La Varde

La Varde is a dolmen at the place called L'Ancresse, in the parish of Clos du Valle, on Guernsey in the Channel Islands. It lies buried under a mound on a knoll overlooking the sea at 14 m above sea level.

The dolmen was discovered in 1811 during military exercises. It is a passage dolmen of V shape, 10 m long and 3,60 m at its widest. The headroom reaches a maximum of 2,10 m, and the monument opens to the east.

The size of its six capstones decreases from west to east. Originally there was a seventh capstone. The weight of the slabs is estimated at between 10 t and 25 t.

Excavations revealed pottery sherds, remains of cremated human bones and a bronze plaque. The site was occupied in the Neolithic.

A dolmen is a single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually made of two or more upright stones supporting a large flat horizontal capstone, or table. Most date from the Late Neolithic period, 4000 to 3000 BCE, and were sometimes covered with earth or smaller stones to form a tumulus. In many dolmens the covering has eroded away, leaving only the stone skeleton, but at La Varde the mound still covers the chamber. The word entered archaeology when Théophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne used it to describe megalithic tombs in his book of 1796.

La Varde is a dolmen in Vale, Guernsey. No English Wikipedia article exists for it; the full text below is the French article "La Varde", shown in the original language.