Cucuruzzu: A Bronze Age Castle in the Granite

Required Activities

• Find the single way into the enclosure — a stairway cut straight into one of the granite boulders of the natural chaos, then a chicane that turns you sideways before you are inside — and notice that there is no second entrance

• Walk the inside of the enclosure, 40 m by 20 and still 5 m high on average, and follow the passage along the wall — look for the stones left jutting out of the facing at about 2 m, which Grosjean read as the supports for a plank floor making a wall-walk

• On the north-west side find the raised semi-circular terrace with the paving Grosjean read as hearths, then the three slab-roofed chambers built into the thickness of the wall with their unusually careful facing — and on the rock in front of the middle one, the cup cut into its centre

• Go up to the torra that stands 10 m above the enclosure, in by the corridor on its east side with the niches cut in the sides, and look up: the semi-circular room, 3 to 4 m across, still carries its original corbelled vault, the only one left standing in Corsica

• Carry on up to the Castellu di Capula at 759 m, built in the ninth century by one Bianco, count of Corsica, on Bronze and Iron Age foundations, and find the statue-menhir standing there again — it turned up as two fragments built into the reinforcement of the medieval staircase

• Finish at the musée de l'Alta Rocca in Levie, where everything dug out of Cucuruzzu is kept, and find the obsidian arrowheads — obsidian is not Corsican rock, so somebody carried it across the sea