Hi, a quick message to report on my painstaking but immensely satisfying sweep from the SW megaliths of Iberia up to the mists of the NW. After more than 2 years busy mainly with the Alentejo stones I have recently expanded to the North of Portugal and Galicia. Sadly, I am moving to Berlin very soon in an attempt to discover German megalithia, as another Unsung country in terms of ancient remains awaits. What’s then left behind is an initial framework for a possible future Annexus Quam’s Megalithic Iberia, which will attempt to cover the best sites for the XXIst Century Mystic in search of inspiration far from the madding crowds and spreading bungalows that infest so many of the stones in various other parts of Europe.
But to get back to the main point, I was recently amazed by the huge amounts of petroglyphs (rock art like spirals, labyrinths, concentric circles, cupmarks and others) which were EXACTLY THE SAME as the ones in Northumberland and Scotland. The area I have just come from is the (Third) Finisterre in Galicia, the ‘Gallic fringe’ of Iberia (the first being Land’s End, the second the Finistere of Brittany). Whereas the temperature in other parts of Iberia and Europe has been reaching boiling levels, here it is never higher than 24º and the rain falls more often than on English soil (excluding the Land’s End).
Although there are serious reports of some stone circles in parts of Galicia (and I am NOT considering the beautiful Mesolithic Cromlechs of the Alentejo as ‘proper’ stone circles, though they may look like them), I have not found any, and, in various cases, they are already gone. BUT the Atlantic connection goes back for sure to the Iron Age (due to the 2000 or more Celtic Hillforts all over Galicia and Northern Portugal – as well as, curiously, a much higher presence of distinct physical features, like pale people with blue eyes and fair or red hair, not so common in the inhabitants of other parts of Iberia). These innumerable Bronze Age petroglyphs (as they are called here), are, surely too, part of a common heritage told in the legends of the ‘lost tribes of Maelloc’ that left Britain at various stages from the Bronze Age until the coming of the Saxons. Or perhaps, as I believe, the movement was not unidirectional and is not so important in such a vast stretch of time, in my opinion, whether ideas and people originated in Celtic Britain, Brittany or Galicia (or all three at the same time). Finally, the topography is surprisingly conspicuous – the River Brea, Eira Vedra, Eiros, Cuntis… to name a few, are common names in the Galician landscape, there’s even a Bretona.
Going even further back in time, the photogenic beauty of the thousands of dolmens and cairns that dot the Galician and Northern Portuguese landscape is such, that they could fill up books. For a taster, I have added pictures to my space at Guilfin, as well as some other dolmens from another ‘fringe’ area I raved about last year, the Basque Country (or Euskadi).
Reclaim the stones! (and respect them)
http://www.guilfin.net/database/?subcat=scINET5&pix=1#pix
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