A new decorated menhir

Well-known monuments continue to yield surprises. The bold zig-zag carving on the menhir of La Bretellière, in the département of Maine-et-Loire some 55 km southwest of Angers and 40 km east of Nantes, is the latest in a series of unexpected discoveries of megalithic art which includes, for example, the designs carved on the upper face of the Gavrinis capstone (Le Roux 1985) and the grid-lines and animals on the Saint-Samson menhir (Giot 1990). Furthermore, the Bretellière menhir has the added distinction of its geographical location, in an area not hitherto noted for its megalithic art. It forms part of a cluster of some 20 menhirs (extant or destroyed) on the northern side of the River Moine, an affluent of the Sèvre-Nantaise, around the modern town of Cholet (Gruet 1967).

The menhir of La Bretellière measures some 6.2 m tall, and is of local granite. It has long been known to have a series of crosses carved round its base, associated with the process of Christianization. The vertical zig-zag motif is entirely different in scale and execution and begins around one-third of the way above ground level, continuing towards the summit of the menhir where it ends in a possible head. The total length of the line is 5.50 m, compressed within a vertical height of 3.65 m. It may originally have begun at ground level, the lower part erased perhaps in the same process of Christianization that resulted in the carving of crosses round the base. The survival of the upper part of the carving may be explained by the fact that it lay beyond the reach of those seeking to remove the pagan symbol.

The carving is on the north face of the stone, and is normally only visible in oblique light around sunrise from April to October and sunset from the end of February to the beginning of November. Although the other carvings on the stone had been known since at least 1807 (Gruet 1967), the zig-zag lay unrecorded until January 2000 when it was discovered and photographed by Paul Raux. The indication of a head at the top of the carving, if correctly interpreted, suggests that this is indeed a representation of a serpent.

The serpent is relatively rare in the corpus of engraved motifs on menhirs and passage-graves of northwest France. The 4-m high menhir of Le Manio in the southern Morbihan was found on excavation to be carved with five parallel serpent motifs, each measuring some 90 cm long and with clearly discernible heads (Bailloudi et al. 1995: 73, pace Shee Twohig 1981: 92, who finds them 'not at all convincing'). Vertical serpentiform motifs are also found on orthostats 4, 6 and 8 at Gavrinis; on orthostat 8, three serpentiforms (two of them carved in raised relief) rise from the base of the stone (Shee Twohig 1981: figures 115-118; Le Roux 1985: plate XXI; 1992). Here again, the snake heads are visible. Alternatively, a more angular Breton parallel for the Bretellière motif can be found on one of the carved blocks (stone 21) re-used in the kerb of the Tossen-Keler mound (Briard & Giot 1968).

The strongest parallels for the Bretellière menhir are to be found not in France but in northern Iberia. Sinuous motifs are in fact the most numerous form in Iberian megalithic art, and against Shee Twohig's caution (1981: 37) must be set the recent discovery of the free-standing pillar within the burial chamber at Navalcán (Toledo) bearing the carved representation of a serpent in rounded relief, ending in a head (Bueno & Balbín 1995). The shape of the Navalcán stone itself is clearly phallic, as is the menhir of Gargantans in Galicia which also has a carved snake rising from the ground and ending in a head (Bueno & Balbín 1998: figures 5 & 6). Neither of these, however, approaches in size the dimensions of the Bretellière menhir: the Navalcán stone measures some 1.6 m long while the exposed part of the Gargantans menhir rises some 2 m from ground level.

Hence the zig-zag carving on the Bretellière menhir may be part of a broader phenomenon of serpent carvings on Neolithic monuments of Atlantic Europe. Originally, like most of the other examples cited above, it may have depicted a serpent rising vertically from the ground at the foot of the stone. The fact that the serpents were carved as if rising out of the earth (i.e. moving vertically upwards from the base of the stone) echoes the chthonic character often attributed to serpents in documented mythologies. Within this broader west European corpus, however, the Bretellière menhir remains altogether exceptional on account of its size.