A must-see

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The quarry

vue sur la carrière

Like a wound that goes right to the heart of the cairn, it gives an extraordinary view of the monument...

The gutted cairn

Section plan

The site designated as a quarry is the result of an excavation carried out in May 1955 by a local contractor who had bought the stony mound from a local hotelier in order to respond to a work order from the municipality of Plouézoc'h.

This "bite" reveals the internal architecture of the Cairn on its north-west face. The two most easterly or left burials are made up of a small series of stones forming a false dome, and one of them has ornamental stones at its foot.

The materials making up these corbels are relatively flat and fairly long, and their progressive overhang, combined with the mass added to the back of the elements making up the false dome, gave remarkable stability to the whole. It should be noted that these two corridor dolmens were built "simultaneously".

One of these four tombs is entirely megalithic (made of large blocks of stone: from the Greek mega (large) and lithos (stone))... In the Neolithic period, these megalithic monuments or dolmens would have been covered either with stone, earth or a mixture of the two, and today only these megaliths remain.

The last tomb to the west or to the right is semi-megalithic (made up of megaliths and a small dry-stone structure). A porthole slab is located at the end of the corridor leading to the tomb.

It should be noted that two monoliths used to surround this tomb formed a single block in the Neolithic period, weighing an estimated 15/20 tonnes.

vue de la carrière Cairn de Barnenez

DR, Centre des monuments nationaux