Jonathan Thomas (00:26)
Welcome to the Anglotopia podcast where we explore British history, travel and culture. And I am your host, Jonathan Thomas. If you've ever stood before Stonehenge or walked past a standing stone somewhere in the British countryside, or even just seen one of those ancient circles from a car window, you've probably felt something, a kind of pull, a question without an answer. What is this? Who built it? And what did it mean? Archaeologists can give us some of those answers, dates, construction methods, the origins of subs...

specific stones, but there's a whole other layer of human response to these ancient monuments that archaeology alone can't explain. The stories people have told about them, the myths, the legends, the folklore, the romantic poetry, the folk horror films, the rock musicians. For thousands of years, humans have stood before these silent stones and invented meaning and those inventions tell us as much about the people doing the imagining as they do about the stones themselves.

That's the subject of a remarkable new book published by Reaction Books coming out on July 6th called Stories of the Stones, Imagining the Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany. Its author is Paul Robichaud. Did I say it right? Professor of English at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut. And he is here to take us on a journey through the remarkable cultural afterlife of some of Britain and Ireland's most mysterious places.

Paul Robichaud (01:37)
You

Jonathan Thomas (01:50)
Paul, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being with us on a Friday afternoon.

Paul Robichaud (01:52)
Thanks for having me.

Yeah, good to be.

Jonathan Thomas (01:58)
So

Paul, you describe yourself in the book as a child of the seventies, whose earliest encounters with stories about stones involved earth energy druids with the power to levitate things in alien spacecraft. That's quite an origin story for a scholarly book. So where did the fascination actually begin for you?

Paul Robichaud (02:15)
Well, you know, I grew up ⁓ on the sort of Usborne books about ghosts and UFOs and monsters and things like that. And ⁓ I remember very specifically a series called In Search Of that was hosted by Leonard Nimoy. And there was one episode on Stonehenge which made it seem as cool and mysterious ⁓ as possible. And ⁓ when I was growing up, my grandparents would ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (02:29)
Yep. Yep.

Paul Robichaud (02:45)
occasionally go over to the UK. I remember they brought me back the National Heritage Guidebook to Stonehenge, which I thought was really interesting. And ⁓ yeah, so my interest kind of came out of that. among those kind of strange books from that time, I had one that had a picture of a druid kind of surfing on a large stone coming into it, like he's landing at Stonehenge. And it was kind of this idea that how did they build it? They must have levitated the stones.

you using these Earth energies and things. So the 70s was a time when there was a lot of interest in what we kind of call new age ⁓ thinking and ideas and spirituality. So all that was kind of in the air, you know, when I when I was a kid. But, ⁓ you know, and I did ⁓ I made a trip to Scotland in 1998 and I went and visited the the Stone Circle on Lewis at Kalanish and, know, it was really just a really powerful experience. I've always been fascinated by these places.

Jonathan Thomas (03:42)
And so you're a professor of English, a literary scholar by training, so you're not an archeologist. So how has that shaped what you're doing in this book? What can a literary scholar see that an archeologist might not be looking for?

Paul Robichaud (03:56)
Well, I think there's been so many books written about Stonehenge in particular, archaeological books about Neolithic sites all through Europe and Britain. ⁓ I think often when archaeologists are writing about kind of myths and legends and folk tales, they're really looking at them and kind of testing them against what they've discovered about these places through archaeology. ⁓ And I think that from

A more literary point of view, I'm more interested in what these stories are doing and what they reveal about the people who are telling them and what they reveal about ⁓ people's changing relationship to their kind of natural and built ⁓ environments. In other words, I think if we kind of put the question of what do they tell us about how these sites were built or what they were used for,

to one side and just kind of look at the stories and the way that these places have been imagined. We can get some insight into what they've meant to people who have visited them, who've lived alongside these places for centuries and even millennia. The stories are interesting in their own right. We don't have to look at the stories and kind of judge them by whether or not they tell us something about how these places were built because...

They generally don't tell us much of anything about that because we don't have any records from thousands and thousands of years ago about them.

Jonathan Thomas (05:28)
So your book covers Britain, Ireland, and Brittany, which is in northern France. So that's a big geographical scope. Why those three regions together and what connects them prehistorically?

Paul Robichaud (05:33)
Yeah.

Well, they're all places that have a lot of prehistoric sites, know, standing stones, ⁓ tombs, places like that. An archaeologist named ⁓ Aubrey Burl wrote a book, ⁓ you know, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany. So I'm really kind of following following his lead there. But these are all regions of Europe that are kind of megalithically dense. They're certainly not the only places that have.

megalithic sites. Those are found all through Europe, but there's a particularly high concentration ⁓ in northwestern Europe. And I thought as well, it could be way of ⁓ expanding our perspective a little bit out of Stonehenge, out of England, even out of Britain, and kind of seeing these sites as part of a regional kind of cultural network of ⁓ megalithic

places and ⁓ and the interconnect the connections between these places and you know as I've read the sort of sort of megalithic builders and so on there are a lot of questions about it one of the things that's interesting is you know these are all built at slightly different times right so the the megalithic alignments these long rows of stones and karnak and britney

date back as early as 4500 BC. Whereas when we get to Stonehenge, most of that's built around 3000 BC. So there's a huge span of time between when these places are built and yet all of them are characterized by desire to raise stones, make monuments in the landscape.

They must have learned from and influenced each other, those early builders, in some ways. But ⁓ yeah, just a high concentration of these sites. Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (07:42)
So for listeners who might not know much about prehistoric monuments beyond Stonehenge, which everybody knows about, ⁓ can you give us a sense of scale and variety of what we're talking about? Standing stones, stone circles, dolmens, burial mounds, earthworks, what are these things in the landscape?

Paul Robichaud (08:01)
Yeah, right. And Stonehenge really does loom large and Stonehenge features prominently in the book. But one of the things I did want to do with the book is kind of take us out of Stonehenge a little bit and see that it is special, it's unique in many ways, but it is one of many Neolithic monuments. it is a kind of catalog of different kinds of sites. we have the burial mounds.

We have single standing stones, which are also known as menhirs from Breton, actually, just the big stone, to arrangements of stones and circles, ⁓ to tombs that are constructed of stones and covered in earth. ⁓ And so it's a pretty broad range in terms of the types of sites that are there. And

Jonathan Thomas (08:43)
instead of.

And so it's a pretty broad range in terms of the exoskeleton right there.

Jonathan Thomas (08:57)
So you make a point early in the book that the word prehistoric didn't even exist until the mid 19th century. So for most of human history, people encountering these monuments had no framework or understanding of them as ancient. They were just there. How did that shape the stories people told about them in your research?

Paul Robichaud (09:18)
I think ⁓ that's a good question because particularly ⁓ when you get into folklore ⁓ in places like Cornwall, for example, in the southwest of England, ⁓ where folklore doesn't necessarily make a huge distinction between ⁓ what we would call natural rock formations and things like that and constructed formations. So they might both be attributed to giants, for example. ⁓

And so they were often perceived as part of the landscape, the same way that an unusual rock formation or a weird shaped hill or something might be seen as part of the landscape in folklore. think for more ⁓ educated people kind of looking at these places, they, I think, perceived a difference ⁓ between a man made, a human built structure and a natural formation a little more

clearly, but they didn't have any context either. So they're faced with something that was built by someone ⁓ and often, you know, thinking about Stonehenge and some of these other larger monuments in a way that is not really explicable. So folklore often brought giants in as a way of explaining, you know, who could have built these places. ⁓ But over the centuries, ⁓ antiquarians, people studying these sites tended to see them through the lens of either the Bible

or classical literature and history where they're not really mentioned. mean, there's no framework for it at all. And so ⁓ they were really kind of guessing, you know, the stories and narratives that get constructed around these places are in some ways stabs in the dark, trying to make sense of them and trying to bring them into a worldview where they can make sense.

Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (11:13)
So, and you mentioned Stonehenge. Stonehenge is kind of an obvious entry point for most people. It's the most recognizable of these monuments. Many Americans, when they think of prehistoric monuments, they think of Stonehenge. So what is it about Stonehenge that specifically that has fired the imagination so persistently across the centuries? Because what makes it so different from other ancient sites that keeps it in the collective memory?

Paul Robichaud (11:21)
Yeah.

Well, I ⁓ think a starting point for answering that is just kind of looking at the difference visually between what Stonehenge looks like and other ⁓ stone circles. And the major difference that jumps out are the arrangements of the stones, where you have uprights and then a lintel on top. So they're very clearly constructed and, if you like, designed.

It's a very clearly intentional structure. And there are no other stone circles like it. This is very, ⁓ this is kind of a one-off. It's unique. And ⁓ those lintels that hang on those uprights, ⁓ they're put in place, held in place ⁓ with mortise and tenon joints, like from carpentry. There's a bump on top of the upright stone and the lintel rests with a little indentation to.

to sit where the bump is. And they've been ⁓ in a state of ruin for centuries. So people could see that feature of them that was hidden. So clearly, there's a lot of ingenuity that went into constructing it. And the sheer size of it, these stones are absolutely massive. And I think that this feeling of wonder and awe ⁓ that people had looking at Stonehenge ⁓

was something that inspired not just the interest, but some of the legends and stories ⁓ that went along ⁓ with it. And also its location in the south of England and Wiltshire. It's there, like it's right there on Salisbury Plain, a relatively populated part of Britain. It's not up in the fastnesses of the Welsh mountains or on the Hebrides. ⁓

So people see it and they saw it from the road when they went by. ⁓ so I think it's location and really the distinctiveness of ⁓ its architecture is what has singled it out ⁓ in particular.

Jonathan Thomas (13:49)
Well, in mentioning architecture, and forgive me, this isn't on my list of questions, but ⁓ Stonehenge as we see it today is actually not how it's looked for most of ⁓ recorded memory. They ⁓ think it's how it would have looked. And it's an approximation. And I think that's interesting that it's also the monument itself has changed within the landscape and based on who was studying it and who was looking at

Paul Robichaud (14:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And even in the 19th and into the 20th century, some of those stones were raised up that had been lying down for hundreds of years. there are some questions about the extent to which that kind of intervention was really, really appropriate. ⁓ But yeah, to your point, ⁓ we don't know exactly, I suppose, how

how it would have originally ⁓ looked, but it's been in a state of ruin for a really long time.

So yeah, it's never, no one's, we see a more polished and complete and kind of cleaned up version of Stonehenge today than people would have seen for centuries, if not millennia.

Jonathan Thomas (15:06)
And I guess you can make the argument that's the version we would like to see.

Paul Robichaud (15:10)
Well, it is. Yeah.

so so that's kind of making the point that, the way the way we imagine a place like Stonehenge can shape ultimately how we do see Stonehenge. ⁓ And so we get we sort of get the restoration of it. ⁓ We imagine a partial restoration. You know, it's not all ⁓ pieced together. Another example of that is actually the site of New Grange in Ireland, which was very controversially restored.

in the late 60s. So it has this kind of gleam. It's this ancient chamber tomb. It's enormous. ⁓ And it's today covered in a kind of crystal rock ⁓ facade. ⁓ But whether or not it looked like that originally is very much open for debate. And there are archaeologists who think that it's not, that's not the way it looked and this facade shouldn't have been added.

So to your point, these monuments themselves are not static fixed parts of the landscape, but are themselves constantly being reimagined and rearranged and so on.

The same at Averbury too, where a lot of the stones that we see today are ones that were ⁓ re-erected and put into place by an archaeologist named James Keeler in the 1930s.

Jonathan Thomas (16:33)
Yeah, I know on the tourist trail, many people say that actually Avebury is a more enjoyable stone visit than in Sonnen, it actually is because of the popularity that Avebury is much more, ⁓ it's much

you get more of a sense of monastic awe, I guess.

Paul Robichaud (16:50)
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think that the crowds at Stonehenge can be a bit overwhelming if you're going. it can be a little hard to experience with the kind of kind of sense of awe. And one suggestion I would have if people are visiting Stonehenge is if you're physically able to walk from the visitor center to the monument.

It's a bit of a hike, but what you experience is a bit more of the landscape. So you see as you're walking along the barrows and you walk by them and the wooded land. then finally, you see a little bit in the distance Stonehenge itself. And it really is impressive. ⁓ But you at least get a little bit of that experience as you're approaching, ⁓ which you see the landscape from the bus, I'm sure. ⁓ when I was over there a few years ago,

I walked from the visitor center and I was glad I did because you did get a bit of a sense of what this must have been like to suddenly see in front of you in the landscape.

Jonathan Thomas (18:00)
Yeah, walk to it and then take the bus back.

Paul Robichaud (18:03)
Yes,

absolutely.

Jonathan Thomas (18:06)
So you opened your book with the earliest recorded responses to megalithic sites, including a tantalizing account by the Greek historian, I'm gonna, Diodorus Siculus, of a spherical temple in the north that some scholars believe could be a description of Stonehenge or Kalanis. Tell us about that. Like, how did you find, come across this?

Paul Robichaud (18:29)
This was so, yeah, in Aubrey Burle's book that I had mentioned earlier, the Stone Circles of Britain Island and Brittany, ⁓ he brings this up, this story recorded in Diorus Siculus, which as you say, describes the spherical temple on this Northern Island. And he refers to an 18th century ⁓ antiquarian and ⁓ kind of controversialist named John Toland who

made this argument that ⁓ this spherical temple was actually the stone circle and related monuments on the Isle of Lewis in the outer Hebrides called Kalanish. And ⁓ Aubrey Burl ⁓ endorsed this. He agreed with this perspective. he gave this argument that the

The account that Diodorus Siculus gives of the position of the moon and the stars in relation to the temple only makes sense at a pretty far north location so that Stonehenge is actually a little too far south to experience the moon as it goes through its great 19-year cycle. So that is a possibility. I don't, personally, I'm a bit agnostic about it. I think

I think that would be really exciting. ⁓ But I also, if we kind of go back to the story and we think about the description that Diodorus Siculus gives us, he doesn't say a circle, he says a sphere. ⁓ And he describes how it is on this island and there's a city nearby and the people there are constantly praising the god Apollo and so on. it doesn't, the details,

are definitely shading into kind of the mythical and legendary. ⁓ And I think it's quite possible that it ⁓ is reflecting the reality of a circular kind of temple, maybe Kalanish, and has just been, I don't know, embroidered a bit or exaggerated in the retelling. But that is ⁓ the earliest story we have that could be about

one of these megalithic sites in northwestern Europe.

Jonathan Thomas (20:51)
So fast forwarding a few centuries, ⁓ Jeffrey of Monmouth's account of Stonehenge, which was written in the 12th century, is one of the most influential stories ever told.

Paul Robichaud (20:58)
Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (21:01)
that account come to dominate the medieval imagination of Stonehenge for centuries.

Paul Robichaud (21:06)
Well, ⁓ in many ways it dominates because there aren't any rival accounts. ⁓ Geoffrey's story is sort of it. mean, Geoffrey claimed to get his information from a mysterious book in Welsh that ⁓ no one else had ever heard of and has never been identified or located. And he was clearly a fabulator. ⁓ He was a storyteller. And it's not at all clear.

where some of his information comes from, if he's just making things up, if he's drawing on authentic local folklore traditions, if he had access to manuscripts that disappeared. But there were no alternate origin stories ⁓ for Stonehenge. And throughout the Middle Ages, Geoffrey's account of ⁓ the settlement of Britain, the history of the British kings up till ⁓ the Saxon conquest, his stories about King Arthur,

⁓ They were generally accepted as factual throughout the Middle Ages. so that account of Stonehenge ⁓ was accepted as part of the real history ⁓ of Britain. ⁓ And there some interesting features about it. His story about the stones coming from Ireland, ⁓ for example, ⁓ we know today that the earliest stones, not the big sarsens and the lintels, but

the smaller blue stones actually do come from a quarry. It's been identified in West Wales and Pembrokeshire. ⁓ And in the 1920s, an archaeologist named Stuart Piggott suggested that ⁓ Geoffrey Monmouth's story was actually a kind of garbled account of these stones coming from the far west, ⁓ not Ireland, but Pembrokeshire. And just recently, archaeologists have found that some of the

the other stones come from as far as Northeastern Scotland. my sort of take on this is that there seems to be, there's a recognition that some of these stones are foreign. I don't think we have to accept that there's this story that's being passed down for millennia about this. think if we try to see it from the point of view of a local farmer, people in the nearby village, they know what stones look like in the place they live and they know these stones are not local, right?

⁓ So something like that might be underlying the story, but ⁓ in any case, his account definitely dominated the Middle Ages and kept getting retold all through the Renaissance. makes an appearance in ⁓ Edmund Spenser's Fairy Queen, for example, but it crops up again and again. It's really, it's the canonical ⁓ version of ⁓ Stonehenge.

Jonathan Thomas (23:54)
And speaking of the Welsh, the early Welsh tradition has its own fascinating relationship with ancient monuments. The idea that these prehistoric mounds were places of enchantment. So what's the particular character of the Welsh response to the landscape?

Paul Robichaud (24:10)
Yeah, the Welsh response is distinct. I think ⁓ one way to sort of think about it is ⁓ as a tradition that is very much rooted in folklore and that draws deeply on ⁓ Arthurian traditions and the traditions of the early British saints, the Celtic saints as well. So the traditions all are at least looking back to that kind of that post-Roman.

moment in Britain where ⁓ if there was an Arthur, ⁓ he would have been fighting the Saxons off and the early British saints were spreading Christianity back to the continent. so we have, there's a cluster of sites of megalithic tombs and things in the Presley Mountains that are named after Arthur or his sons, know, Arthur's bed, Amherst tomb, these kinds of places.

But there are also lot of standing stones named after some of the early saints, ⁓ particularly Saint Samson, who later became a missionary to Brittany. ⁓ there's a town in Brittany called Samson of Dal, and that was where he eventually became bishop. And so there are these standing stones and whales ⁓ that are identified with the saint and sometimes have

folklore attached to them, like this was the stone that St. Samson threw at the devil or something like that, and very similar stories told about stones ⁓ in Brittany as well. ⁓ So there's a definite distinctly Welsh ⁓ way of interpreting these stones. Sometimes they're associated with fairies, but less so than in, say, Gaelic Scotland or Ireland or even in Brittany. But the Arthurian connection in particular is a...

big part of the stories around those stones.

Jonathan Thomas (26:04)
So Old English poetry treats ancient ruins as the work of the giants and in Beowulf a barrow becomes the lair of the dragon guardian or treasure. How deeply does that anxiety about the ancient landscape run through early medieval English culture?

Paul Robichaud (26:09)
Yeah.

Yet there seems to have been, I mean, it ran widely and there seems to have been a real sense of anxiety or fear around these places. ⁓ For example, there's an old English poem called A Charm Against Stitch, like getting a stitch in your side. And it has kind of mysterious reference to hag some kind of female spirits flying above the barrows at night and the...

It's a little mysterious, but these creatures seem to be associated with ⁓ the idea of elf shot, know, getting shot by an elf and then having a stroke or experiencing a muscle stitch or something. That's part of it. And ⁓ there's also an early English saint named Guthlak. And in the stories around him, he goes out to the fens around Cambridge and... ⁓

He opens up some of these burial mounds, these barrows, and he fights the demons who live there. They torment him. And eventually he builds a little, well, he makes a little hermitage for himself inside a cistern inside one of these barrows where he's constantly tormented by demons. But because he's very holy and powerful, he is able to fight them off. But there's this very consistent association between burial mounds in particular.

⁓ and evil spirits. ⁓ They're places of fear. ⁓ On the Frank's casket, which is ⁓ an early medieval little casket made of ivory, there's a scene on it that has a lot of kind of mysterious mythological figures. It's not clear who they all are, but there is what appears to be a burial mound ⁓ with stone inside, and within that, ⁓ a human figure has been imprisoned.

You know, so there are places of fear, imprisonment of the supernatural, ⁓ definitely places of danger, ⁓ as is the barrow where Beowulf's dragon ⁓ makes his home.

Jonathan Thomas (28:26)
So fast forwarding in time to the 17th and 18th centuries, the antiquarian tradition, which was the learned gentleman who tried to make sense of these monuments, is one of the most entertaining parts of your book. Inigo Jones concluded that Stonehenge was a Roman temple and corrected its geometry to make it look classical. So what does that tell us about how we project our own assumptions onto ancient things?

Paul Robichaud (28:51)
Well, I think it's an example of that that's clear to us because we can see sort of how wrong it is and how, I mean, it is kind of funny. know, they have these incredibly well-educated men engaging in these arguments about whether Stonehenge was built by the Romans or the Danes. ⁓ And there isn't an answer. There isn't a winner in that argument, right? We know, but they had no way of knowing. I mean, their horizon and the frameworks they have

⁓ that don't allow them to kind of think outside of them. And I think it does make this point that the way we see these sites is very much conditioned by the frameworks that we have available to us. And clearly, archaeology, science, dating have made a lot of progress, and we do understand a lot of things about these places that, and I go Jones couldn't possibly...

have understood, but I do think there is a little bit of a cautionary tale ⁓ around them that we shouldn't necessarily assume that all of our assumptions about ⁓ these places are correct, that we are seeing them through the lenses available to us. And many of those, from a scientific point of view, are more correct, more accurate, and so forth. But as with everything else in our culture,

science and archaeology are happening within a particular cultural framework as well. I think it is just a cautionary tale that we need to be aware of the assumptions that we're bringing ⁓ to these places. But yeah, those were really fun parts of the book to write because of the real seriousness that these antiquarians brought to these conversations about whether it was Vikings or Romans who had built it and how, know, Nigo Jones with his very

careful architectural drawings, kind of correcting the shape of Stonehenge to make it fit his vision is kind of an exaggerated ⁓ form of ⁓ what we're all kind of tempted to do, which is make things fit our assumptions about the world.

Jonathan Thomas (31:05)
And so William Stuckley or Stookley, ⁓ Stookley is perhaps the most fascinating figure in this tradition. He was a genuine pioneer of archaeological observation who then went completely off the rails into druidical fantasies. So can you walk us through how the druids became attached to Stonehenge and why that association is so sticky?

Paul Robichaud (31:09)
Stupid. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think we I think this a starting point there is to to again kind of recognize the frameworks that were available ⁓ for people to make sense ⁓ of places like Stonehenge and other prehistoric sites in the 17th and 18th century. It's the Bible, it's classics, and there's really not much outside of that. So at the end of the 17th century, a really important antiquarian named John Aubrey ⁓

who had, among other things, kind of discovered Ava Burry. Amazingly, there was no record of this ⁓ site before John Aubrey kind of stumbled across it when he was out hunting one day. ⁓ But he went around to a bunch of these different sites, and he recognized that they were not Roman. ⁓ And they existed in parts of Britain that the Danes had never come to in the Middle Ages, so they couldn't be Danish.

So he sensibly concluded that they must have been constructed by the ancient Britons as he understood that. ⁓ And as he thought about this, he decided that it was most likely these were religious sites because they don't have any obvious practical purpose and perhaps they were like a modern church. ⁓ he kind of famously said that Averbury was to Stonehenge like a cathedral to a parish church.

So he kind of was thinking of them as sacred sites. So from that, he concluded that the ancient Britons priests, the Druids that Caesar and Tacitus and other ancient writers described, must have been the ones who officiated at their rites and sacrifices at these places. ⁓ And Stucco just kind of took that idea, which Aubrey, who was kind of a disorganized writer, he was never able to pull everything together.

But Stucco had access to Aubrey's manuscripts and he really kind of ran with it and he drew upon the relatively few facts we know about druids in the ancient world and elaborated and he just kind of kept elaborating ⁓ and it ended up he kind of connected Druidry with his own kind of personal Christian mystical kind of faith and

⁓ He saw the Druids as early ⁓ patriarchs bringing knowledge of the one true God to Britain in ancient times, of ⁓ a pre-Christian monotheism. ⁓ And so it's this kind of mix, or if you prefer, muddle of ⁓ kind of ideas about ancient religion. ⁓

the ancient Britons, the Druids, and these stone circles kind of all getting mixed together. ⁓ So that was kind of Stucley's way of reconciling ⁓ these things. And again, because there's no way to disprove what he was saying, and it seemed like kind of, at least in its early form, in its less maybe fully developed form, it seemed plausible and viable. ⁓

these views were largely accepted. And the controversy around Druids in the 1700s was not whether they conducted their rites at Stonehenge and elsewhere, but rather whether the Druids were, in fact, noble philosophers who had a secret wisdom and a mystical understanding of the universe, or in fact, if they were bloodthirsty priests using human sacrifice to terrify the population and to submission. ⁓ So Stukeley lost a close friend. ⁓

the antiquarian William Borlase over this, because Borlase didn't like the druids and Stokely was very pro-druid and they fell out over this question. And then the imagery just kept getting reproduced in illustrations and engravings, a nice little engraving of Stonehenge, stick a little druid in there. people see this reproduced again and again. so it kind of, it becomes like a meme in a way. You've got a stone circle, you've got a druid there and they're just always together. And then,

they're taken up by the romantics. know, the druids and the stone circles are just always together. And often these sites are referred to as druid or druidical circles or temples or whatnot. So it really gets cemented in the popular imagination.

Jonathan Thomas (36:05)
Yeah, I'm always amused when like they do the summer solstice or the fall or the winter solstice at Stonehenge and you see people dressed up as Druids and they claim it's their religion and I'm like, you guys have made this all up. Like this Druidic tradition is mostly made up from from this tradition. So how why do you think that that's so persistent?

Paul Robichaud (36:26)
Well, think so there's a few things going on there. I think modern druids would generally not claim that they're kind of doing this kind of continuity with the ancient past. But one of the things that happens in the 18th century is druidry undergoes a kind of revival. There are fraternal organizations, there are organizations loosely based and growing out of the Freemasons and so on. And because of

this connection in the culture between druids and stones. They hold their rights at these kind of stone circles. And in Wales, the National Eisteddfod is part of this kind of wider movement. so this connection keeps getting kind of culturally cemented. And ⁓ I think its persistence is partly because of the way that this, not ancient, relatively modern,

⁓ tradition kind of keeps getting reinvented as it did in the 60s and 70s where it kind of joins in the counterculture and the New Age movement ⁓ as well. ⁓ And now I think the association or at least the annual rituals that take place at equinoxes ⁓ and so on, they've become part of the public culture as well. well, can't say that since the dawn of time,

Druids have been performing rituals at these sites because historically there really is no evidence to suggest that these sites were even used ⁓ in the Iron Age that we associate with the Celts and the Druids. they have been a part of ⁓ modern British culture, modern Druidry for several hundred years now.

Jonathan Thomas (38:15)
And so let's talk about the romantic era because a lot of our conceptions of these

You have Wordsworth having visions at Stonehenge, you have William Blake incorporating the megaliths into his prophetic paintings, you have Turner painting them. What does the romantic imagination find in these standing stones that the earlier eras didn't?

Paul Robichaud (38:36)
Well, I think one thing they find is this kind of, ⁓ there's an admiration for the rugged beauty of these sites. So the kinds of things that put off an earlier generation whose idea of beauty and order was all classical. ⁓ In the 18th century, ⁓ the idea of the sublime, Edmund Burke kind of promotes this idea of the sublime that we experience a sense of awe.

in wild places and places that are kind of irregular and might provoke a little frisson, you know, of fear or a sense of awe. And ⁓ that comes to be a kind of defining experience that travelers have at places, particularly Stonehenge. And the romantics, again, kind of run with this. So we have this association between this experience of the sublime feelings of terror, of awe.

a sense of the ruin of Stonehenge as itself beautiful and moving and powerful, kind of chiming in with their romantic sensibility. And so it becomes a place where you can have that kind of experience just as you might have it in North America at Niagara Falls or something like that in the 1800s. And so these sites,

are viewed through the same lens as our places in the wilderness where we can experience nature and its most powerful and threatening.

Jonathan Thomas (40:14)
And makes me wonder if we actually knew what these things were for, if we still would have painted all of these ideas.

Paul Robichaud (40:22)
Yeah, well, I think that's a great point because with all of these different stories we've been talking about today, these are, as you say, painted on to these places, largely because no one knows, right? The less people knew about them, the more imaginative their responses could be. ⁓ And so I think that's right. are...

a kind of canvas for people to project their feelings, their imaginings, ⁓ and so on, on to anxiety. Yeah.

Jonathan Thomas (41:01)
that kind of leads into my next question. Wordsworth had an intense personal encounter with Stonehenge. He was stranded near there after a carriage accident and he experienced what he described as visions of ancient Britons and human sacrifice. So how much do experiences like that dictate what we feel about places like this?

Paul Robichaud (41:20)
Yeah, ⁓ that's an interesting question because what happens just as Stukely essentially trains directly and indirectly trains generations of viewers to see druids when they see Stonehenge or other prehistoric sites, ⁓ Edmund Burke and his successors kind of train visitors to places like Stonehenge to experience this sense of awe.

I mean, in one sense, know, William Stookely describes what is, when you read it, does seem like a very intense, personal, even kind of mystical feeling or experience when he's standing in the center of Stonehenge and looking around. And Burke's later idea of the sublime kind of puts a name to that experience. So I think I wouldn't say that Burke's idea of the sublime

creates this experience for later generations because there are earlier writers who found themselves experiencing a sense of awe and wonder and fear and what have you there. But by putting a name on it, it becomes a little more accessible to everyone. And people come to these sites expecting to have that kind of ⁓ experience. And the romantics were no different. ⁓ And Wordsworth's vision that he describes

I think there's a lot going on there because as you point out, he's having this experience after he's had a bad carriage accident. So he's kind of had this traumatic experience. But there is something curiously literary about his vision. Like he talks about how he sees the Wicker Man, the human sacrifices, the bodies being put into the Wicker Man besides Stonehenge. the Wicker Man comes from, that's a detail from Julius Caesar writing about the Druids. ⁓

It's hard to know. mean, I think it would only make sense if we're having a kind of powerful reverie or vision that it would be shaped by the things we've read and seen and experienced. ⁓ you know, I would pause before accepting that Wordsworth had a vision of the actual past unfolding before him, although he seems to have felt that was what he experienced.

Jonathan Thomas (43:38)
So coming into the modern era, the last part of your book talks about our modern ⁓ conceptions of places like Stonehenge, they're part of the counterculture movement and the New Age movement and Doctor Who and all that. So what is it about our own era that keeps us returning to these ancient places searching for meaning?

Paul Robichaud (43:59)
Right. And I think there are different reasons. I think the 70s was this kind of wild exploratory time after the 60s. And there is this interest in Earth energies and alternate ways of understanding the past and how things work and things like that. There's a little more openness. There's an openness to enchantment that I think gets dispelled a little bit in the 1980s.

I think as we get closer to our present day though, ⁓ the environmental aspect of it, I think becomes more important. And I think that was there earlier, but a sense that we need to think more and imagine more about our relationship to the environment around us and the world around us and the landscape, you know, because so much of what we're talking about, the stories, the myths, the paintings and everything else are

dealing with our relationship to the landscape. They're responding to it. They're describing it. They're trying to convey a sense of the feelings and perceptions that people have had over the generations. And I think as we're living in this increasingly dire moment of climate change, there's a sense of urgency.

in thinking about our relationship to the landscape and by extension to our environment. ⁓ And also we live, it's a cliche, but we are living in a time of unprecedented technological changes. We spend so much of our time staring at screens, you know? ⁓ And I think that this interest in the deep past ⁓ is also something that ⁓ more and more people are

are developing as a way of connecting to our cultural and human origins at the same time as connecting with the actual environment around us. ⁓ Even if we don't have, we may not have a stone circle down the street, but ⁓ I think there are some lessons here about how we can engage meaningfully with the places we find ourselves in and ⁓ find different lenses to make sense of.

the places we live in and to celebrate them ⁓ with stories, with songs, with paintings and so forth.

Jonathan Thomas (46:33)
Well, and speaking of connecting and visiting with these places, that kind of gets me to our next section, which is for listeners who want to experience these sites for themselves, what advice would you give to anyone visiting Stonehenge or Avery or Newgrange or any of the lesser known sites that you cover?

Paul Robichaud (46:50)
Yeah, well, ⁓ haven't I have not visited all of them. I'm still New Grange is still on my my list of places to go. But I think ⁓ my earlier suggestion about, if you can walk from the visitor center, if you're going to see Stonehenge, the challenge with with Stonehenge is that it's very familiar, for one thing, to us through images and things. And it's also very crowded. So I think ⁓ kind of making your way on foot to the site is one way to to kind of experience a little bit of that magic. And I

I would agree with your earlier comment about Ava Burry. That is a great place to visit if you just kind of, if you want to walk around and kind of walk around the stones, you know, you can sit by them, you can touch them, you can, you know, have a nice afternoon tea at the visitor center and continue to kind of kind of walk around. I would really recommend that as a great place to visit. ⁓ Stanton Drew, ⁓ there's

stone circle. There's actually stone circles at a little village in Somerset called Stanton Drew. And if you go there, you can have ⁓ a pint at the druids arms and they have part of the stone circles in the back garden. ⁓ A little arrangement of stones known as the Cove. ⁓ That's well worth checking out as well. ⁓

And if you're in Scotland and you're in the Highlands, take the ferry from Ollipool to Sturnoway and go see Kalanish. It's really spectacular. And the landscape is spectacular as well. those are a few places I visited that I really enjoyed.

Jonathan Thomas (48:26)
and maybe you'll get transported to the Georgian era and live some adventures with a romantic man. So what would be your favorite prehistoric site that people must visit?

Paul Robichaud (48:33)
It could happen. ⁓

⁓ I guess I really love Avebury ⁓ One of my personal favorite visits, though, was to a site ⁓ in Oxfordshire ⁓ called Wayland Smithy, which is a chambered tomb. And you drive up there. ⁓ There may be some tourist buses that will take you as well, but I was driving around. I drove up there. You park in the parking lot and you make your way to ⁓ this

this road called the Ridgeway. ⁓ And you travel down the Ridgeway and kind of go off the beaten path. And there are signs, so you can find it fairly easily, but it's a little bit of a walk. And I had the place to myself. It was raining, but just a little bit. It was just one of those English kind of drizzles. And I had the place all to myself. And you walk down this pathway, and then all of a sudden, this really ⁓ magnificent ⁓ tomb.

is in front of you and there are standing stones around it. And you can walk around, you can go inside. Someone had left an offering of flowers there before I had arrived. And it was really beautiful. it was just, it was a place that I really kind of was able to just kind of be there and commune with the place. And there's a wonderful folk tale that goes along with it, really a folk practice, which is that in the past, people would

⁓ leave a coin and leave their horse at this tomb. And in folklore, was believed that Wayland, who was actually the old Anglo-Saxon Smith god, would reshoe your horse. So that was the local belief, and I like that story. ⁓ But that's also a really magical place to visit.

Jonathan Thomas (50:29)
And my favorite is Castle Rig in Cumbria. ⁓ That's a really cool one because it sits on a hill and it's surrounded by mountains. It's a really cool place and nobody really knows it's there and so you can't usually have it to yourself, which that's my favorite attraction usually when I'm usually the only person there.

Paul Robichaud (50:34)
⁓

Yeah, well that I haven't been to either and that I would love to see.

Jonathan Thomas (50:51)
It's gorgeous.

So highly recommend it. Cumbria is beautiful. mean, go in the summer. It's amazing. Lake District is great. So anyway, so what a rich and fascinating conversation this has been. Thank you so much for joining us on the Angle Topia podcast. Paul, Stories of the Stones is published by Reaction Books since coming out in July. We'll link to it in the show notes. And if you have any interest in British and Irish prehistory and folklore and the romantic poets and folk horror are simply

Why Standing Stones has such a powerful hold on our imagination, then this book is for you. If you enjoyed this episode of the podcast, please subscribe, like or comment. And if you enjoy the Anglotopia podcast, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club where you get early access to new episodes and connect with other enthusiasts about Britain. So join us next time as we continue exploring the people, places and stories that make Britain's cultural heritage so endlessly fascinating to discover. Thank you, Paul.

Paul Robichaud (51:48)
Thank you.