A French mayor has been criticised after planning permission was granted to remove 39 ancient stones – to build a DIY shop.
The site in Carnac, in France’s Brittany region, is well known for its extensive fields of Neolithic-era stones, known as ‘menhir’.
The stones, measuring around 3ft (1m) high, have been carbon dated and were built from 5480 to 5320 BC – making them older than Stonehenge.
Mayor Olivier Lepick claimed excavations carried out last June determined the site had a ‘low archaeological value’ and didn’t merit protection, CNN reports.
But the removal of the stones at the site, 3km away from a protected tourist attraction, drew criticism from a local amateur archaeologist, Christian Obeltz.
His blog post accusing local authorities of ‘denaturing this globally recognised site’, and denouncing ‘several sudden developments in the vicinity of the Carnac menhir alignments, distorting this world-famous site’, received international attention.
The site is part of an application for UNESCO World Heritage Status which was set to be submitted to the French Ministry of Culture at the end of last September, Mr Obeltz claimed.
‘Whether it’s little or not, [the site] has an archaeological value,’ he told BFMTV.
Despite the outcry over the removal of the stones, the work went ahead, with the new branch of ‘Mr. Bricolage’ DIY shops already open in Carnac.
Meanwhile Mr Lepick claimed coverage of the controversy ‘does not reflect the reality’ of the situation on the ground.
Speaking to French news channel CNews he said: ‘There were never 39 menhirs in this place. The preventative excavations we carried out in 2015 clearly show this.
‘It’s really not the kind of images described in certain media articles. I feel like I have destroyed the Mona Lisa when I read certain articles.
‘There were not archaeological remains of sufficient value to reject planning permission.’
He said the destroyed stones were located in a commercial area, opposite a service station and close to a supermarket and recycling centre.
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