Locmariaquer: The Great Broken Menhir and the Table des Marchands

Required Activities

• Walk the length of the four fragments and work out what was done here: a single block of orthogneiss between 300 and 330 tonnes, quarried at least 8 to 10 km away towards Vannes or the Rhuys peninsula, which means it was brought across a stretch of water with a strong current before it was ever stood up

• Inside the chamber, look up at the capstone for the great hafted axe, the long crook and the forequarters of an animal — the stele broke across the animal's back, and the missing half is the capstone of the Gavrinis cairn out in the gulf — then find the carved word GAZELLE on the end slab, cut into it by a nineteenth-century sailor off a ship of that name

• In the passage, count along the eighteen upright slabs and pick out the two that are not local granite: they are orthogneiss, two joining fragments of a bigger monolith taken from the Grand Menhir's own row — then look at the end slab of the chamber, which was already standing here before the dolmen was built and whose height set the height of the roof

• Walk the length of the Er Grah tumulus to see the scale of the third monument on the site, then go back to the carved end slab of the dolmen, count the four facing registers of crook shapes and decide for yourself whether the outline round them is a mother goddess with radiating hair, as one excavator read it, or something else entirely, as the next one argued