‘Le Pierre aux Oeufs’ a late Neolithic sacred stone near St Chaffrey, Serre Chevalier, France

Thirty minutes from St Chaffrey, in the pine forest, a sacred stone can be found lying on the ground by the edge of the Ravin de Réguinier, the other side going down to the Dormilliou fields which were cultivated until 1914. The stone is 0 70m wide and 1.15m long. The thickness is 42 cm. 13 cups with an average diameter of 4 cm have been hollowed out in no apparent special order. The stone is placed towards the long north-south paths. This cannot be the work of erosion or freezing. It must be that some men have attacked the block by successively hitting it in a rotating motion with small stones or pebbles.

This cupped megalith is similar to those that have been detailed in Maurienne and Tarentaise, and in particular around Lans-le-Villard, Saint-Martin-de-Belleville and Bourg-Saint-Maurice. There the cups are more or less regular. Sometimes they are accompanied by engravings of solar or spiral shapes. Similar stones have been listed in Briançonnais, for example in the ‘Table Percée’ on the Col de l’Echelle, there is the “Pierre de Fontenil”.

Recently, two new megaliths of the same type have been discovered: one on the Puy-Saint-Pierre road and the other in the L’Eychauda mountain pastures near Monêtier. They are all located at the same level (about 1500 m). These stones emanate from a similar pastoral civilization that carved stone axes that have been discovered at Oulx, Salbertrand and Cezanne in Italy and Freissinière (near L’Argentière) and at Ubaye (just south of Lac Serre Ponçon) in France. François Arnaud discovered no less than 27 in Ubaye made with the green stone of the upper Durance, which indicates that they were made in Briançonnais.

These lucky finds are found in mountain pastures, like the 7 cupped stones in Maurienne. All these testimonies are proof of a Neolithic human presence in these areas, but the Alps, being covered with ice, were uninhabitable before the fourth millennium. It is from this period that the climate warmed and the glaciers receded. Therefore, the first populations could not be here before 2000 years before Christ. Archaeologists agree that the age of the stones dates back to the late Neolithic. It is thought to be early Bronze Age, around 2000-1700 BC The same techniques were used for a long time and it is possible that this stone was cut by a group of peasants who arrived here in the early 2nd millennium.

In other places, the cups are sometimes accompanied by drains and it is thought that these megaliths may have acted as sacrificial tables, collecting the blood in the cavities. Absolutely not the case at St Chaffrey. Here this megalith is called the stone of the eggs, because tradition has it that the townspeople regularly left food there for the lepers and the plague-stricken in the Middle Ages. In fact, following further up the right bank of the ravine, at the end of some cliffs called Combe de Ricou, which top off the ravine, shelters can be found under rocks and a small cave whose entrance is today obstructed by rubble and at the foot of which a fountain of water sprouts. It is in this hole called ‘cave of lepers’, according to local tradition, where the fugitives with the plague always went. This is not a random stone that has been chosen to feed plague victims, but a sacred stone.