Stretching credulity: the ‘Christianisation’ of the figure in the Déhus passage grave, Guernsey

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Their account includes several factual errors. The main chamber is 7 m east/west and 3.7 m north/south, not the other way round (Jelly and Nash 2016, 247). The kneeling skeletons were excavated in side-chamber B, not C (250). The tomb was re-excavated in 1932 by Vera Collum, on behalf of Sir Robert Mond, not by Mond himself (248). The illustration purporting to show the Déhus (Jelly and Nash 2016, Figure 2) is a watercolour of La Varde, another passage grave on Guernsey. There are further errors in the introduction including the location of Guernsey (245), and the number and location of passage graves and menhirs on the island (Jelly and Nash 2016, Figure 1).

2. The surface area of the underside of the smaller section of capstone is 1.36 m². The thickness of the stone is more difficult to assess because of the reconstruction work which now hides its exact form, but the east face is certainly more than 0.2 m thick along its length, and the west face is between 0.4 and 0.45 m thick along its length. If we take an average of 0.3 m for the thickness of the capstone, the volume can be calculated as 0.408 m³. A typical figure for the mass of granite is 2691 kg/m³, giving the weight estimated here.

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Philip de Jersey

Philip de Jersey is the Archaeology Officer for the States of Guernsey. Between 1992 and 2007 he worked on the Celtic Coin Index at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, and he has published extensively on Iron Age coinage and related topics. In his current role he has an interest in all aspects of the archaeology of the Channel Islands and the surrounding region.