Cromlech

Crómlech de Stonehenge, United Kingdom.

Crómlech de Swinside, United Kingdom.

Avebury Circle next to the village of that same name, in Wiltshire County, England.

Callanish Stones.

A cromlech, a word from the Welsh crom-lech or crom-leach, is a megalithic monument made up of stones or menhirs introduced into the ground and adopting a circular or elliptical shape similar to a wall, enclosing a piece of land. It is widespread in Great Britain and French Brittany, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula, Denmark and Sweden.

In Spanish they also receive the names composed of circle of stones, rings of stones or megalithic circle.

The word cromlech in British English was used for dolmens and not for stone circles, although in technical environments it does have the same use as in Spanish. In French it occurs to this Anglophone term the same use as in Spanish.

Etymology

The word cromlech comes from English, which acquired it from Old Welsh. It is made up of crwm, «curved» (crom in feminine), and lech, «flat stone», and means «flat stone (placed in) curve.”

Main features

A cromlech is a megalithic monument made up of several dozen menhirs planted in a circle. There are menhirs arranged rectangularly, as in Brittany in the "Crucuno quadrilateral", but the fact that it is not a circular arrangement means that they are not cromlechs in the strict sense. These stone circles could be isolated, paired with another stone circle or associated with alignments of menhirs. The best known and most important cromlech is the Stonehenge cromlech in England.

It is believed that initially the cromlechs were only funerary monuments that surrounded dolmens or burial mounds and that, later, they could become sacred enclosures and, in some cases, a kind of temples. These are hypotheses maintained by scientists whose research on megalithism can only be supported by archaeological data and not by written sources. They are characterized tombs.

Cromlechs are much rarer than other megalithic monuments, such as dolmens, menhirs, etc.

Most seem to date, especially in Europe, from the Bronze Age (between the XXVI century B.C. and X century BCE – 2500 BCE to 1000 BCE). The harrespil (like that of Bilheres, in Aquitaine, in the Atlantic Pyrenees) continued to be used during the Iron Age. However, there are some older ones, which have been dated thanks to the Neolithic objects (especially ceramics) found, such as the islet of Er Lannic, in the Gulf of Morbihan in Brittany.

Cromlechs are found all over the world, from India to England, in Scandinavia, in Kabylia and in America. It does not seem that a unique symbolism can be imputed to them. The Nordic skibsaetninger (collective graves covered by stones forming the hull of a ship, and which can contain hundreds of corpses), with their ship shape, surely had a different meaning linked to Norse mythology.

Period of construction and purpose

The time of construction of these monuments is located in recent prehistory, with dates ranging from 3500 to 2000 BC. c.

The cromlechs, like all megalithic monuments, were essentially of a funerary nature, that is, necropolises.

Some researchers come to support astronomical theses, suggesting that they could have been observatories of the stars or the cycles of the Moon. These suppositions, although possible (for example in Stonehenge, much studied in this sense), have not yet been irrefutably demonstrated and are received with great prudence by the scientific community.

Dimensions

Dimensions vary from site to site. In France you can visit cromlechs with diameters greater than 100 meters (such as the Crêperie de Carnac in Brittany and those of the Rigalderie and Peyrarines in the Gard). The menhirs that make up the cromlechs vary in France from one to more than three meters high. Some Scottish cromlechs exceed four meters in height.

Geographic location

Crómlech de los Almendros, Portugal.

There are notable cromlechs in the British Isles, especially in Scotland (for example, Achmore and Callanish Stones in the Hebrides; the Rocks of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney) and in Cornwall, although they occur in other areas of Europe, such as Portugal.

One of the most famous in the world is Stonehenge, made up of several concentric circles, and one of the oldest in Europe is Castlerigg, both in England.

Outside the European continent, there are stone circles in Africa (Senegal, Gambia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Algeria) but they cannot be considered cromlech stricto sensu since they were built only a few centuries ago. And by the commonly accepted definition, cromlechs are always prehistoric constructions.

In France, cromlechs are known in Brittany (Saint Peter's cromlech in Saint-Pierre-Quiberon, or the one on the island of Gavrinis both in the Morbihan, or at the ends of the Carnac Alignments), in Aquitaine and in the Languedoc (at the site of Causse de Blandas near the cirque de Navacelles in the Gard there are three of the four cromlechs in the region). In the French Basque Country there are circles of stones of small diameter (about ten metres) but it is believed that in fact they are only the circular outlines of ancient burial mounds that have been razed. There is also a cromlech about 70 meters in diameter at Petit-Saint-Bernard, on the French-Italian border between Savoy and Valle d'Aosta.

There is also a cromlech on the plateau des Combes above the cham des Bondons, Lozère. The most majestic of its menhirs is known as the "Menhir of the three parishes", due to its geographical position, in the limits of three parish churches of the Old Regime.

A cromlech is also found at Sailly-en-Ostrevent in the Pas-de-Calais.

In Portugal there is the most important cromlech in the Iberian Peninsula, the Crómlech de los Almendros, about 12 km west of Évora. It has several enclosures, one of them formed by three circles of menhirs and about 18 meters in diameter, and another oval, with a 43.6-meter major axis and a 32-meter minor axis.

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  The Crómlech de los Almendros in Portugal.

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  Les Bonnettes Sailly-en-Ostrevent, France.

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  Mull Hillon the island of Man, United Kingdom.

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  Nabta Beach, Egypt.

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  Crómlech de Castlerigg, Keswick, United Kingdom.

Pyrenean Harrespil

Harrespil from Okabe between Lecumberry and San Juan Pie de Puerto (France).

There are also many monuments of this type in the central and western Pyrenees, whose name in Basque is harrespil, which means "circle of stones". Its similarity with other European cromlechs lies in its shape (circles of stones stuck into the ground), but they are small: there are some whose diameter does not reach three meters, and there are few with more than fifteen. Its stones are also small. The circles, in general, are grouped in a variable number, and are located in hills and rounded peaks. Sometimes a cromlech surrounds a burial mound and even a dolmen.

The Pyrenean cromlechs are associated with the Iron Age (first millennium BC). In excavations carried out, its funerary function has been verified. The corpses were previously cremated, and their ashes were deposited in ceramic vessels, or they were surrounded with small slabs (forming a cist).

Its geographical distribution covers the entire central and western Pyrenees, both north and south. It has a feature that has not yet been explained: to the west they end abruptly when they reach the Oria and Leizarán rivers. In the eastern divide of the basin of this last river there is a significant amount of cromlech, but in the western divide there is not a single one. To the west of these rivers, very few isolated and dispersed specimens have been found (1 in Álava, 5 in Vizcaya and 3 in Navarra).