Carnac in brief
Carnac is a coastal village in Brittany, in northwestern France, and the name given to a group of more than 3,000 standing stones, called menhirs, in long rows and in other forms, near the village. Along with other monuments around the Gulf of Morbihan, such as burial mounds and dolmens, they make one of the densest concentrations of megaliths in the world. Parts of the region were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2025.
What is there
- The alignments. The rows of stones, running east to west, in three main groups: Ménec, Kermario and Kerlescan. The Ménec group has about 1,100 stones in eleven rows, running for about a kilometre, and the stones get smaller from around four metres at one end to less than a metre at the other.
- Tombs. Stone burial chambers, dolmens, and large mounds such as the Saint-Michel tumulus, a mound about 125 metres long, which holds a stone chamber with grave goods of jade axes and other objects.
- The Locmariaquer stones. About 12 km away, a huge stone, the Grand Menhir Brisé, now broken in four, which was once about 20 metres tall and weighed more than 300 tonnes. It is the largest known menhir ever erected.
Age
The stones were set up over many centuries, starting around 4500 BC and continuing for about a thousand years or more, so that some are older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids. The builders were early farmers, who cleared forest, raised cattle, and built long tombs for their dead. The very early date of the tombs of this region has attracted much attention from archaeologists.
What were they for?
Nobody knows. Ideas have included that they marked the sun and moon, or boundaries, or were a place of gathering or processions, or that they honoured the dead. Local tradition says that the stones are Roman soldiers who were turned to stone by Saint Cornély, the patron saint of horned animals, who was chased by them. Archaeologists reject the theory, popular in the 20th century, that they had a detailed astronomical purpose.
Protection
By the 20th century many stones had been damaged by people using them as building material, and by trampling. Since the 1990s, fences have restricted access to the Ménec and Kermario rows, because of erosion, so that the vegetation can grow back. In the winter, visitors can enter the fields.
Visiting
Carnac has a prehistory museum, the Musée de Préhistoire James Miln-Zacharie Le Rouzic, with finds from the stones and tombs. The alignments can be viewed from paths and from a viewing platform, with guided visits that allow people to enter the fields. See also Stonehenge.
Sources
- Boujot, C. and Cassen, S. (1993). A pattern of evolution for the Neolithic funerary structures of the west of France. Antiquity 67: 477 to 491.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. UNESCO World Heritage List, entry for the Megalithic Sites of Carnac and the Shores of Morbihan (2025).