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Mature Flâneur
The Biggest Standing Stone in the World: The Broken Menhir of Er Grah
Brittany’s Neolithic Rock Gods
When we think of Western Europe’s first farmers, we have it all wrong. We think of people just scratching out a living to survive. We think of small huts next to patches of grain-like grass, a pen full of half-feral sheep and maybe a cow or two. We imagine they were simple people, like medieval European peasants, but dumber. That was my baseline, once upon a time.
It’s a thrill for me to have my assumptions proven so dramatically wrong. It turns out the farmers of the Neolithic accomplished astonishing feats of engineering and design, wonders that have survived for millennia as testament of their ingenuity, energy, and purposeful values — values that compelled them to erect amazing monuments of stone: stone tombs, stone circles, and standing stones. In all, some 35,000 of these megaliths (literally “big-stones”) were constructed across Europe during the Neolithic (“new- stone”) Age: 5,500–3,000 BC.
What’s truly mind-blowing is that the biggest standing stone of them all was one of the earliest to be built. It’s as if these stone age farmers started with the Empire State Building, and then later made shorter skyscrapers.
