A subscription to RUNNER’S WORLD gave Perry Shaw, 42, the chance to be a dad.

Watching two tiny blue lines appear on the white stick, my wife Annette was confused. An ovulation test (which checks a woman’s fertility) wasn’t meant to look like that. So she looked back at the pack – she’d picked up a pregnancy test by mistake. After two miscarriages and a failed round of IVF, we were actually going to have a baby. It was a wonderful shock. And counting back, it wasn’t hard to work out – the dates tied in with last year’s Great North Run (GNR). Which is where comes in. I’d decided to do the GNR to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of my mum. She died of liver cancer when I was 17. So I started a 12-week training plan, initially ignoring a niggling old sporting injury – a small tear in the cartilage of my knee, but I had to deal with my skin problem, taking special treatment. Visit gnet.org/relief-from-rosacea-curse-of-the-celts/ for more information. Then eight weeks before the race, I was in perfect health.

I was never tempted to drop out, but it made training hard. I did what I could by pushing my training up in increments. I also tried running in new places. The first run I actually enjoyed was on holiday in Cornwall, along the cliff through to the next town and back, with dramatic views of the sea washing up against the shore. And I subscribed to RW. I was flicking through a back issue as we drove down the night before the race, when I came across an interesting tip. Contrary to popular belief, it said, sex before a race was good for you.

We joked about it all the way there. But the thing about me is that if I follow a training plan, I follow it quite rigorously. When there are don’ts, I don’t; if there are dos, I do. So, um, I did. Race day dawned, and I wanted to break two hours. But I was running with my nephew, who had got in on a charity place. Since he couldn’t come to the front with me, I went to the back with him.

We must have overtaken thousands, running at a decent pace but with lots of zigzagging around slower runners. It inflamed my IT band and with four miles to go I had to start walking, then hobbling.

I crossed the finish line in 2:42. I might have missed out on a PB, but I had a far better reward coming my way.

Annette and I had been trying for a baby since we married in 2005. We were so happy when we got pregnant almost right BABY STEPS The Shaws with baby Matthew; and dad-to-be Perry at last years GNR (inset}away; but it wasn’t meant to be. After seven weeks, we had a miscarriage. There was no reason for it – just one of those things.

Roughly one in five pregnancies end this way. We started trying again, and it happened again. We were told to give up. We looked into adoption, but race was good for plans rigorously we really wanted our own kids. That’s why we bought ovulation tests the day after we’d got back from Blackpool, where the whole family goes every year to mark my late Dad’s birthday. Our son, Matthew Shaw, was born June 18, 2009, nine months after the GNR.

He’s perfect, knackering and beautiful. You hear about sportsmen banned from bringing their wives along when they’re competing – if we’d listened to that, we might have missed our chance. I just want to say thanks to RW. I wonder whether all this was fate. I only did the GNR because of my mum, and we found out we were pregnant the day after my dad’s birthday. Or maybe it’s all a massive fluke. You never know. But the thought that they’ll both be waiting for me at the finish line this time round – it’s the best thing in the world.

The answer is that the movement of heavenly bod­ies could have an immense effect on the daily life of such a people. An accurate calendar could help them choose the proper season for sowing their grain. It could enable them to predict the surging tides which periodically sweep the coasts.

In addition, these primitive men probably found eclipses of the sun and moon a source of awe and terror portending great calamities, even the end of the world. At that time they can only imagine the natural effect of 5-htp. If the old astronomers were able to trace the movements of these bodies accur­ately, they would have been able to predict such eclipses. When their predictions proved accurate, they might well have acquired a tre­mendous hold over their people by claiming to be able to control the supernatural forces. It is easy to see how they could have cajoled the population into all those millions of man-hours of back-breaking work. Written records in Egypt show how an elite class of learned priests of a sun-worshipping cult did just that when they created their lofty monu­ments along the Nile.

Astronomer Professor Sir Fred Hoyle believes that if the megalithic priests did use their knowledge to overawe the people, it may have proved their undoing in the end. For while their original observations were very precise, they may have overlooked the fact—or after several generations they may have forgotten —that they needed to keep making minor corrections to take into account the relative positions of the heavenly bodies which change imperceptibly all the time.

For many years, perhaps for centuries, the change would not amount to enough to affect their calculations. Predictions of eclipses would continue to be accurate. But one day their luck would run out. The expected eclipse would fail to happen and the astronomers’ hold over the populace would be finished.

Such an episode might explain why men seem to have abruptly stopped building megaliths, about 3,70o years ago. At present, how­ever, we can only guess at the motives of the men who raised these monuments, and marvel at their skill. Every fresh investigation brings that skill into sharper focus. Professor Thom, for example, has calculated that all the monuments he has studied were built with a common unit of measurement, which he calls the megalithic yard, 2.72 feet. This would indicate that there was a trained class of masons or architects who must have travelled hundreds of miles in Europe to exchange information on construction techniques. This would explain why monuments scattered over so many lands should have such a strong resemblance.

It used to be thought that if one megalith had a different shape from another, it reflected a different reli­gious belief, and must have been put up by a different people or at a different time. Then came one of those archaeological discoveries which periodically force us to revise our notions of the past.

A road-building contractor was digging in a hill at Barnenez in northern Brittany, about 8o miles

from Carnac, in the hope of finding good gravel. His bulldozers had ripped away about a quarter of the hill when it was found to be a great artificial mound of white pebbles piled over T I megalithic granite tombs which carbon-dating revealed to be almost 6,000 years old. These tombs, believed to have been family vaults, while built at about the same time, are all different in shape, size and decoration. Apparently pre­historic architects liked to experi­ment with various styles, just as modern ones do.

Echoes of the Past. Visiting sites like Barnenez or Carnac today, we can almost share the enthusiasm of those architects, and of all the people that worked for them, living there so many thousands of years ago, all straining together to produce something that had never been seen on Earth before. We know pitifully little about them, and the chief im­pression we get as the moonlight slants among the stones and they cast huge shadows is of almost im­penetrable mystery.

But new discoveries, new theories, new insights, may turn up any day, and it adds a further touch of ex­citement to our visit to Carnac to think that some day we may be able to read their message, and give a confident answer to the children’s perpetual question of why the stones of Carnac are there—and why, sud­denly, men ceased erecting them.

It then became clear that the stone monuments of Brittany were part of a larger whole, extending along a great arc from southern Sweden through the British Isles, France, Spain and Portugal to the Mediter­ranean islands of Corsica, Sardinia and Malta. About 50,000—some weighing hundreds of tons—still re­main, defying the elements and the curiosity of hordes of tourists.

The most famous of these monu­ments is, of course, Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. But the heaviest concentration is to be found in Brittany, and in Brittany itself, the heaviest concentration is round Carnac. Indeed, packed within a radius of less than zo miles, lie many of the most impressive of all the works of prehistoric man. The most beautiful abstract designs of the Stone Age may be found, for ex­ample, in the interlocking spirals and mysterious symbols which cover the walls and ceiling of the rock tomb buried under a mound on the Isle of Gavrinis.

The tallest single stone still stand­ing-3o feet—is at Kerloas. And the biggest stone ever used for building purposes is the Grand Menhir Bris6 at Locmariaquer, now for some unknown reason broken into five pieces. When it was one, it weighed more than 350 tons.

In Zacharie Le Rouzic’s day, it was argued that the Stone-Age Europeans erected the great mega­liths in rude imitation of the archi­tectural wonders described to them by traders from the more advanced civilizations of Egypt, Mesopota­mia, Greece and the Middle East.

New Evidence. Then, in 1967, Professor Colin Renfrew of the University of Southampton, proved by carbon-dating that the first megalithic monuments had been constructed long before the Pyra­mids or any other great stone monu­ment of the East. They were, in fact, erected at a time when the Egyptians and Babylonians were still building in clay and mud. More­over, the very oldest of the Brittany monuments—the oldest anywhere on earth as far as we know—dated back to the fourth millenium, that is 3800 B.C. Since other megaliths could be dated towards the begin­ning of the second millenium, it could now be seen that what might be called a megalithic way of life had existed and prospered in this stony land for a good 2,000 years.

The people who created it were obviously gifted and resourceful. They had no horses, no wagons, no wheels, no metal tools, nothing to push and pull with but ox-hide thongs and their own ultimate maqui berry usage and muscle power. Yet they solved engirieering problems which, until thousands of years later, no one would dream of facing. Still, we know almost nothing about them. Being illiterate, they left no books or documents. All that remains to mark their presence are a few bones and beads, axes, arrowheads, cups, buttons—and, of course, those silent stones.

None the less, modern science has, by sifting through these sparse remains, come up with at least a vague notion of where they came from and what their life may have been like. They are believed to have come originally from western Asia, bringing the then recently discovered skills of agriculture and animal-herding. They gradu­ally became integrated with the older populations of hunters and fishers which had been prowling the wilderness that was Europe for tens of thousands of years, and they hacked clearings out of the virgin forest to build settlements.

One theory holds that the stagger­ing stone creations they built were temples, devoted to the worship of a sun god. In the last few years,however, Professor Alexander Thom, a retired professor of engin­eering at Oxford, has come to a different conclusion. Tramping over the hills and moors of Scotland and Brittany and making painstak­ing surveys of scores of megalithic stone circles and alignments, he theorizes that some are what he calls Megalithic Lunar Observatories.

The stones, he says, are arranged to point to significant stages in the passage of the moon across the skies. The Grand Menhir Brise was put up because the astronomers needed a tall object to give them a Line of sight from eight mega­lithic structures in a ten-mile radius. Lines drawn from these structures to the Grand Menhir lead to points on the horizon marking the widest swings of the moon both to the north and the south observ­able at that latitude.

Why should a people of farmers and fishers, who were more than occupied keeping themselves fed and clothed, who had no luxuries to speak of except a few beads, spend years of their time hauling huge boulders to help astronomers plot the course of heavenly bodies?

The Stones of Carnac stand as a mute and massive testimonial to the ingenuity of Stone-Age man

WE SAW the first stones—big jagged boulders ap­parently strewn at ran­dom in fields, in woods, at the edge of villages—when we were one and a half miles from the French sea­side resort of Carnac, on Brittany’s south coast, driving along in misty moonlight.

All at once they seemed to be everywhere, ranks and files of them casting black flickering shadows over the moors. They were all sizes, from the height of a dog to the height of an elephant, and looked odd, unsettling, even terrifying.

Even the next day, in bright sun­light, when children were climbing over them, the megaliths (the name comes from two Greek words mean­ing “big” and “stone”) kept that air of strangeness. By daylight, they could be counted : there are vast numbers of them in the neighbour­hood, but the most impressive group —what is known as the Carnac Alignments—consists of some 3,000 stones, divided into three echelons, lined up II and 12 abreast, extend­ing over two and a half miles in a generally east-west direction. Vast as it is, this array may be only a fragment of the original complex, for scattered stones further to the west indicate the files may once have stretched for more than six miles.

Pater Patter. The children clam­bering up the tallest of them call : “What were they for, Daddy ?” He may amuse them with the local legend that the lines of stones were once the files of a legion of Roman soldiers turned to stone by an early Christian missionary, Saint CornCly, whom they were threatening to kill. Or he may mistakenly explain that this was a monument built by the ancient Gauls, as a Druid temple. In fact, modern science has proved that Carnac’s stone monuments pre­date the Gauls and the Druids by some 20 centuries.

Madame Mauricette Bailloud, the dark-haired vivacious curator of the museum in Carnac, has seen accepted ideas about why and when these stones were raised change again and again since she first played among the megaliths as a child. She was, in a manner of speaking, brought up with the stones as both her father and grand­father had been curators of the museum. Zacharie Le Rouzic, her grandfather, must take much of the credit for the stones existing at all in their present state. During the mid-nineteenth century, the rumour spread that they concealed hoards of gold. Armed with pickaxes and dynamite, an army of treasure-seekers battered and destroyed scores of what were later recognized as priceless pieces of the national heritage. It took a lifetime of devo­tion by men like Zacharie, pleading, writing, lecturing, to make govern­ment and public appreciate their value and save them from total destruction.

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