In France, as in England, and indeed most countries [Stones] are usually connected in the popular belief with fairies or with demons - and in England, with Robin Hood. In France this latter personage is replaced by Gargantua, a name made generally celebrated by the extraordinary romance of Rabelais. A cromlech near the village of Toury, in Britany, is called Gargantua's stone; a not uncommon name for the single stone or menhir is palet de Gargantua (Gargantua's quoit).

A very common name for cromlechs among the peasantry of France is fairies' tables, or devils' tables, and in one or two instances they have obtained the name of Caesar's table; the covered alleys, or more complicated cromlechs, are similarly named fairies; grottos, or fairy rocks. The single stones are sometimes called fairies' or devils' seats.

The prohibition to worship stones occurring so frequently in the earlier Christian ecclesiastical laws and ordinances, relates no doubt to these druidical monuments, and was often the cause of their destruction. Traces of this worship still remain.

In some instances people passed through the druidical monuments for trial, or for purification, or as a mode of defensive charm. It is still a practice among the peasantry at Columbiers, in France, for young girls who want husbands, to climb upon the cromlech called the Pierre-levee, place there a piece of money, and then jump down. At Guerande, with the same object, they despose in the crevices of a Celtic monument bits of rose-coloured wool tied with tinsel. The women of Croisic dance round a menhir. It is the popular belief in Anjou that the fairies, as they decended the mountains spinning by the way, brought down the druidical stones in their aprons, and placed them as they are now found.

In the quaint dirty tumbledown City of Poitiers, Dr. Veryard detected a marvel which escaped my observation. It consisted in a stone, twenty-five feet high, sixty in compass, and supported by five small ones. 'Some will needs have S. Aldegonde to have brought it hither on her shoulders, with the five supporters in her apron, and that, letting one fall by the way, the devil took it up, and following her to the place where she erected the stone on four pillars, set the fifth in the middle; but, cunning artificer as he is, he could not make it touch the great stone by an inch, nor does it to this day'.