Dolmens and Faeries

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.

Travel back in time with me, just a short distance to the final days of February when I actually signed up for this blog whilst visiting the city of Metz, in the north east of France. Metz is a beautiful and ancient city that carries the architectural mark of both German and French creativity along its integral waterways. It boasts legends of a saint banished dragon that can still be seen in a 16th century papier-mache effigy in the cathedral crypt and in a more recent likeness dangling over a street lined with fashionable shops.

Then there is the cathedral itself, a Gothic marvel rising up to neck craning heights in the interior as well as exterior. And everywhere there is the presence of the stone masons and sculptors who fashioned this city and peopled it with a plethora of fantastic personages---foliate heads, gargoyles and mermaids cohabiting with saints and madonnas.

I took a walk one late winter day under leaden skies, past lingering remnants of snow and wet cobblestones and discovered a park near the medieval German gate (pictured at the beginning of this post). The path is lined with stonework of a more melancholy nature--- ancient sarcophagi with interiors shaped to hold human cargo now home to reflecting pools of leaf filled water. There was one tiny child sized coffin among many larger ones.

And so I will leave you for now with the image of a heraldic lion from the facade of a renaissance hotel near where we stayed. A passerby told me the poet Verlaine had lived there for a period, but I have yet to verify this tidbit, preferring to keep it alive as an interesting possibility.