One of my potential stories is set in France at some dubiously time period of several hundred years ago. The prologue is all that exists of it, and it's quite well written, in my humble opinion. But I was rereading it tonight and became gradually more uneasy as I began to wonder if what I was describing was a historical impossibility.

I have a burial mound, or cairn, in the midst of a plain. It's made of stone, and and has gradually become mostly buried over the centuries. All the other cairns are deemed destroyed and looted long ago.


The hardest thing about this, is that I state in the prologue that it was excavated in the beginning of the twentieth century. So I can't just have it mysteriously destroyed and ignore the historical impossibilities. Thoughts?

Very interesting. I do wonder what the man had done in his life (or death) to earn that quote.

I don't understand what you're asking, though. What logic issue are you running into?

I wish I knew what he'd done too. I forget.

The logic issue is: is there any precedence for such a tomb existing in France? Is there going to be a serious historical issue with having a civilization build such a tomb? Or is it totally in the wrong place in the wrong century?

It's an actual, real live, historical problem. The book itself is pretty much fantasy, but the backdrop is France.

Okay, I think I get it. You're saying that this structure isn't something that was used historically in France. Just not a French thing, right?

I don't think that's a problem, if you're presenting this book as fiction. First of all, even though these structures aren't French in origin, a small group of people could have built a few in a certain sector.

Second of all, just because it isn't likely doesn't make it implausible. For example, most modern-day fiction is set in a made-up town. That town doesn't exist in real-life, but it's plausible. There's nothing in that fictional town that is impossible in real-life, so we, in our suspension of disbelief, can assume that there really is a town with that name in America. There aren't actually any cairns in France, but there's no reason there couldn't be. It's a "what if." What if a group of people had built these in a region in France?

I myself could accept it, but if you want to be historically accurate, consider relocating your setting and just taking some Frenchmen with you.

You could just go to Scotland. Cairns about up there, or Wales. It would be that hard to get Frenchmen there either...
I'd be surprised if the French didn't build cairns ever. Maybe not when they spoke Latin, but the French natives were Celts/Gauls, the same as England, and they built cairns. I'd believe it if you said one cairn survived in France.

I didn't think about Wales... do you have any links about those Cairns?