Carnac
The Standing Stones
A self-guided audio tour with offline listening, optional directions between chapters, and free on-location listening: all stops are free for now during our founding period.
Download before you go. Works offline with no signal and no roaming needed.
Photo (cropped and styled for display): Table des Marchand by Man vyi · Public domain
Free sample + on-location start
Try a web audio sample before your trip. In the app, every stop in France is free for now during our founding period. Founding users keep a year of Pro when pricing returns.
Carnac's mystery is not only that the stones are old. It is that the original system was damaged by farming, roads, collecting, tourism, and development before modern archaeology could read it.
Web preview is capped at this single free stop. On-location free stops, offline listening, and route guidance stay inside the app.
City context
Long before Paris, Brittany was raising stone. This self-guided audio tour walks the Carnac alignments, thousands of standing stones in rows, then the great tombs of Locmariaquer, the Grand Menhir Brise and the Table des Marchands built around a stone older than itself. We weigh the astronomical theories against the destroyed evidence and the genuine unknowns.
Tour chapters
19 min audio | 4 stops
Start with Carnac's central alignment landscape: the overwhelming rows, the lunar hypothesis, and the visitor-center warning that much of the evidence is damaged. This short walk keeps the route focused on the core stones and the modern frame that admits how much of the original megalithic system was lost before archaeology could read it.
Over 3,000 standing stones in roughly parallel rows, stretching for miles across Brittany. The largest megalithic site on Earth. And nobody knows why it's here.
Carnac Standing Stones
Everything from the last stop still stands. The rows may be processional ground, ancestors in formation, the border of sacred land. Now hold a second possibility beside it, one that deepens rather than replaces: this landscape may also be an instrument, built to track the moon.
Alignements de Kermario
Carnac's mystery is not only that the stones are old. It is that the original system was damaged by farming, roads, collecting, tourism, and development before modern archaeology could read it.
Maison des Megalithes, Carnac
In the center of Carnac town, a pope flanked by two oxen watches from the church facade. The people who put him there could tell you exactly what the stone rows are: a Roman legion, frozen mid-march by the saint it was hunting.
Église Saint-Cornély, Carnac
44 min audio | 10 stops
Drive the wider Carnac and Gulf of Morbihan route from chapel-topped tumulus, stripped dolmen, Le Manio, and Kerlescan to Locmariaquer's broken giant, the Table des Marchands, and Gavrinis across the water. These stops turn the stone rows into a regional system of tombs, reused monoliths, elite burial, thresholds, and memory carried across the gulf.
The chapel-topped hill above Carnac is a Neolithic elite tomb whose grave goods reveal power, exchange, and prestige before written France existed.
Tumulus Saint-Michel
Kercado is the rare Carnac monument that kept its mound: a whole chambered cairn, by some dates among the oldest built structures on Earth, wearing a heavy 1920s restoration.
Dolmen de Kercado
At Le Manio, rows of menhirs cross an older burial mound, a quadrilateral marks a vanished tomb, and a six-meter stone turns the landscape into layered construction.
Le Manio and the Giant of Manio
Kerlescan's thirteen rows converge toward enclosure and mound, making the stones feel less like a line of markers and more like a controlled passage between spaces.
Kerlescan Alignments
The broken Grand Menhir at Locmariaquer was once a 20.6-meter monolith, turning Neolithic Brittany's ambition into a question of transport, labor, and collapse.
Grand Menhir Brise
The Table des Marchands is not just a passage grave with carvings. Excavation showed it was built around an earlier decorated stele, making reuse part of the monument's original logic.
Table des Marchands
Gavrinis is famous for its engraved passage, but the deeper layer is that its capstone appears to be part of the same broken monolith system as Locmariaquer.
Cairn de Gavrinis
Er Lannic in the Gulf of Morbihan holds two Neolithic stone circles, one of them now submerged, showing how rising seas hid a monument that was built on dry land five thousand years ago.
Er Lannic
The cairn of Petit Mont at Arzon was rebuilt three times over two thousand Neolithic years, then cut open in 1943 when the German army poured an Atlantic Wall bunker through its oldest chambers.
Cairn du Petit Mont
The sealed tumulus of Mané er Hroëck at Locmariaquer held a hundred polished axes of Alpine jade and beads of Iberian variscite, proof that Neolithic Brittany pulled prestige stone across a continent.
Mané er Hroëck
12 min audio | 2 stops
On a headland above the bay of Morlaix in northern Finistère stands the great cairn of Barnenez, a stepped stone monument with eleven burial chambers raised in phases from roughly 4850 BCE. It is one of the oldest standing structures on earth, older than the Egyptian pyramids by two thousand years.
At the southern end of the great cairn at Barnenez, out on a headland in northern Finistère where the wind comes straight off the bay of Morlaix, put your hand flat on the dry-stone wall. Granite and dolerite, fitted without a drop of mortar, still holding their line after roughly six thousand eight hundred years. This is one of the oldest standing buildings anywhere on earth. It went up two thousand years before the pyramids of Giza. It is far older than Stonehenge.
Cairn de Barnenez, Plouezoc'h
Walk to the sliced south face, the wound the 1950s quarry left, and use it the way archaeologists have used it ever since. As a window into how this thing was actually built.
Cairn de Barnenez, chambers, Plouezoc'h
11 min audio | 2 stops
In the farmland of eastern Brittany at Essé stands the Roche-aux-Fées, a Neolithic gallery grave built from around forty slabs of deep purple-red schist, some weighing dozens of tonnes. You can walk into its covered passage, more than nineteen metres long, aligned so the winter-solstice sunrise reaches down its floor.
The story people told here is precise, and they were not joking. The fairies came at night, carrying great slabs of purple stone in their aprons. They raised this tomb in a single night, to prove their power to neighbours who had doubted them. And when the work was done and word passed back down the line that it was finished, the fairies still on the road opened their aprons and let their stones fall where they stood. Ask around Essé and people will point to lone blocks lying out in the fields, the dropped stones, still where the fairies let them go.
La Roche-aux-Fées, Essé, Ille-et-Vilaine
Before you leave, the stones have a game for you. It is a very old game, and nobody has ever quite won it. Want to try?
La Roche-aux-Fées, forecourt, Essé
11 min audio | 2 stops
At the tip of the Rhuys peninsula, above the mouth of the Gulf of Morbihan, a green dome of earth fifteen metres high has been called the Butte de César, Caesar's Mound, for centuries. Legend put Julius Caesar on its summit watching his fleet crush the seafaring Veneti in 56 BC.
On top of the Butte de César, at the tip of the Rhuys peninsula where the Gulf of Morbihan opens to the sea, you are standing on a hill that carries two stories at once.
Tumulus de Tumiac (Butte de César), Arzon
Stay on the mound, but stop reading the legend off the horizon for a moment and think about what lies under your feet.
Tumulus de Tumiac, burial chamber, Arzon
FAQ
Yes. You can hear a free web sample before you go, and if you are standing in France, the first 2 stops are free in the app before the subscription wall.
Yes. Download it before you go and it plays with no signal, no roaming charges, and no network connection required for playback.
Yes. You walk at your own pace and the tour gives you optional directions between stops only when you want them.
It covers Carnac Alignments, Carnac to Gavrinis, Barnenez, the Prehistoric Parthenon, The Roche-aux-Fées, the Tomb Built by Fairies, Tumiac, the Mound With the Wrong Name, Carnac, Barnenez, Roche Aux Fees, and Tumiac.
20 chapters, about 1h 37m total. You can do them in any order.
We keep history honest. Instead of blending myth and fact, we separate what is documented, what is legend, and what nobody actually knows.
185 episodes | 14h 21m
Photo (cropped and styled for display): Athens — Mask of Agamemnon by Gleb Simonov · Public domain
126 episodes | 8h 41m
73 episodes | 7h 9m
Photo (cropped and styled for display): Sacsayhuamán walls by Esoltas · Public domain