion buried in the anchoring soil is counted. This robustness explains their exceptional longevity: with no maintenance whatsoever, they defy the millennia with sovereign indifference.
Related Figures
Les bâtisseurs néolithiques anonymes du Ve-IVe millénaire av. J.-C., communauté paysanne armoricaine organisatrice de l'érection du menhirProsper Mérimée (1803-1870), inspecteur général des Monuments Historiques, pionnier du recensement et de la protection des mégalithes bretonsRené Galles (1821-1882), archéologue morbihannais ayant contribué à l'inventaire des monuments préhistoriques du départementZacharie Le Rouzic (1864-1939), archéologue et conservateur du musée de Préhistoire de Carnac, figure centrale de l'étude des mégalithes du Morbihan
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where is Menhir de Guernangoué located?
Menhir de Guernangoué is located in Roudouallec, Département 56 department, Bretagne region, France.
Is Menhir de Guernangoué open to visitors?
Menhir de Guernangoué is currently closed to visitors.