Latest news with #megaliths
Malay Mail
2 days ago
- Malay Mail
Unesco adds mysterious Carnac menhirs and Morbihan megaliths to World Heritage list
PARIS, July 14 — The UN's cultural organisation on Saturday included the megaliths of Carnac and the banks of Morbihan, a vast area including famous alignments of menhirs in western France, on its World Heritage List. Erected over more than two millennia during the Neolithic period, they cover an area of 1,000 km² with more than 550 monuments spread across the Morbihan region. Among them are the Carnac alignments, with long straight avenues of menhirs — 'long stones' in Breton — of different sizes, whose origin and purpose remain a mystery. They are visited each year by close to 300,000 people. These megaliths 'constitute an exceptional testimony to the technical sophistication and skill of Neolithic communities, enabling them to extract, transport, and manipulate monumental stones and earth to create a complex symbolic space that reveals a specific relationship of populations with their environment,' UNESCO said. Carnac's inclusion takes the total number of French sites on the heritage list to 54. Making the UNESCO's heritage list often sparks a lucrative tourism drive, and can unlock funding for the preservation of sites. — AFP
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Telegraph
How to have the perfect holiday on France's greatest coast
Boasting a third of the entire French coastline, Brittany unfurls in a succession of sinuous estuaries and endless inlets. Between its family-fun beaches and fortified towns, you can always find a secluded stretch of shore, to hike across dramatic headlands or feast on oysters in tucked-away bays. Brittany has always stood apart from the rest of France. History here goes back a long way; megalith builders were erecting pyramid-like monuments 7,000 years ago, and eerie menhirs still march across the moorlands. Later came the Celts, whose music and culture is celebrated in festivals like Lorient's Interceltic bonanza. Highlights range from medieval cities like Saint-Malo and Dinan to pocket-sized resorts like Morgat and Erquy, arrayed around sumptuous beaches. And leave time for an island jaunt – head for Batz or Bréhat, minutes off-shore, or the Île de Sein, adrift in the mists of the Atlantic – or to venture into the time-forgotten forests inland. For more Brittany inspiration, see our guides to the city's best hotels, restaurants, bars, things to do and beaches. In this guide: How to spend a day How to spend a week When to go Where to stay How to spend the perfect day in Brittany Morning Sailing into Saint-Malo from the UK as the day begins, with the ferry picking its way past myriad islets to nestle near the city walls, is a glorious experience. A short walk brings you into the old town. Assuming you're staying overnight, leave bags at your hotel, then breakfast at whichever café the sun is currently striking. Now enjoy a leisurely half-hour circuit along the top of the ramparts, drinking in the views over the Channel, across the water, and back down into town, before stepping out onto the broad surrounding beach. Next browse the old-town shops; on Tuesday or Friday you'll find a bustling street market too. For a quintessentially Breton lunch, try a crêpe at the Corps de Garde, then head to the quai de Dinan, at the southernmost point of the walls, to catch the river taxi to Dinard.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
Bavarian fairy tale castles and French Carnac Megaliths among new UNESCO World Heritage sites
UNESCO has added several new sites to the World Heritage list after reviewing applications that required extensive research and presentation processes. Among them were several European sites, including the famous fairytale castles of Bavaria's King Ludwig II, the megalithic Carnac stones in northwestern France and the Minoan Palatial centres on the Greek island of Crete. At its meeting in Paris, the World Heritage Commission decided to elevate the German Neuschwanstein Castle, Herrenchiemsee, Linderhof and the royal house at Schachen to World Heritage status. The magnificent castles in Upper Bavaria have been attracting numerous tourists for over 140 years. The buildings of King Ludwig II (1845-1886) attracted over 1.7 million visitors last year alone - including many international guests, particularly from the USA and Asian countries. "The inclusion of the palaces on the World Heritage List is an outstanding honour for these impressive places," said the President of the German UNESCO Commission, Maria Böhmer. "They are all architectural masterpieces and bear witness to the artistic imagination, but also the eccentricity of the fairytale king." Germany previously had 54 UNESCO World Heritage Sites - including the old towns of Stralsund and Wismar, Cologne Cathedral, the Wadden Sea and the Roman border fortifications of the Limes. The French Carnac megaliths and the Greek Minoan Palatial centres are both structures from antiquity. The Carnac Stones are a dense collection of megalithic sites near the South coast of Bretagne, dating from from 4500–3300 BC. The Minoan Palatial centres, including Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia, were key hubs of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation, which flourished between 2800 and 1100 BCE. The World Heritage inscription recognises the sites' historical significance, architectural integrity and the existence of a comprehensive protection and management framework. Although the World Heritage title does not bring any financial support, it does ensure further international attention and cultural prestige. World Heritage status is also accompanied by UNESCO requirements that are intended to benefit the local population in particular, who are burdened by the influx of tourists. Among other things, the organisation requires a concept for effective visitor management in order to better control mass tourism. The consequences of disregarding UNESCO guidelines were demonstrated in 2009 in Dresden's Elbe Valley, where a new bridge led to the withdrawal of World Heritage status. The construction of the so-called Waldschlösschenbrücke bridge was considered to be detrimental to the "outstanding universal value" of the cultural landscape. It was the first time that UNESCO had removed a European World Heritage site from the list. Italy has 60 listed sites, the most of any country. Some notable examples include the historic centres of Rome, Florence, and Naples, the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the Amalfi Coast. Other sites that were added to the World Heritage list this week include three locations used by Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime as torture and execution sites 50 years ago. The inscription coincided with the 50th anniversary of the rise to power by the communist Khmer Rouge government, which caused the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians through starvation, torture and mass executions during a four-year reign from 1975 to 1979. UNESCO's World Heritage List lists sites considered important to humanity and includes the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India and Cambodia's Angkor archaeological complex.
Telegraph
14-06-2025
- Telegraph
Forget The Salt Path – this tale of Britain's ancient stone sites is superb
Stay awake all night, and you'll find that euphoria hits you with the dawn. It was with a similar euphoria to the one Fiona Robertson describes at solstice festivals that I finished her poignant, scholarly and poetic book. Stone Lands is about ancient standing stones and their cultural significance. Robertson has hunted down megalithic sites all her life, and for 20 years she shared this enthusiasm with her husband Stephen. After his early death from cancer she continued to visit them; as such this is also a memoir about that loss and the beginnings of her recovery. The Greek poet Michaelis Ganas wrote that 'duration is passion', and Robertson's book is cleverly crafted to explore that principle both in the survival of extraordinary neolithic monuments and the relationship with her husband, cut short in their 50s. In episodic travels, she visits stones in Avebury and Pembrokeshire, the Isle of Mull and Dartmoor, the Medway and Taransay, the Scilly Isles and Iona. She's more fascinated by druidical and pagan groups than part of them, and at solstice events she's an observer, like most travel writers – no bad thing. But when it comes to megaliths, she's absolutely part of the movement. She knows her stones, the places they sit, the reasons that they sit in the ways that they do. She knows about the websites like the megalithic portal (try it: it's endless fun), and the difference between the sandstone and the granite, the slate and the quartz. She also knows the theories and stories about the stones' making. These are mysteries so deep they'll never be solved, but some speculate that megalithic sites were places of healing pilgrimage – a kind of neolithic Lourdes – or stone family trees. Most famously, stones such as Stonehenge which align with the sun of the winter solstice are believed to map the turn of the year towards spring, or even, in the case of the Calanais site on the Isle of Lewis, to provide a landscape-size tool for measurement of the lunar calendar. I would have enjoyed even more speculation about the reasoning behind the efforts of man to build these structures, but perhaps the tenuous evidence doesn't justify it. Still, she writes lucidly about the archaeological histories of the stone circles. Here Robertson adds all the layers of interest stamped on the ground by writers and artists who have been inspired by standing stones; their writing maps some of the cycles of interest and destruction that the stones have gone through. There's the archaeologist John Aubrey, for example, whose book Monumenta Britannica marks him out as 'the first true stones obsessive' in the 17th century; then there's the physician William Stukeley, who fought against the spoilage of stone circles for use in building. Finally, she quotes Paul Nash, bemoaning the restoration of Avebury henge which left it 'dead as a mammoth in the Natural History Museum '. Robertson is at her most impressive as a writer describing her love for Stephen. Most people, I suspect, can sympathise with both the love and the horror of illness and loss which is so painfully and beautifully described here. But what is more unusual is how Robertson reflects so profoundly on the ways that places add to that love and passion, and provide anchoring points across the years of a relationship. The couple's first long walk along the Ridgeway in high summer to Wayland's Smithy, with blisters and light hearts, can be directly compared to her emotions on an autumnal visit after the failure of Stephen's chemotherapy, and to Robertson's May visit after his death. Philosophical it may be, overblown it isn't. There's a beautiful reality here – Robertson's children come with her on these trips, not expunged as other writers' children might have been – and we see them kicking their heels on megaliths and eating chocolate biscuits in the rain. Sometimes the stones are impossible to find, or so small they seem completely insignificant. It's also hard to write well about death: most writers are dragged under by the weight of its profundity, and entangled in the seaweed strands of its macabre and almost disgusting sentimentality. It's easier, perhaps, to write about love, but not love of duration and happiness. Robertson manages to do both with originality and clarity, and can occasionally be very funny too. Mostly, though, her book has the purity of one about holidays, and so deals with death in slices of pure feeling. That's how you link the deeply personal, with its sometimes confusing detail to the transcendent weirdness of the landscape over 5,000 years ago. It is in the mists of this parallel world that the book ends, not with a miracle of 'healing', but with euphoria: how strange it is that our ephemeral ancestors left landscapes which can help us confront our own mortality, Robertson reflects, and so gave us temples to hope.
ABC News
23-05-2025
- Science
- ABC News
Could modern technology help answer the question behind Samoa's ancient megaliths?
Hundreds of prehistoric stone mounds have been uncovered across Samoa thanks to drones and laser light technology, and now, a project bringing these megalith structures to the world could help answer the puzzling question: why were they built? The Living Monuments project has recreated a high-quality virtual model of one of these mounds, known as Potini Tia, which is now accessible through virtual and augmented reality. The model was launched at the megalith's site at Sa'anapu, Upolu, and is also open physically to the public. The Potini Tia is thought to be around 800 years old. It stands 11.5 metres high and 17 metres wide and is made up of about 30,000 cubic metres of stone and earth. Jonathan Fong, from Motivate Fiji, flies a drone to capture images as part of geospatial mapping of the stone mound at Pōtini, Sa'anapu ( Supplied: Tiapapata Arts Centre ) "It's amazing to think that manpower basically constructed this by hand with literally tons and tons of basalt," said Tiapapata Arts Centre director, Galumalemanu Steven Percival. Galumalemanu said not only did the opening of the Tia at Potini create the potential for heritage tourism, but it also provided opportunities to carry out more research into why these megaliths were built. The discovery of these mounds, which could be close to 1,000, indicated there were many enigmas in the culture still not understood by modern Samoans. Many Samoan elders living near stone monoliths believe they were used to snare pigeons, which is why they are called Tia Seulupe. But Galumalemana and other researchers believe this could have been a secondary purpose. "Perhaps the knowledge was quickly erased because a lot of this knowledge was considered pagan by the early missionaries," he said. "So if there had been indigenous religious practices associated with these mounds, it's very likely that the missionaries made it clear to the Samoans that this is something from the past that should be forgotten — and they erase the memory." Galumalemana Steven Percival runs the Tiapata Arts Centre and is passionate about discovering Samoa's past ( ABC Radio Australia: Inga Stünzner ) The largest megalith is found in Savaii. Pulemelei is a star mound, and the sides of this rectangular pyramid align directly to the north, south, east and west. Galumalemana interviewed an elder from the village who said the story passed down through generations was that it could have been a portal to another world. "There was a gentleman from the village whose duty it was to go to the top of the mound at dusk every day and blow the conch shell. "And in doing so, their belief was that this called any wandering spirits to enter the underworld or to return to the place where the spirits go and in that way not disturb the living at night." Professor Helene Martinsson-Wallin, an archaeologist from the Gotland Campus of Uppsala University, Sweden, is one of only a few people who have visited Pulemelei in recent years, which she stands on top of. ( Supplied: Galumalemana Steven Percival ) Galumalemana said he hoped the Living Monuments project could include other sites across Samoa, creating a better understanding of Samoa's history and preventing unintended damage to archaeological sites. This can be mitigated through education, he said. "And partly that education can come through creating the 3D models of the state that they are naturally in without changing them, and I hope this will also then increase the appreciation and value that people have for these sites."
