Hello and salut!
It is September 2020 and I'm in the outskirts of small town in Western France,
standing outside a café.
And I’m here partly because I’ve just had a half hour walk from the town centre
and I’d quite like a drink,
but mostly because this particular café has something really quite unusual in its back garden.
Something that was built there 5000 years ago
by the prehistoric inhabitants of the area.
So erm, well.
Let’s hope they’re in!
This is Saumur,
a ridiculously beautiful medieval town on the banks of the river Loire,
about two hours west of Paris on a TGV.
Historically it’s a big military town,
it’s still home to a Cavalry School
and the National Museum of Tanks,
and it was the site of the Battle of Saumur in World War II
when students at the Cavalry School tried to fight off the advancing Wehrmacht
even though France had technically already surrendered.
This is now considered as one of the first acts of the Résistance.
Meanwhile the Loire Valley itself is a region famous even within France
for its chateaux,
its great food
and great wine.
I really don’t know why I picked this place to come and film a video.
Anyway, of course,
we’re not here to see any of that.
(Not until I’m off camera anyway.)
Because what we’re here to see is this:
a 5000-year-old prehistoric chamber, dating to the time of Stonehenge.
It’s the biggest of its kind in France,
one of the 2 or 3 biggest in the whole of Europe,
and for some reason it’s in the back garden of a café.
It’s called the Dolmen de Bagneux,
and a dolmen (which I had to look up but apparently it’s the same word in English) is
a type of ancient structure made of megalithic stones.
The most basic dolmens are just two vertical stones supporting a third one that forms a roof,
but here, as you can see,
they’ve gone for a spacious detached bungalow kind of vibe.
Some dolmens would originally have been covered with earth
and turned into a type of mound called a tumulus
but in many cases, the earth has been eroded and washed away over the centuries
and all that remains are the giant slabs of stone.
So apparently this stone above me right now weighs 80 tonnes.
Just that stone!
Er, slightly worrying,
but it's stayed up for 5000 years so far...
So who lives in a house like this?
Well because dolmens come from an age before written history,
no-one really knows who made them,
or why they made them.
The most likely explanation is that they were ceremonial burial chambers or tombs,
which feels like the default archaeologists explanation for pretty much anything
but human bones were found in some of them so it’s our best guess.
What we do know is that they are mostly concentrated in the Celtic areas of Europe,
you’ll find a lot of them in Ireland,
Wales,
southern England,
northwest France,
southern Spain,
India and Korea.
Wait, India and Korea? Really?
Oh.
Weird.
Yep turns out they’re not Celtic at all,
and in fact they were being built all over Eurasia in Neolithic times,
way before Celtic culture was a thing.
So they’re nothing to do with druids and all that stuff.
Of course,
some people have a different opinion to me on that,
but then, it’s our differences that make us beautiful,
as you would no doubt say if you’re the kind of hippie who goes to those event-
-beep-
So how did a building older than the pyramids end up in a café's back garden?
I asked the owner off camera
and he explained that even the dolmens out in the countryside are on private land,
and they all belong to whoever the landowner is
which around here is often the local chateau.
It just happened that this one got swallowed up by the development of the town,
and ended up in someone’s back garden.
So when his granddad bought the house,
the dolmen came with it,
he opened up a café
and the business has been handed down the generations.
It does feel strange though that a prehistoric site as significant as this
is almost completely unknown to the outside world.
You’d think someone on the French tourist board would have negotiated a deal with the owners,
printed some posters calling it "The Stonehenge of France",
and started charging 5 times the price.
But then maybe that’s a good thing.
At Stonehenge you pay £20, there’s a hundred other people there,
and you can’t even get within 10m of the stones.
Here you pay 4€, there’s no-one else,
and you can just walk around and touch the walls that were built 50 centuries ago.
And that is…
sorry I’ve just noticed something on their website.
The dolmen is for sale.
You can buy this.
Right.
A million subscribers before Christmas and I’m getting it!
If you’d like to visit the Dolmen de Bagneux,
it’s a 5 minute drive or a half hour walk from the centre of Saumur.
Entry to the garden (under the current owners) is 4€ for adults and 2€ for kids
and the gate opens straight onto the road
so there shouldn’t be any problems with accessibility.
Anyway, I need to go and meet my mortgage advisor,
so thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.