Jardin aux Moines

Néant-sur-Yvel

A long low mound, twenty-five metres by five or six, eighty centimetres high, whose edges are held by upright blocks — twenty-six on the north, twenty-seven on the south — alternating the purple schist and the white conglomerate of the region. Jacques Briard excavated it in 1983 and 1984: built in the Middle Neolithic on ground already frequented in the Mesolithic, it was reopened and reused in the Bronze Age. The legend, for its part, has been told in two ways. In the older one, published in 1863 by Ernest du Laurens de la Barre, the stones are the participants in a hunt led on All Souls' Day, the day after All Saints', by a lord of Tréhorenteuc, petrified for having hunted on a holy day. The second does not appear in writing until 1984, in an article in which Jacques Briard praises the talent of the storyteller Patrick Lebrun, who is thought to have originated it: monks and lords led a life of feasting on the heath; Saint Méen, the abbot of Gaël, caught them at it and urged them to lead a more monastic life; they mocked him, and divine punishment turned them into stones — and their ranks can still be seen frozen in the alternation of light and dark blocks. Both say the same thing: in this country every standing stone has been given a story, and not only a story of fairies. Neither Merlin nor Viviane came this far; the Jardin aux Moines has stayed on the side of the real forest, that of the abbeys of Saint-Méen and Paimpont, whose monks did indeed walk on these heaths.

Wikipédia — Jardin aux Moines ↗

Getting there : On the road from Tréhorenteuc to Néant-sur-Yvel (signposted), with a car park laid out at the roadside; the mound is a few minutes' walk away, with free access.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound