French Monoliths, and OMG Human BONES!!

Oct 17, 2004

We were up 8:45 on our first morning in Berric, France. I’d gone to sleep a bit earlier than my three companions, and had quite a bit less to drink the previous night, but everyone was in a foul mood. Jason was particularly cranky, which made breakfast rather unpleasant.

French people love their breads, and for good reason. Baguettes and soft cheese, or fresh croissants, are treats that I enjoy anytime. But the French people like to eat them every day, and often for more than one meal. So despite our attempts at staying in the range of our normal fiber intake, we were starting to feel a little plugged up. The hangovers from combining good Absinthe with cheap beer didn’t help our overall physical condition.

Robyn decided that she was feeling icky enough she wanted to stay back at the chateau, while the rest of us headed out to visit the nearby monoliths. Unfortunately they were gated and it was a Sunday, so we could only walk around the outside of the field and take pictures.

As we were walking around the exterior we came across an amazing old cemetery. Some of the headstones were so old that pieces of stone were actually rotting off from the headstones. The two guys headed down an eastern path while I headed north. A few seconds later I was freaking out and calling them both over at the top of my lungs.

At my feet was a freshly turned grave, which I merely glanced at until I noticed an eerily bone like object near my foot. Crouching down I pointed it out to the guys and they verified that it was a human finger! Oh my god! With three pairs of eyes now on the site, we were suddenly seeing more bones, including teeth, scattered throughout the churned up earth.

We couldn’t figure out why someone would simply grind up an old skeleton like that. It seemed extremely disrespectful to just chop it up and leave pieces of it all over like that! The only thing we could figure was that the town was limited on cemetery space so they decided they needed to dig up an old grave to plant a new body. I would have freaked out if they’d done something like that to one of my ancestors, but all we could hope was that it was a relative of the first occupant.

That was about all I could take of cemeteries. Seeing Jim Morrison’s grave was pretty awesome, but seeing human bones being trampled all over like this was an entirely different story. That was the last cemetery we visited in France.


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