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Origin and history

The Pierre de la Joure is a menhir in iron sandstone measuring 4.5 meters high, located at the border of the communes of Saint-Ouen-d-Attez, Saint-Nicolas-d'Attez and Condé-sur-Iton, in the Eure. This massive block, dated from the Neolithic, has a tapered shape with a dormant slot and deep crevices on its western face. Its current location, on the edge of an artificial pond created by sand extraction in the early twentieth century, explains its progressive inclination due to soil weakening.

The site has delivered numerous prehistoric tools (cut silex, axes, scrapers, arrow tips), attesting to a prolonged human occupation since the Paleolithic period. Two amygdaloid axes and moustarian tips, discovered in the vicinity, confirm the age of the site's attendance. The menhir himself, described for the first time in 1832 by Auguste Le Prévost, nearly disappeared in 1901 when its marshy land was sold to an entrepreneur exploiting the Alluvions of l'Iton. Saved in extremis by Léon Coutil, president of the French Prehistoric Society, it was finally classified as a historical monument on December 6, 1934.

A local legend combines the stone with a Gaulish chief named Hoël, who allegedly committed suicide in front of her during the Roman invasion in 57 BC, after the capture of Evreux by Publius Crassus. Another tradition is that the menhir, nicknamed "Pierre de Gargantua", would open on Christmas Eve to reveal a treasure, sometimes trapping the hand of greedy men trying to take it. These accounts reflect the symbolic importance of the site, a place of worship and memory for local populations for millennia.

The western face of the menhir presents a protuberance that Abbé Alphonse-Georges Poulain interpreted in 1896 as a schematic representation of a human face, with three small holes evoking eyes and nose. This hypothesis, although speculative, illustrates attempts to attribute ritual or commemorative significance to this megalith. Neolithic tools found in the vicinity suggest that the stone could mark a territory or serve as a landmark for collective activities, such as flint size or seasonal gatherings.

The adjacent pond, accidentally created by sand extraction in the early 20th century, has permanently altered the landscape around the menhir. The work, carried out in the immediate vicinity of Iton, weakened the foundations of the stone, causing its current inclination. Despite these disturbances, the 1934 ranking preserved this exceptional testimony of megalithic practices in Normandy, while fuelling a local imagination mixing Gaulish history, medieval folklore and pagan beliefs.

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