Marcel Mestdagh, (1926-1990) was a Belgian historian whose curiosity was sparked by a discovery of unusual street patterns in the city of Ghent. This led to a lifelong interest in the Viking culture that had settled on both sides of the English Channel. It was the study of the Vikings that led him to realise that they had knowledge, now forgotten, of the purpose of many of the megalithic monuments which Mestdagh identified as a form of road system, laid out in giant ovals with radials. At the centre of these ovals was the ancient city of Sens where the greatest concentration of megalithic monuments in France existed.

In the course of his investigations Mestdagh discovered an aspect of the Stonehenge-Avebury complex that had been overlooked, namely that the two sites were situated on the circumference of a huge oval. He further discovered that this oval was on a scale 1/10th of the ovals that he had discovered in France.

Filip Coppens, following Mestdagh’s work, has persuasively argued that Atlantis was the centre of a far-flung megalithic civilisation with its centre located where the ancient city of Sens now stands.