Cavemen and Cardigans
Jun 20th, 2007 by admin
One of the places that we visited was Le Grottes Prehistoric de Rouffignac, a network of caves discovered in 1956 to have a number of prehistoric cave paintings on the walls and ceilings.
You can get a guided tour which lasts an hour where you travel around the cave on an electric train. Our guide was French (obviously) which meant that I couldn't follow what she was saying, and, to add to the confusion a couple had bought their baby down into the cave which proceeded to cry for the duration of the tour. So to give you a flavour of what we saw in the caves here is a summary and picture of one of the cave paintings courtesy of the official website (photography once inside the cave was strictly forbidden).
"At Rouffignac, the dominant theme is the mammoth. The walls and ceilings of this labrinth bear 154 images of these pachyderms. Despite the enormous prestige this animal has, it was not often depicted by prehistoric artists, who genrally preferred to depict horses and bison. Although there are 300 decorated caves in Western Europe, about half of the representations can be found at Rouffignac. This is why the site is sometimes called the 'Cave of the Hundred Mammoths'. The choice of the artists is all the more suprising since mammoth bones are rare in the South East of Europe, which adds to the mystery of the decoration of this cave."
Why the reference to cardigans? Well three of our party had come in short sleeves and once inside the caves the temperature significantly drops, on seeing our apparel a very kind lady at the souvenir stand offered us a selection of cardigans - obviously we were not the first to come unprepared!