On my way walking to the dolmen of Pierre Martine I passed a tiny caravan parked beneath the trees in this magical landscape of stones and moss.
And now it is on a long voyage to its new home in California.
The dolmen of Pierre Martine, just outside the village of Livernon, France, is thought to have been erected about 4000 years ago. At some point in the past the capstone was deemed unstable and so the appearance has been rather spoiled by the addition of two concrete pillars helping to hold up each end.
It rests in a field of scrub oak and hawthorne where one sees frequent evidence of the passage of wild pigs and hares. Around the perimeter is a natural maze of limestone sheets where erosion has created round sided channels and tiny grottoes to a depth of about eighteen inches. These are full of tiny ferns, reindeer moss and elegant spider weavings but were too difficult to adequately photograph in the intense light of mid-morning.
The dolmen's surface has been altered by some vintage grafitti
and the rain of many centuries striking the flat surface of the stone table.
