Pierres Jaumâtres
A granite chaos, listed since 1927
About forty granite boulders at the summit of Mont Barlot, five hundred and ninety-one metres up. Listed site since 1927, free access. George Sand picnicked here with Chopin.
The boulders are what geologists call tors: cores of sound granite that held firm while the rock around them decomposed. Erosion during the cold periods of the Quaternary, between a hundred thousand and ten thousand years ago, did the rest. Their surfaces carry grooves, channels, basins.
They have names: la Bascule, l'Oratoire, les Pains de sucre, le Siège, la Grenouille, le Berceau du Diable.
For a long time it was said the druids had carved them for blood rites. It was a Creuse politician of the early 19th century who first imagined this. Mérimée disproved it.
George Sand came here in 1841, then in September 1845 for a picnic with Chopin and Pierre Leroux. She set her novel Jeanne here, and described the boulders as perched like giant mushrooms on narrow bases.
Listed under the 1906 heritage law, eleven hectares. Free access by a path lined with dry-stone walls. One kilometre away, the Toulx tower, thirty metres high, gives a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama over seven départements.