Written on Stone : The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments [1 ed.] 9781443815536, 9781443813389

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Written on Stone

Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments

Edited by

Joanne Parker

Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments, Edited by Joanne Parker This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Joanne Parker and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1338-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1338-9

FOR RONALD HUTTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................... xi Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Joanne Parker Chapter One............................................................................................... 10 Megaliths and Memory Ronald Hutton Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 The Devil”s Chapels: Fiends, Fear and Folklore at Prehistoric Sites Jeremy Harte Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 36 Breaking Megaliths Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 49 Standing Stones and the Poetry of Prehistory Joanne Parker Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 66 East Anglian Stones: Erratic Prehistories from the Early Twentieth Century David Matless Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 82 Imagining the Past: Archaeological and Artistic Perspectives Sam Smiles Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 93 Pulp Archaeology: Megaliths in Popular Culture Neil Mortimer

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Table of Contents

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 100 Mystics and Mavericks: The Pagan Reinvention of Avebury Andy Worthington Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 111 Supernatural Nationalism and New Age Ecology Shelley Trower Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 128 Right Here! Right Now! - Prehistoric Monuments in Rock and Roll Timothy Darvill Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 143 Children of the Stones: Prehistoric Sites in British Children”s Fantasy, 1965-2005 Charles Butler Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 155 Processes and Metaphors: Constructing Perceptions of Prehistory Bob Trubshaw Bibliography............................................................................................ 163 Contributors............................................................................................. 175

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. “The Oxenham Arms Megalith”. Copyright Joanne Parker (2009). 2. “The Other Monolith in the Oxenham Arms”. Copyright Joanne Parker (2009). 3. Percy Robertson, “The Devil's Punchbowl”, Surrey Landscapes (c.1890), plate vii. 4. J. Charles Wall, “The Devil Digging the Devil’s Dyke”, in Devils (London: Methuen, 1904), p. 114. 5. William Stukeley, “An Abury Atto da Fe, May 20 1724”, in Abury, A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R. Manby, 1743). 6. Cover of W.A. Dutt, The Ancient Mark-stones of East Anglia: Their Origin and Folklore (Lowestoft: Flood, 1926). 7. “Stockton Stone”, from The Ancient Mark-stones of East Anglia (1926), p. 16. 8. “Chalk Mammoth Found at Great Glemham, Suffolk”, from J.R. Moir, The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 118. 9. Paul Nash, “Equivalents for the Megaliths” (1935), oil on canvas 457 x 660mm. Copyright Tate, London 2009. 10.

Still from The First Circus (Public domain, 1922).

11. Detail from Captain Britain (Marvel Comics, 1976). Copyright Marvel UK. 12. William Stukeley's view of Avebury, laid out as a serpent. From William Stukeley, Abury, A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R. Manby, 1743).

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List of Illustrations

13. Arthur Pendragon (left) in a ceremony at Avebury, vernal equinox 2003. Copyright Andy Worthington. 14. Emma Restall-Orr (left) conducts a goddess ceremony at Avebury's portal stones, vernal equinox 2003. Copyright Andy Worthington. 15. Yes (1973), Tales from Topographic Oceans. Cover artwork by Roger Dean including images of Chichen Itza (Mexico), geoglyphs from the Plain of Nazca (Peru), stones at Avebury and Stonehenge (Wiltshire), Brimham Rocks (North Yorkshire), Last Rocks at Land’s End (Cornwall), and Logan Rock near Treen (Cornwall). Copyright Atlantic Records. 16. Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros (1999), Rock Art and the XRay Style. Cover artwork by Damien Hirst and others. Copyright Mercury Records. 17.

Advertisement for the “Sonic Rock” festival (2005).

18.

Dick Bauch, “Silbury Hill”. Public domain (2005).

19.

“Newgrange”. Copyright Charles Butler (2007).

20. John Matthews, “The Seven Circles of Annwn”, in Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman (Inner Traditions, 2000). By permission of John Matthews.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to John Matthews for permission to reproduce ‘The Seven Circles of Annwn’, from Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman (Inner Traditions, 2000) and to the authors who contributed photographs and images from private collections to the present volume. Every effort has been made to contact other copyright holders. Joanne Parker would like to acknowledge the support of the University of Bristol and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the funding which allowed the “Cultural Reception of Prehistoric Monuments” conference to take place, and the University of Exeter for the research time to develop the papers from that conference into the present volume. She would also like to thank all those who attended the conference for making it such a stimulating, supportive and entertaining event, and the contributors to this volume for their enthusiasm, patience, and help. Particular thanks are due to Shelley Trower who was unable to attend the conference but who contributed a paper subsequently to complete the present volume, and to Nick Groom for his support at the conference itself, but also for his invaluable encouragement in turning the conference proceedings into the present volume.

INTRODUCTION JOANNE PARKER

Five years ago, I first visited South Zeal – the Dartmoor village where I now live – and was shown two massy slabs of rock standing erect in the Oxenham Arms Inn. One slab is in the little lounge behind the bar, inconspicuously set into the wall (see Fig. i). The other stands proudly in the centre of the breakfast room, as a pillar for the ceiling (see Fig. ii). One of these rocks, I was told, was a 5000-year old megalith – part of a stone circle around which, more than eight hundred years earlier, lay monks had chosen to build the medieval hostelry which had preceded the current pub. But which was the megalith, and which was simply a stone? The correct answer was the stone set into the wall, which according to local legend is so massy an edifice that its base has never been uncovered – despite various attempts at excavation. But what of the other stone? No one seems certain why the monastic builders, if they had built around a genuine megalith, should have felt the need to add another upright stone to the building – this time more prominently positioned. It is possible that the second stone was a late addition, introduced at the end of the sixteenth century when the Burgoyne family developed the hostelry (assuming it ever existed) into a small manor house. Or it might have been added even more recently, when the manor had become an inn, to satisfy those visitors who had heard the tradition about the megalith but felt less than fulfilled on seeing the stone itself, incorporated with little dignity or drama into the wall. If so, the Oxenham Arms megalith would not have been the first or the only stone to have disappointed sightseers. A peeved visitor to Stonehenge in the late nineteenth century lamented: “the average description of Stonehenge which sets forth the grandeur and stupendous size of these stones, is pumped up fudge and flapdoodle of the damnablest kind”.1 To avoid such disillusionment, day-trippers were advised to approach the edifice with their carriage blinds down – otherwise, viewing it at first from a distance it might “appear nothing, and by the time you are at it all astonishment cease”.2 It seems that prehistoric monuments require the viewer to bring to them as much, or more, meaning as they find in the remains themselves. Certainly, I have often seen visitors

2

Introduction

to South Zeal admiring the breakfast-room upright, touching it tentatively to sense a little of its ancient atmosphere. The fact that it is not the right stone doesn’t seem to have any effect on the enjoyment that it gives, or how authentic the experience feels to those willing and happy to be impressed – which is perhaps unsurprising, since in geological terms at least, the stone is certainly of a similar vintage to its more officially acknowledged neighbour. Earlier this year, I escorted an archaeologist friend to the Oxenham Arms and was soberly informed that no part of the building was medieval and that the stone in the bar wall was as unlikely to have ever formed part of a stone circle as its rival in the breakfast room. This has not stopped me from regularly showing the megalith to less sceptical acquaintances – or from continuing to view it as a site of local interest, a village personality, and an old friend. In a sense, that is what this book is about. The collection of essays is not interested in the still unresolved questions about the origin, original use, and authentic meaning of the prehistoric monuments of the British Isles. It is not concerned with their prehistory. Rather it deals with the history of the stones: with the ways in which they have been viewed, the meanings that have been attributed to them, and the significant impact that they have had over the centuries on British life and culture – from motivating artists and authors, to acting as the source of inspiration for the traffic roundabout.3 It is thus as interested in stones commonly believed to be megaliths – like the Oxenham upright, or the foundation stones of the chapel in South Zeal – as in the “real” stone rows and circles (many of them re-erected in the nineteenth-century, in any case) that can be found on the moor up above the village.

The Prehistory of the Monuments In her recent study of Stonehenge, the historian Rosemary Hill asserted: “Stonehenge does not belong to archaeology, or not to archaeology alone”.4 Likewise, this book is not written primarily for archaeologists – or not for the interest of archaeologists alone. It should also be of interest to social and cultural historians, to those interested in fine art, literature or film, and to anyone fascinated by the construction of national, local, or counter-cultural identities. For this reason, while this is not a book about the archaeological understanding of prehistoric monuments, it is perhaps of use to begin with a very brief introduction to the current archaeological thinking about those remains.5 South Zeal is not unusual in its wealth of prehistoric – or allegedly prehistoric – monuments. Almost every parish in Great Britain can boast

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some relic of the prehistoric past. Those remains include stone circles, stone rows, and single standing stones, as well as hillforts, boundary earthworks, and hut circles, and more esoterically-named remains such as dolmens (which have a large, mushroom-like capstone resting on four or more legs), chambered cairns (a rounded or conical heap of stones used for burials), barrows (circular or rectangular earth burial mounds), and henges (a circular area enclosed by an earth bank and ditch). To get a basic idea of their antiquity, as Julian Cope pointed out succinctly in his recent gazetteer of Britain’s megaliths: “were Jesus Christ to have visited even the most recent of those great megalithic Stone Age monuments, that sacred place would have been older to Jesus than he is to us”.6 More specifically, the oldest of these remains are from the period between 3200 and 2500 BCE. Those very early constructions comprise mainly of dry-stone enclosures – perhaps used for livestock, perhaps for permanent habitation, perhaps as temporary dwellings – as well as round cairns, dolmens, and long barrows in which tens of bodies were interred together. Both types of construction – the enclosures and the burials – have been linked to the expansion of farming which took place around this period.7 The more settled populace and the surplus labour that arose from successful livestock-husbandry and agriculture (as opposed to hunting and gathering) would have provided the manpower and the communityidentity necessary for monumental tombs, and the barrows may also have served as territorial markers. Several thousand tombs from that early period are still evident in the British countryside. In the centuries after 2500 BCE, however, the building of such edifices seems to have declined and new classes of monument emerged. These included round barrows, in which far fewer individuals were interred, and which took over from long barrows – perhaps indicating a shift in social structures. Cursus monuments – long, lozenge-shaped ditches with internal banks, that may have been processional ways – also emerged at this time. And this was also the period when henges began to be built – circular enclosures, looking rather like defensive structures, but with an earth bank set outside (rather than inside) a ditch, making them useless for defence. There is currently a consensus that the henges were ritual monuments, but that most probably had several functions, and changed their role over time. Some seem to have been half-way between burial-monuments and enclosures. Timothy Darvill suggests that they may have defined neutral territory where rival social groups could meet: that they were “focal points in the complicated exchange systems which were obviously developing at this period”.8 It is also possible that the henges, because of the vast reserves of labour needed

4

Introduction

to construct them, were symbols of power and prestige – it’s been suggested that Avebury, for instance, took 1.5 million man-hours to build.9 From around 2400BCE, a new sort of circular monument began to be constructed – built not of earth, but of stone. The earliest stone circles to be built were small and appeared only in the far north and west of Scotland and England but by 1700 BCE, larger circles with widely-spaced stones were being constructed across the British Isles. Both multiple circles and single circles were common, and around the same period stone rows also began to be built in some areas – often in conjunction with the circles. Like the earlier cursus monuments, the rows were perhaps for processional purposes. The circles themselves, like the earlier henges (inside which they were sometimes built) are thought to have functioned as both meeting places and ritual spaces. The care with which their stones were positioned also suggests a new interest in celestial movements. Indeed, it has been widely argued that they may have been aligned so as to allow observation of the rising or setting of either the sun or the moon, and could thereby have functioned as simple calendars for the timing of rituals. Today, hundreds of stone circles survive in the British Isles. Less disturbed by ploughing, livestock, and erosion than earthen structures, they remain the most instantly recognisable and best-known of Britain’s prehistoric monuments, and continue to attract widespread popular interest. Best-known of them all, is Stonehenge in Wiltshire. Numerous texts on the possible origin, use and meaning of Stonehenge have been published to satisfy the popular interest in this monument – particularly in the last three decades. Nevertheless, it requires at least a brief mention here in order to clarify exactly how it differs from the other British stone circles. As Aubrey Burl memorably states in the introduction to his study of stone circles, “to begin a book about stone circles by referring to Stonehenge is like starting a discussion about birds by describing the Dodo. Neither is a typical example of its class. Both are above average in size, of peculiar construction and both represent a dead-end in evolution”.10 Stonehenge, as we know it today, was constructed gradually in three phases, over the course of fourteen or fifteen hundred years – the equivalent of nearly seventy generations at that period.11 As its name suggests, when it began life around 3000BCE, it was not as a stone monument but as a simple earthen henge, which was perhaps used as a site for the internment of cremated remains.12 This monument may have gradually fallen into disuse, but around five hundred years later, a wooden structure was probably added it. It was not until the third phase of construction – long after the completion of most of Britain’s stone circles

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– that stones were added to the monument, making it gradually recognisable as the structure we see today. This phase itself took place over around four hundred years, with the smaller “bluestones” and the larger “sarsens” added gradually – in an order over which there is still fierce disagreement. So Stonehenge was both used and constructed over a far lengthier period than Britain’s other stone circles – a period stretching from the stone age into the dawn of the bronze age. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it also combines a far wider range of architectural styles. Its horseshoe arrangement of stones is more like Breton monuments than other British structures, while its famous “trilithons” – constructed from two upright stones and one horizontal stone lintel – have been classified as “an imitation of a timber ring”, rather than a relative of the more common stone circle.13

The History of the Monuments That, then, is the brief and rough outline of the prehistory of Britain’s stone age and bronze age remains. This book continues their story into the historic period, surveying over eight hundred years of rediscovery, study, superstition, inspiration, fear, restoration, and destruction. In certain periods, naturally, there was more widespread interest in prehistoric remains than in others, as different generations saw their own anxieties, beliefs and concerns reflected to different extents in the mysterious lives of the prehistoric builders. Religious turmoil in the seventeenth century led to a variety of responses to prehistoric remains. The Romantic Period spawned a fascination with the obscure and primitive which led – among other results in the nineteenth century – to the coining of the term “megalith”, which still designates a large stone forming part of a prehistoric monument.14 And in the 1960s and ’70s, the so-called “Celtic Renaissance”, the development of environment activism, and the growth of neo-pagan religions all contributed to a resurgence of the phenomenon which the cultural historian John Michell has famously dubbed “megalithomania”.15 Those identifiable periods of intensified interest are reflected in the focus of many of this book’s chapters. Others address periods – like the early twentieth century – when only a fascinating minority turned away from more culturally dominant interests, and towards the remains of prehistory. The chapters are arranged in broadly chronological sequence, beginning with “Megaliths and Memory” – Ronald Hutton’s broad introduction to the ways in which megaliths have been viewed across the centuries. Hutton’s study opens by addressing the vexing problem of

6

Introduction

divining how medieval thinkers viewed prehistoric remains, before turning its attention to the association between megaliths and druids which developed in the early eighteenth century and survived tenaciously until the 1950s. In particular, it challenges the powerful and persistent belief that folk traditions about megaliths preserve echoes of pre-Christian belief – or even of the rites for which the monuments were originally built – and calls for a general rejection of this doctrine of cultural “survivals” among archaeologists. The second chapter is likewise interested in folklore, but addresses the association of prehistoric remains not with druids, but with the devil. In particular, “The Devil’s Chapels” traces the ways in which Satan displaced giants and other mythical figures in folklore connected with prehistoric sites. It investigates when exactly this shift took place, and why it did so in England, but not in Wales or Ireland. Like the first chapter, it also attempts the difficult task of discovering how prehistoric remains were viewed before the seventeenth century – in this case, whether they were feared and dreaded from an early date. Chapter Three, “Breaking Megaliths” turns its attention to the seventeenth century, when tens of megaliths were destroyed at Avebury. The study reveals the extent and organisation of this operation, which must have involved nearly all of the village’s population. It corrects the lack of research into Avebury’s destruction, presenting it as a subject of study in its own right and arguing for stone breaking as a lost “craft tradition”. Like Ronald Hutton and Jeremy Harte, Gillings and Pollard also investigate the connections between prehistoric remains and religion – in this case, the links between stone breaking and non-conformism. “Standing Stones and the Poetry of Prehistory” turns its attention to the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century and to depictions of megaliths in poetry and fiction. It examines the ways in which Romantic and Victorian authors popularised antiquarian traditions of viewing megaliths, but also the new conventions which they themselves introduced – many of which endured until the late twentieth century, and some of which in turn influenced modern archaeological descriptions of the stones. The early twentieth century period is dealt with in Chapters Five and Six, by David Matless and Sam Smiles. In “East Anglian Stones”, Matless, like Ronald Hutton, turns his attention to interpretation of the folklore of prehistoric remains as the survivals of primitive beliefs. This chapter focuses, however, on the pervasiveness of that interpretation in the 1920s. In particular, it examines the responses of early-twentieth-century regional antiquarians to the lack of megalithic remains in East Anglia and Norfolk by claiming that natural boulders moved during glaciation, had fulfilled

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the same function in prehistory. These claims are investigated in the context of the development of regional and national identities, as well as competing attempts at the time to locate the “birthplace of man”. Chapter Six – “Imagining the Past” – turns to the 1930s, identifying it as a cultural moment which produced both the concept of “artistic modernism” and the notion of “British prehistory”. Smiles investigates the surprising interactions between artists and archaeologists in this period – both the interest of archaeologists like Stuart Piggott and Alexander Keiller in the arts, and conversely the meetings with archaeologists and the visits to prehistoric sites made by the artists John Nash and John Piper. Like “Standing Stones and the Poetry of Prehistory”, this chapter interrogates any notion of simplistic oppositions between artistic and objective approaches to archaeology. The following chapter, “Pulp Archaeology”, begins its survey of prehistoric remains in the popular media from the 1950s. Neil Mortimer traces the direct influence of archaeological discoveries upon cartoonists, film-makers and television producers, as well as their use of the folkloric motifs associated with megalithic monuments. In particular, the chapter examines the prevalence of prehistoric sites in the genre of science-fiction during the 1970s, and analyses their importance during that period as cultural symbols, and more specifically as icons of Britishness. The 1970s is also addressed in Chapter Eight, “Mystics and Mavericks”, in which Andy Worthington identifies the different factors which led, in that period, to Avebury being reinvented as a spiritual centre. Worthington examines Avebury’s role in the “earth mysteries” movement that was born in that decade; its use by neo-druidic orders in the 1980s; and the interest that feminist activists took in the monument from the 1980s into the 1990s. Finally, he considers its use by anti-roads campaigners – an interest which continues to the present day. Worthington’s focus on Avebury, feminism and “new age” movements is developed further in Chapter Nine, which examines the reception of standing stones in Cornwall between 1970 and the present day. Shelley Trower traces the association that folklore about living stones had with Cornish nationalist discourses from the 1970s, looking in particular at the fiction of Donald Rawe and Daphne Du Maurier, and the folklore collections of Michael Williams. The chapter then investigates how nationalist claims of connection with prehistoric sites became linked at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first century with feminism, environmentalism, and what might be dubbed “econationalism”.

8

Introduction

The period between the 1970s and the present day receives further attention in chapters ten and eleven, which examine the relationship of prehistoric remains to popular music and to children’s literature in those decades. Timothy Darvill’s “Right Here! Right Now!” considers the use of prehistoric remains in the popular music industry –as images for album covers, as sets for live performance, and in the nomenclature of both bands and albums. Darvill analyses the way in which monuments were used in late-twentieth-century music to signify the past generally, but also to suggest power and permanence on the one hand, or ambition and megalomania on the other. Stonehenge receives particular focus, but is considered alongside rock-art more generally, and in the context of musical interest in the Pyramids and Ziggurats. Darvill’s chapter demonstrates how new archaeological research and the growth of counter-cultural interest in prehistory both fed into late twentieth century popular culture. This is also the case in Charles Butler’s “Children of the Stones”. Butler examines the use of prehistoric sites in children’s fantasy fiction, tracing the way in which authors have drawn on a mixture of folklore and mythology, the theories of early antiquaries like William Stukeley, New Age beliefs about megaliths, and even recent conflicts between archaeologists and protestors. In particular, the chapter focuses on the novels of Alan Garner and Catherine Fisher, demonstrating how in their works prehistoric monuments often function as a means of connecting with the past – or as portals to other worlds. The children who read Catherine Fisher’s fiction today may determine the fate of Britain’s prehistoric heritage tomorrow. This book ends by looking from children towards the future, with Bob Trubshaw’s concluding chapter on “Processes and Metaphors” – a theoretical overview of the ways in which we construct and reconstruct ideas about the past. Trubshaw investigates how the meaning of prehistoric sites is produced and consumed in today’s society – whether that is via the “folkloric” transmission of information using the internet, the publication of academic research, or as a result of the activities of neo-pagans at prehistoric sites. Echoing Hutton’s chapter which opened this book, he suggests that our mythmaking about the past should be viewed as a process. The chapter’s ultimate argument also represents the rationale and principle of this book as a whole: that the past is multiple and man-made. Thus, if we are to effectively interpret and fully understand the prehistoric remains of that past, a variety of disciplines and a range of approaches – both traditional and unconventional – will need to work together. This jointly-authored book – as a collaboration between archaeologists, folklorists, historians,

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journalists, English scholars and others – is, we hope, one step in that direction.

Notes 1

Charles G. Harper, The Exeter Road (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 200. Richard Fenton, A Tour in Quest of Genealogy through Several Parts of Wales, Somersetshire and Wiltshire (London: Sherwood, 1811), 268. 3 On Stonehenge and the history of the traffic roundabout see Rosemary Hill, Stonehenge (London: Profile, 2008), 80. 4 Hill, Stonehenge, 3. 5 This brief introduction draws on Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (London: Routledge, 1987) and Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 6 Julian Cope, The Modern Antiquarian (London: Thorsons, 1998), 3. 7 See, for instance, Darvill, Prehistoric Britain, 48, 67. 8 Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain, 88 9 Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain, 92. 10 Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale University Press, 2000), 1. 11 Rosemary Hill, Stonehenge (London: Profile, 2008), 10 12 Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale University Press, 2000), 349. 13 Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Yale University Press, 2000), 371. 14 The term was first used by F. C. LUKIS in Archaeologia, 35 (1853), 233. 15 John Michell, Megalithomania (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) 2

CHAPTER ONE MEGALITHS AND MEMORY RONALD HUTTON

The purpose of this contribution is to look at the ways in which British megalithic monuments have been viewed through the centuries, at different levels of society. It is an exercise in seeing how attitudes change and traditions mutate. As such, it takes its place amid an exciting matrix of related research, concerned with topics such as the history of the discipline of archaeology, the folklore of prehistoric sites, the historical development of ceremonial landscapes, and the manner in which structures surviving from earlier periods seem to have been regarded in later prehistory and early historic times. Some authors, notably Richard Hayman, have already produced work that focuses directly on the themes of this paper. What is attempted here is the construction of a broad framework for the history of attitudes to megaliths in Britain, which in varying degrees builds on the achievements of others, complements them, and provides alternative perspectives to theirs. Retrieving medieval viewpoints is extremely difficult, as contemporary references are very few and material evidence equivocal. It is no longer possible, as has often been done in the past, to project back folklore recorded in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and assume that it represents timeless popular tradition.1 What is certain is that the medieval British did not regard prehistoric monuments as a single class of phenomena, any more than they do now. In a category of its own was Stonehenge, which was clearly recognised as a unique structure built by human hands, or at least for human purposes. The prevailing explanation for it, apparently invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the early twelfth century, was that it had been designed by the wizard Merlin (himself half a demon by blood, and so equipped with superhuman knowledge) as a war memorial to post-Roman Britons treacherously murdered by the invading Saxons.2

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Then there were barrows, some with megalithic chambers, which were often recognised as burial mounds. This was simply because human bones were commonly found in them when people dug into them, as were grave goods, sometimes of precious metal. This perception was well established by the opening of the medieval period. It is built into the most famous Anglo-Saxon text of all, Beowulf, which could have been composed at any point between the seventh and eleventh centuries, though an earlier date seems currently more favoured. The climax of the story is based on the existence of “a treasure in a huge burial mound, containing a hidden passage” This treasure was “ancient”, representing the “immense ancestral wealth of some great race”; it was “pagan gold”.3 The Life of St Guthlac, which dates from the early eighth century, and so may be older or younger than Beowulf, portrayed its hero as setting up a hermitage in a chamber in an old earthen mound at Crowland in the Lincolnshire Fens. This structure had been uncovered by men digging into the tumulus in the hope of finding valuable objects. As the saint concerned had died only about twenty years before the Life was written, the description is probably an accurate one.4 The twelfth-century Viking inscriptions in the chamber of Maes Howe attest that the association between ancient sepulchral mounds and treasure was also found at the far north of Britain. To my reading, they represent something like a Norse chain-letter, keeping a running joke about a particular treasure going.5 During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the rifling of barrows was regarded as an accepted means of gaining wealth, and one which the English royal government attempted to control, by issuing licenses to individuals to carry out such work. The most exalted of these was Richard, earl of Cornwall, the brother of Henry VIII, who was authorised to open mounds on his Cornish lands and keep the proceeds.6 Not all the attention paid to ancient burial mounds was primarily concerned with grave goods. In or around the year 1178, the monks of St Albans opened some near their abbey in the hope (which was fulfilled) of finding an ancient skeleton which they could identify with the martyr Amphibalus, and add to their collection of saintly relics.7 From the beginning of the medieval period, also, tumuli were sometimes regarded specifically as the resting places of heroes or giants: the Historia Brittonum, completed in Wales in 830, identified a large one in what is now northern Monmouthshire or southern Herefordshire as traditionally the grave of Anir or Amr, “son of the warrior Arthur”.8 Finally, there were standing stones, whether singly, or in alignments, or in circles. The problem here is that there seems to be no solid evidence that anybody in medieval Britain thought that any of these, except

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Chapter One

Stonehenge, was a monument. In the mid seventeenth century the general opinion seems to have been that the huge megalithic complex of Avebury was a natural outcropping of stones.9 This could have been a traditional perception of such structures, and the explanation of why they apparently find no place in medieval literature. It is plausible that, to a society which believed the whole earth to be God’s creation, the notion that natural phenomena should appear shaped by an intelligence presented none of the difficulties that it does today. After all, until the opening of the nineteenth century fossils were commonly considered to be animal forms spontaneously generated from the rocks, or ornaments planted in the interior of the earth by the deity as flowers were planted in the exterior.10 This problem is linked to another: that there seems to be equally little solid evidence that any person in medieval Britain regarded prehistoric circles or tombs as religious structures. For many years it has been suggested that some of the stones at Avebury were buried in the fourteenth century as part of a campaign to violate a heathen temple. Recently, Joshua Pollard and Andrew Reynolds have argued that the burial of stones was a haphazard business spread over a long period; so that there is no evidence for any such campaign.11 Paul Ashbee has noted that the chambered barrows of Kent were systematically wrecked in the late thirteenth century, by people who came from outside the locality, and favoured the hypothesis that this was an act of religious desecration. He himself, however, also considered the possibility that it may have been the work of treasure-hunters, and this remains open; his readiness to accept a spiritual motivation for the damage was explicitly influenced by what he then regarded as the proven example of such action at Avebury.12 What is clear is that, once the middle ages had ended, patterns of interpretation both began to alter and to diverge between nations. By the 1520s, the Scottish historian Hector Boece was confident that stone circles had been pagan ceremonial monuments. Furthermore, and most significantly, he stated that this was by his time a generally accepted belief among his compatriots: these “roundis of stanys” were “callit the ald temple of goddis be ye vulgare pepill”.13 Perhaps this was simply because those in the hinterland of Aberdeen (his own university) looked even less “natural” than most. They form a large, thickly-concentrated group known to archaeologists today as “recumbent-stone circles”, because they have a standard feature of a massive block lying in the southern part of the circumference between two unusually tall uprights. This looks very much like an altar, which may be just what it was. The recognition that they were ancient religious monuments persisted in early modern Scotland. In 1692 another leading scholar at Aberdeen, James Garden, could declare

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13

that the “general tradition” concerning stone circles was that “they were places of worship and sacrifice in heathen times”, and that “the vulgar” called the recumbent stone “the altar”.14 Whether this was a tradition confined to Aberdeenshire, and whether it had been present all through the middle ages, the records do not tell. As for the Irish, their native literary and oral tradition gave a major role to the Druids, as the priests and sages of pre-Christian Ireland. There was a firm tradition among some of them, by the early seventeenth century at the latest, that prehistoric chambered tombs had been Druid altars.15 As Daniel Woolf has recent emphasised, the sixteenth century produced a new consciousness among English scholars of the alien nature of the past and of a relative chronology in it. This served to separate them, in a novel fashion, from perceptions of it held by people in general.16 In the case of megaliths, popular and learned attitudes certainly both developed and diverged, but the divergence was also between English (and Welsh), Scottish and Irish scholars. The Scots picked up a new enthusiasm for Druids, as heroic and patriotic national ancestors, that had been pioneered by the Renaissance Germans and French. It was the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France that took this straight from Paris to Aberdeen, and so in the 1530s the Druids were grafted onto the Scottish disposition – whether old or very recent – to believe that stone circles had been pagan temples.17 Partly in reaction against this Scottish enthusiasm, English and Welsh intellectuals took a different tack. Some, such as William Camden and Walter Charleton, attributed specific stone circles to the Danes, as part of a growing realisation, propelled by the energy of Danish and Swedish antiquarians, that megalithic monuments also existed in Scandinavia. Inigo Jones and John Webb proposed the Romans as the builders of Stonehenge.18 The Welsh continued to ignore their own prehistoric remains, concentrating on their medieval bardic literature as the expression of their nationhood.19 In the same period, West Country folklore, from Somerset to Cornwall, enlisted them in a new cause: that of sabbatarianism. This process could only have commenced with the campaign against Sunday games and dances, which appeared in the later reign of Elizabeth. The common theme of the new folk tradition was that stone circles represented groups of sportspeople or revellers who had been petrified for enjoying their pastimes on Sunday. It may have been spread by preachers, but the apparent complete absence of any reference to it in surviving sermons suggests that in large part, at least, it was a genuine folk motif. It is first recorded in Cornwall in 1602, specifically as a belief of “the country

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people”, and was attached to several monuments in the region by the early eighteenth century.20 Political and intellectual developments were, however, working against this diversity. The British peoples were drawing closer together, in a process epitomised by the union of England and Scotland in 1707. At the same time the pace of antiquarian research was quickening, and becoming much more collaborative and argumentative, with societies being founded to serve it in the metropolis. As a result, the period between 1660 and 1740 saw a growing realisation among English and Welsh intellectuals that their land contained a large number of ancient stone structures which demanded explanation. The result was a series of arguments, in which the claims of Druids, Romans and Danes were deployed against each other, with equal success.21 How far any of this rubbed off on popular perceptions is hard to say, but two particular case studies suggest that much of it did. At the Rollright Stones, Camden’s theory that the monuments were a Danish sepulchre got mixed up in the seventeenth century with a local legend about a petrified king.22 At Avebury, the growing interest of antiquaries in the stones was followed immediately by a systematic campaign by villagers to destroy them. Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard have demonstrated that the scale of effort involved went far beyond that needed for simply utilitarian purposes such as getting building stone.23 Furthermore, the stone breakers were mostly Protestant dissenters who had concentrated in the village to evade the Clarendon Code that persecuted their meetings in their longerestablished centres.24 It seems reasonable to conclude that, having got the point that they were living around a pagan temple, their response was to try to annihilate it. In the tussle among antiquarians, it was the proponents of the Druids who won, after almost a hundred years of disputation. This was because of a particular sequence of events. It began with the formation of the Royal Society to promote British science at the Restoration. This attracted Scots, who told their English colleagues about their long-held belief that megaliths were the work of Druids. One of those colleagues was the Wiltshire squire John Aubrey, who applied the theory to British monuments in general, inspired by the surveys of national monuments made by Scandinavians. The Druid theory was, however, too novel for most of the English, and Aubrey was too timid and disorganised to publish his ideas. Instead, they circulated among scholars, mostly at Oxford, between the 1660s and 1730s, until they found an adherent able, longlived and well-connected enough to give them victory. This was William Stukeley, who won it for them almost single-handed, in his two famous

Megaliths and Memory

15

books on Stonehenge and Avebury published in the early 1740s. What was so impressive about them was the unprecedented quantity of detailed fieldwork behind them, itself propelled by the intense religiosity that had eventually turned Stukeley into an Anglican parson.25 With arguments of that quality now behind them, the Druids could take advantage of the cultural context that had built up in their favour during the past hundred years. They represented some of the very few historical figures that the newly united British state could have in common. One of its biggest problems was that the traditional heroes of its component peoples had mostly achieved their fame in conflict with each other. The Druids now supplied them with a united and (thanks to their new association with megaliths) tangible and visually impressive past. Furthermore, the linkage made by some writers between Druids and wild natural places, especially oakwoods, exactly suited the new literary cult of the beauty and wisdom of the natural world, which was a hallmark of the early Romantic Movement. To the more prosaic sort of Georgian, the association of Druids with oaks burnished their patriotic credentials still further, as these were the trees that, above all others, built the royal navy and thus guaranteed British power. The result was that the second half of the eighteenth century saw a celebration of Druids as wise and noble ancestors among the Scots, Welsh and English alike, embodied in literature, music, drama, painting and sculpture.26 It seems to have pervaded the whole of British society within about forty years. By the 1790s, Welsh country people were happy to identify any standing stone as a Druidical monument, if an English tourist showed interest in it.27 In that decade a Glamorgan stonemason, Edward Williams, forged documents that purported to prove that the Welsh bardic tradition preserved Druidic teachings and the form of the ceremonies that had taken place in those circles.28 In London in 1781 a master builder founded an Ancient Order of Druids to supply middle and working class men with a safe space in which they could combine conviviality with a taste for music. By 1830 it had lodges all over England, being especially strong among artisans and factory workers in the new industrial areas of the Midlands and North.29 It should not be wondered that the message that Druids and megaliths were synonymous, and summed up ancient Britain between them, should have travelled so fast between classes and regions. It was provided not only in all sorts of print, but in stage productions and civic sculpture in towns. John Fisher’s delightfully dotty musical, The Masque of the Druids, was a huge popular success at Covent Garden in the winter of 1774-5.30 The growth of domestic tourism in the final decades of the century ensured that the yokels of any district with impressive

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Chapter One

megaliths would find themselves regularly supplied with educated visitors anxious to inform as well as question them. The first half of the nineteenth century represented the high noon of the British identification of themselves, and prehistoric monuments, with Druids. One of the most convenient aspects of the latter is that the Greek and Roman texts that described them had provided two different images with equal utility. In one, the Druids had been great philosophers, scientists, teachers and priests, promoting peace between their own people and rallying resistance to foreign foes. As such, they were easily assimilated to Christianity, by suggesting that they had practised the true religion of the Old Testament patriarchs. Either they had simply retained this in the dispersal of humanity after Noah’s Flood, or they had learned it from Abraham before being shipped to Britain by the Phoenicians. It should never be forgotten that the megaliths most familiar to the British between the sixteenth and ninteenth centuries were those in the Bible, erected by Jacob, Moses and Joshua as memorials to people and events. This made the assimilation of the Druids to the Hebrew patriarchs very easy.31 Opposed to this was the other view of Druidry in the ancient texts, as a religion of gloom, ignorance and gore, with a concentration on human sacrifice. This could also be assimilated to the Bible, by representing it as another aspect of the “abomination of the heathen”, and megaliths as idols. In this reading, Britain was rescued from the Druids by the twin improving forces of Roman civilisation and Christian piety. It was an attitude more attractive to those with an adversarial approach to religion, and it had a natural affinity with the evangelism and imperialism that were two hallmarks of nineteenth-century culture. In the new ideology of progress, getting rid of the Druids could be regarded as the apprenticeship that fitted the British for reforming or eradicating native religions in Asia, Africa or Polynesia.32 Sometimes the impact of this second view on popular belief can be precisely identified. In 1754 the clergyman and antiquary William Borlase published his famous book that linked many prehistoric sites in Cornwall to gruesome scenes of human sacrifice. A hundred years later, local people told tales of how some of those places had been occupied by ogres who sacrificed human captives.33 At Pontypridd and Llantrisant in Glamorgan, during the nineteenth century, some local professional men and artisans established a revived Druidic religion, which blended Christianity with Hindu and other beliefs to recreate the patriarchal faith of the Old Testament. They were roundly denounced by local preachers, and today it

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is still said that a cliff in the neighbourhood is haunted by the ghosts of murderous Druids, still trying to lure victims to their deaths.34 It is also possible to find examples of the opposite process in action, whereby popular tradition resisted an attempt to impose images of Druids upon it. One of the best comes from Nottingham, where, in 1850, an anonymous author, supported by a local newspaper, published a reinterpretation of some of the cave systems for which the city is noted. Folk tradition held that Robin Hood and his band had stabled their horses in some of these. Folk memory held that some of the features associated with them, that suggested they had been worked by human hands, were of relatively recent date. The author of the pamphlet set out to reshape these traditions, and to claim for Nottingham a large and impressive Druidical monument to compare with the megaliths possessed by many other regions but sadly missing from his own county. He had read most of the principal authors on Druidry to publish in the previous hundred and thirty years, and applied a medley of their ideas to suggest that feature after feature of the caves and some associated earthworks could be taken as evidence for Druid practice. He was uncomfortably aware that his enterprise was at variance with local beliefs, and lambasted the latter as “idle tales”, informing his readers that “verbal testimony is not always to be relied on, and, therefore, such desultory reports may be rejected”.35 His efforts seem to have been in vain, for the notion that the phenomena concerned represented an imposing ancient monument took no root in the city. The consensus that megaliths were Druid temples fractured at the top of intellectual society in the 1860s, as a result of the importation of more Danish ideas. This time the latter emphasised the division of prehistory into successive stone, bronze and iron ages, each one produced by the invasion of a new, culturally superior people. This framework pushed the Druids to the margins of prehistory, as the priests of the last, Iron Age, invaders. It thereby broke their link to megaliths, which were now recognised as Neolithic or Bronze Age. This view suited the growing Victorian preoccupation with racial differences, and fitted the experience of colonial expansion across North America, Australia and parts of Africa. It was also, however, directed against a view of the past that took the Bible as the starting point for any narrative. As such, it was coupled with the new geology, with its revelation of the great age of the earth, and the theory of the evolution of species. It empowered a set of secular-minded antiquarians to displace the clerical scholars who had been dominant in writings upon ancient Britain for the past two centuries, and still ran the universities. There was, in fact, no pressing need for the Druids to leave the megaliths: it was quite possible to argue for a continuity of religion

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across invasions, and a few authors did. The latter were, however, arguing against the intellectual tide: the Druids were expelled because they had been too successfully absorbed into the earlier, Bible-based, scholarship.36 The old orthodoxy – which associated Druids and megalithic structures – had been accepted by people in general within a few decades. Despite a much more professional group of national intellectual authorities, with much better national systems of communication, it took a hundred years for the new view of prehistory to take hold. By the 1870s it was already firmly accepted by the scholarly establishment, but at the end of the century members of the latter were complaining bitterly about the attachment to Druids exhibited by an ignorant and wilful populace.37 In the 1950s they were still doing the same thing;38 in fact, it was only in the 1960s that a mixture of books, radio and television finally got the midVictorian message across. This was partly because the Druids had long, literally, remained on the map. It was not until the 1920s that the Ordnance Survey stopped calling prehistoric stone rings “Druidical circles” on the one-inch maps which had by then been for decades the mainstay of the rambling public. It was mainly, however, because the new scholarship had nothing to put in the Druids” place. Being confined to material remains, it could not supply the public with any confident reconstructions of the beliefs that had raised the megaliths or the rites that had occurred in them. Late twentieth-century novelists who have set stories in the era of Stonehenge, such as David Burnett, Edward Rutherford and Bernard Cornwell, have mostly recycled the old image of bloodthirsty Druidry without calling the people concerned Druids.39 The main diference is that, whereas Victorian novelists had depicted women as innocent victims of Druidical savagery, in the recent stories, they are as likely to be found wielding the sacrificial knife as going under it. Nor can it be a coincidence that, as soon as the general public finally let go of Druids when contemplating prehistoric monuments, a luxuriant new alternative archaeology immediately sprang up. This also centred on wise astronomer priests, concerned with channelling stellar and earth energies in stone circles pretty well exactly as Stukeley’s Druids had done. Like that of the formerly imagined Druids, moreover, this system tended to collapse ritual structures from all parts of prehistory, and from early Christianity, into a united whole. All that was new was the addition of long, straight, invisible lines upon the landscape, linking the tangible ancient monuments and representing real or imagined currents of natural power; these “leys” were effectively spiritual equivalents to the railways and motorways that link modern centres of political, commercial and

Megaliths and Memory

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industrial might.40 Even now, with the full resources of scientific archaeology and computer technology, prehistorians cannot come up with images of prehistoric religion compelling enough entirely to replace those of the early nineteenth century. That is not, however, the main point of this paper. It has been, instead, to address a vague but powerful, and persistent, belief among archaeologists. This is that popular memory is so long and stable that folk traditions recorded about megalithic monuments in the past few hundred years would certainly preserve echoes of pre-Christian belief, and perhaps even of the rites for which they had been built originally. It spans the whole period since archaeology began to emerge as a professional discipline. In 1926 Sir Flinders Petrie could suggest that modern may pole dances and related seasonal customs represented vestiges of the rites carried out at prehistoric monuments.41 Three years later, Stuart Piggott made the same argument for the mummers’ plays performed by rural Victorian commoners in the Christmas season. A decade later he published the belief that oral traditions, preserving an authentic memory of events and actions surrounding monuments such as Stonehenge, had survived into the high middle ages, to form the material for some of the traditions recorded then by chroniclers and historians.42 Leslie Grinsell was inspired in the 1930s to start systematically collecting the folklore of British prehistoric sites, by the hope that it would help to illuminate their original nature. By the time that he published his findings, in 1976, he had realised that most of them displayed a sense of complete alienation from the monuments on the part of the people who recounted the lore, and an ignorance of their builders. None the less, he felt that a few of them could represent traces of ancient belief and ceremony.43 In 1981 Aubrey Burl made a full-blooded restatement of the notion that modern British folklore preserved elements of ancient religion, in “traditions that endure, thin and ghostlike, to this day”.44 In 1997 Richard Hayman brought out his study of changing attitudes to megalithic monuments, to which tribute was paid at the opening of the present essay. It included an opening chapter on “pagan traditions”, which in fact consisted largely of folklore recorded since 1700.45 It is entirely possible that folklore recorded in relatively recent times actually does preserve memories of medieval, or ancient, or even Neolithic belief. In the very nature of the evidence, however, such a possibility remains for ever incapable of proof, as we lack the records of older belief and custom against which the modern examples can be checked. What is more significant, for present purposes, is that in making this assumption, archaeologists (and writers on archaeology) have actually been imitating

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an idea which was dominant among British folklorists themselves until the 1970s, but has since been almost completely rejected by them. When the discipline of folklore began to define itself in the later nineteenth century, it did so largely around the doctrine of “survivals”, a concept derived from geology and based on the belief that many popular customs and traditions were living fossils, preserving traces of ancient religion and cosmology. This was in turn founded on a conception of rural commoners as unthinking preservers of a timeless and amorphous culture. During the past thirty years, a succession of studies by professional scholars of folk custom and lore have discarded this model absolutely. What they have revealed instead is a dynamic and constantly developing popular culture, which had no fixed boundaries with elite and learned beliefs, or between urban and rural, or oral and written, thought-worlds. Instead, there was a continual interplay between these modes and areas of operation, to which we are starting, at least, to give a history.46 What has been attempted here, briefly and sketchily, is to illustrate some ways in which this new working model can be applied to perceptions of megaliths.

Notes 1

For which, see below. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, VIII.10-13. 3 Beowulf, lines 2199-2377. 4 Felix, Life of St Guthlac, XXVIII. 5 Patrick Ashmore, Maes Howe (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 2nd ed. 2000), 1316. 6 L. V. Grinsell, The Ancient Burial Mounds of England (London: 2nd edition, Methuen, 1953), 110-11. 7 Ibid., 110. 8 Historia Brittonum, cap. 73. 9 Peter J. Ucko et al., Avebury Reconsidered (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 8-17. 10 Deborah Cadbury, The Dinosaur Hunters (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 1-9. 11 Joshua Pollard and Andrew Reynolds, Avebury: The Biography of a Landscape (Stroud: Tempus, 2002), 242-6. 12 Paul Ashbee, “The Medway Megaliths in Perspective”, Archaeologia Cantiana 111 (1993), 63-5. 13 Hector Boece, Scotorum Historiae (Paris, 1526). I have used the 1531 translation of this work into Scots by John Bellenden, edited by R. W. Chambers and Edith Batho (Scottish Text Society, 1936); the stone circles are on p. 56 of volume 1. For the development of this idea in Scottish historiography, see A. L. Owen, The Famous Druids (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 28-31. 14 Bodleian Library, Aubrey MS 12, fos. 123-4. 2

Megaliths and Memory

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21

E.g. Geoffrey Keating, The History of Ireland, ed. Patrick S. Dinneen (Irish Text Society, 1908), ii. 348-51. 16 Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500-1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 17 Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (London: Yale University Press), 53-5. 18 William Camden, Britannia (London: English translation, 1610), 374; Walter Charlton, Chorea Gigantum (London, 1663); Inigo Jones and John Webb, The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain (London, 1655). 19 E.g. Humphrey Llwyd, The Historie of Cambria, ed. David Powell (London, 1584), and Cronica Walliae, ed. Ieuan M. Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002); and Sir John Price, Historiae Brytannnicae defensio (copy in British Library, Add. MS 14925). 20 Leslie V. Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1976), 88, 90, 97, 139-40, 176-7, 205, 239, 254, 261; by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the story is also recorded in other areas that had become sabbatarian strongholds, in Wales and Scotland, and extended to work as well as play. 21 For the particular controversy over Stonehenge, see Christopher Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 48-75. 22 Jennifer Westwood, “The Rollright Stones. Part I: The Danes”, 3rd Stone 38 (2000), 6-10. 23 Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard, Avebury (London: Duckworth, 2004), 148; and see Mark Gillings’s contribution to the present volume. 24 Brian Edwards, “Changing Avebury”, 3rd Stone 47 (2003), 54-8. 25 This story is outlined in Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 65-102. 26 Again, this is all outlined in Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 102-24. 27 Sir Richard Colt Hoare, quoted in Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), 142. 28 The best current book on Williams is Geraint Evans (ed.), Rattleskull Genius (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2005). 29 Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 123-45. 30 Edward D. Snyder, The Celtic Revival in English Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1923), 111-12. 31 Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 210-27. 32 Ibid., 227-37. 33 Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (London, 1916), 49-51. 34 Viv Small, Glamorgan Ghosts (Small Book Co, n.d.), 27-8. 35 A Guide to the Druid Temple in the Church Cemetery, Nottingham (Nottingham, 1850). 36 Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 287-312 37 E.g. H. N. Hutchinson, Prehistoric Man and Beast (London: Smith Elder, 1896), 243, 266.

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38 E.g. Richard Atkinson, Stonehenge (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956), 77-8, 91, 179-80. 39 David Burnett, The Priestess of Henge (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982); Edward Rutherford, Sarum (London: Century Hutchinson, 1987); Bernard Cornwell, Stonehenge (London: HarperCollins, 1999). 40 The classic text of this genre is John Michell, The View Over Atlantis (London: Sago, 1969). 41 W. M. F. Petrie, The Hill-Figures of England (London, 1926), 10. 42 Stuart Piggot, “The Character of Beelzebub in the Mummers’ Play”, Folk-Lore 40 (1929), 193-5; and “The Sources of Geoffrey of Monmouth”, Antiquity 15 (1941), 305-19. 43 Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites. The author was my colleague at Bristol, and this provided the opportunity for various conversations and correspondence about his work. 44 Aubrey Burl, Rites of the Gods (London: Dent, 1981). Use of folklore for this purpose appears on twenty-two pages of the book; the quotation is taken from p. x. 45 Richard Hayman, Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons (London: Hambledon, 1997), 8-24. 46 For an overview of this development in the study of seasonal festivals, see Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). A good example of the way in which the recent developments in folklore studies can be matched to archaeology is the collection on Archaeology and Folklore edited by Amy Gazin-Schwartz and Cornelius J. Holtorf (London: Routledge, 1999).

CHAPTER TWO THE DEVIL’S CHAPELS: FIENDS, FEAR AND FOLKLORE AT PREHISTORIC SITES JEREMY HARTE

Everybody has their own memories of Avebury. I can still recall the day that I went there with my son; we took the bus from Swindon, got off at the Red Lion, and then followed the National Trust waymarkers over a stile. “What’s all this about?”, asked Gabriel, and I started with a sweeping gesture towards the megaliths of the outer circle. He stared hard at them, and then back at me. “It’s a load of old stones”, he said, with the contempt that only a teenager can muster. “You’ve bought me all the way here just to look at a load of old stones”. Well, there’s more to say about the place than that, and the National Trust has made quite a business out of saying it. But it is up to us to provide this context: the stones will not speak until they are interrogated by the storyteller, which is why Avebury, unlike most villages, supports two museums and a bookshop. The first-time visitor, emerging blinking into the sunlight from the Tithe Barn, will have been primed to appreciate that they are stepping into a wonder of the Neolithic, revealed through the work of archaeologists over three centuries. But it is not enough for the visitor to have a narrative confined to the twenty-fifth century BC; we must also have a meta-narrative, a story of how we came to know what we know. That story begins just after Christmas 1648, as John Aubrey was riding after hounds with the country squires when the game took course through “the mighty Bank & graffe”, and he, “wonderfully surprized”, forgot the hunt and reined up his horse in the shadow of the megaliths: seeing, in a moment of epiphany, that they were not just a load of old stones, but a monument to be restored to the British Druids.1 More than an ancient site, more even than the inspiration of one man’s researches, Avebury was the

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birthplace of field archaeology itself – or so the scholars’ story goes. This dawn of discovery requires a corresponding darkness as background. Before Aubrey’s time, we are told, the origin of the stones was unknown, and being unknown, they were a source of fear. “It is easy to visualise the villagers … apprehensively overthrowing the monstrous stones, encouraged by the priest, other onlookers … watching, doubting, even scared of this interference”, relates Aubrey Burl. And why? Because they were “the devil’s handiwork”.2 Evidence for this is, admittedly, a bit thin – not for the overthrow of stones in the fourteenth century, which is well attested by excavation, but for the atmosphere of terror and dread that Burl conjures up in his own inimitable style. He is, however, drawing on three traditions about the monument, each of them embodied in local names. These are the Devil’s Coyts, which is what the Beckhampton Cove was called in the 1640s; the Devil’s Brand-Irons, as the stones inside the North Circle were known in about 1720; and the Devil’s Chair, which is the modern name for the stone at the south entrance where people sit and have their photos taken.3 Three names form a slender base on which to erect a theory for the cultural reception of England’s largest antiquity in the Middle Ages. Of course there are many other ancient sites with names that associate them with the Devil – names which, as at Avebury, are taken to be survivals from a medieval world of semi-pagan fear and superstition. That may not be the case. To put our theories to the test, we will have to look, not just at the folklore of the past, but at the past of folklore. Take, for instance, the scholars’ attitude to a story which was wellloved in sixteenth-century Wiltshire – one which told how the Devil furrowed up the Wansdyke between sunrise and sunset on a Wednesday. William Camden, the first author to record the tradition, is also the first to provide its historical explanation. Wansdyke appears as Wodnes dic in charters of the tenth century, meaning that it is the ditch of Woden, “that false and imagined God and Father of the English-Saxons”. And it is Woden’s name that also appears in “Wednesday”.4 The tradition-bearers themselves were unaware of this connection: they must have been, because they were making a play on words, something for which the two words must be seen as unrelated or there is no pun. The Wansdyke-Wednesday pun could only have become possible once the common etymology of these words from Woden had become opaque. The connection was probably no longer obvious in Middle English, and was certainly broken by the time that the medial -d- in both words ceased to be pronounced, in about 1400.5

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So the Devil tradition recorded by Camden is not medieval at all; instead of going back to Anglo-Saxon paganism, it relies on a wordplay which was only possible once all memories of the original god had been effaced. It is not even certain that those who gave the original name saw any link between Woden and the boundary earthwork. In the tenth-century sources, Wodnes dic is near Wodnes beorg and Wodnes dene. Barrows (beorh) and valleys (denu) are often given sacred names in Old English toponymy, but ditches are not. Maybe Wansdyke is simply “the ditch near Woden’s valley”.6 The common place-name Grims Ditch has also been explained through the northern mythologies. In Norse lore Grimr, “the hooded one”, was a byname that Odin used when he walked the world in disguise. Let us suppose (there is no evidence for it) that the Old English Woden also had Grim as his byname; then Grim’s Ditch would be a parallel form to Wodnes dic, and, since the gods of the heathen are devils, both of these early forms would be identical in meaning with the later Devil’s Ditch.7 This sounds convincing, but it does not square up with the evidence. To start with, although Woden is reported only once in connection with embankments, Grim remained a popular figure in landscape lore throughout the Middle Ages. He appears twice in Old English charter boundaries – Grimes dic in Wiltshire and Grim gelege in Berkshire – and his ditches are found subsequently in Cheshire (early thirteenth century), in Oxfordshire (1216), in the West Riding of Yorkshire (1257 and 1285), in Middlesex (1289), in Hertfordshire (1291), in Wiltshire (1297), in Oxfordshire again (1300), in Cambridgeshire (1319), and once again in Cheshire (1345). Evidently Grim continued to be a meaningful character in the coining of place-names right up to the modern period. In seventeenth-century Oxfordshire “the country people will tell you that this Grymes was a gyant”.8 Today he is all but forgotten. The Grim’s Ditch that runs between Wantage and Streatley, parting Wiltshire from Berkshire, has become the Devil’s Ditch. Like Wansdyke, it was ploughed up in a single night, and you can still see the scrapings from the Devil’s coulter, which are now round barrows, while another smaller barrow is the clod which he threw at an imp who was letting the ploughteam go crooked.9 On the WiltshireDorset border, the Grymsditch of 1280 was still Grimsditch in Aubrey’s time, but when in 1872 Charles Warne asked for it by this name, the locals were baffled. “No one had ever heard of such a work; we were well nigh in despair, when meeting one of the magnates of the village… at last he said “Do you mean the Devil’s Ditch?” – we assented, and were at once put on its track”.10

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Thus, while Wodnes dic occurs just the once as a charter boundary, Grim’s Ditch was quite a common medieval term for landmarks; but Devil’s Ditch, which has been used as a clue to explain the two earlier names, is in fact a very modern coinage. The first record comes from the Devil’s Dyke in Cambridgeshire, so called in 1574 after five centuries in which it had simply been the Ditch, the Ditch of Reach, the Mickle Ditch or the Ditch of St. Edmund. Camden features this earthwork twice, but with different interpretations each time: firstly, that it was so called “as if it had beene cast by the devill”, but then on a second reference that it was “as a work made by devils and not by men”. Evidently he did not know whether “Devils” was to be understood as singular or plural, which suggests that this kind of name was new to him.11 For reference to other, minor Devil’s Ditches we mostly have to wait until the Tithe Maps of the nineteenth century. As this suggests, they were named, not in an age of faith and superstition, but in the last two or three centuries – a time when devils were found mostly in pantomimes and picture books. And, when we look closely at other place-names involving the Devil, it is obvious that we are not meant to take them seriously; not the Devil’s Bed & Bolster, nor his Trencher, nor his Cheeseknife, nor his Cauldrons and Ovens. There is a surprising amount of hellish kitchen equipment scattered around the landscape, from the Devil’s Beef Tub in Dumfriesshire to his Punch Bowl in Surrey – and a punch bowl is a very Georgian piece of equipment, so that particular name is unlikely to be much earlier than its first record in 1765. It could be argued that this placename, like so many in England, is a transformation of some earlier form, but the same could hardly be said for another Devil’s Punchbowl, the one at Longwood on St. Helena. Here, and in the Devil place-names which are scattered throughout North America, is proof that the theme remained very much alive for colonial settlers encountering a strange land.12 The earliest settlers of the English countryside, by contrast, do not seem to have been much concerned with the Devil. Instead, they had a vigorous naming tradition which centred around such spirits as the grima, the puca, the scucca and the þyrs. These were common enough in lonely spots, including the ancient barrows or barrow-shaped hills known in Old English as beorh and hlæw. Scucca is compounded with beorh at Shugborough in Staffordshire; there is another Shuckburgh in Warwickshire and names with scucca and hlæw at Steeple Barton in Oxfordshire and Little Horward in Buckinghamshire, while in Dorset beorh is found with puca at Winfrith Newburgh and with grima at Corfe Castle.13

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These names are, on the face of it, purely descriptive. A scucca was something you might come across at an old mound, as you might encounter the delvings of badgers, wolves, or foxes, all of which also appear in barrow-names. This is quite different from the modern Devil names, which are figurative; a Devil’s Ditch is not a ditch where one encounters the Devil, but one made by him, or perhaps one that makes you think that only he could have made it. The Devil has been brought in as an origin legend for the outstanding landmarks of the countryside – it is his mysterious strength that explains mounds, megaliths, hillforts and ditches. “Tis frequent with us to give the honour of such great trenches, which they think was never worth the while for men to dig, to the devil”, says Defoe in his Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain, the record of a journey undertaken (notionally, at least) in 1724.14 This was the same year that Stukeley was working on his earliest Stonehenge manuscript, in which he observes of the Heel Stone, “they say the devil threw it at the builders. […] They don’t say the devil built this place as comonly [sic] of stupendous. A sign tis a temple”.15 Fifty years earlier, when Aubrey was finding out everything he could about ancient monuments, there were fewer traditions of this kind, although he had been told that stones in the Beckhampton Avenue at Avebury were the Devil’s Coytes. Evidently, like the Heel Stone, they had been thrown by the Devil, though why he should be lobbing stones at a pagan temple is not obvious, and generally the Devil of these landscape traditions is very unsatisfactory from a religious aspect. There is nothing to suggest a spiritual or ethical interpretation for all this frantic stonethrowing and ditch-digging. Some of the later, Victorian redactions of the stories try to add motives – the devil is throwing stones to bring down the first church in the district, or to destroy the hateful sound of monastery bells – but these have the air of an afterthought. In actual, live performances the tone is always jocular, even when the Devil is shown trying to do something terrible, such as drowning Sussex by cutting the Devil’s Dyke through the South Downs.16 This Devil, sitting comfortably in the landscape with his Punch Bowls and his Armchair, seems comfortable rather than evil; a very human fellow. He is even subject to the kind of embarrassing accidents which plague us all. At Tintern they tell how the Devil was carrying stones in his apron when the string broke, leaving a rock or cairn or stone pile; so the mass is known as the Devil’s Lappit.17 One had not normally though of the Devil as wearing an apron, and this incongruity, like the Wednesday tradition at the Wansdyke, alerts to us an earlier history of the story. For on Ilkley Moor lies a cairn called the Skirtful of Stones, with the Little

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Skirtful not far away, and these are explained to the satisfaction of the locals by the story of a quarrel which brewed up one day between the giant Rombald and his wife. Her temper was as titanic as her physique, and she gathered up a whole apronful of stones with which to pelt the erring Rombald; only the apron strings broke, and deposited first one pile and then the other on the bare moor.18 It stands to reason that a housewife giantess should be wearing a giant apron, while it makes no sense that the Devil should have one; so it seems that this motif, attached to names ending in Lapful or Skirtful, has been transferred, regardless of any absurdities, from one class of beings to another. In fact the origin legends that now go under the Devil’s name are all recorded in other sources with giants as the protagonist. In the earliest accounts, it is they who dig the ditches, hurl the stones, and leap from crag to crag to leave their footsteps impressed into the solid rock. Monuments such as these are proportional to their vast bodies, and so when the Devil inherits their oversized mantle, he also has to be imagined on a vast scale. Thus in Wiltshire we are told how he strode darkly over the Downs, his hands weighed down by a great spade piled high with earth and stones. Where are you going, master, asks a cobbler as they pass on the road, and the fiend explains that he is on the way to Devizes, to drop his cruel spadeful on the town and kill all the people. And, he asks wearily, is it far from here to Devizes? Far! says the cobbler. You don’t want to know how far it is. Here’s a sack of old shoes – he scatters them on the road, starts to lay them out one by one – every one of those shoes, see, I’ve worn them all out since I left Devizes. Oh, sighs the Devil, and he looks thoughtful, then drops the earth off his spade where he stands, and goes home. Hence Silbury Hill.19 Now this is one story about a prehistoric monument which certainly presents the Devil as an evildoer and an enemy of the human race. But it also suggests that he is extremely stupid, which is not at all what one expects from orthodox theology. The giants of tradition, however, always were stupid: the heroes of folktale do not rely on bravery, as they might do in chivalric romance, but on low cunning, and it does not take very much cunning to outwit a giant. In Shropshire there was a giant who was carrying his spadeful of earth to dam the Severn and drown all the Shewsbury people, and he met a cobbler who played the same trick as his brother tradesman from Devizes, and where the spadeful dropped on the ground it formed the Wrekin. The story makes much better sense with a giant as protagonist; Charlotte Burne, who published the classic version in 1883, was told, “They generally call it the devil nowadays, but the older people say it was a giant”.20

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The giant of the Wrekin came from Wales, which may be significant. Perhaps this was because the people of Shrewsbury were used to glancing westward when they feared danger, but there were also good reasons for associating that country with giant lore. Several Welsh names for prehistoric monuments include the element gawr, “giant’; there are cairns, forts and stones as well as the common Bedd y Cawr, which corresponds to the English Giant’s Grave and is used almost as an archaeological term for any large mound. By contrast, the native language seems to have no place-names associating ancient monuments with the Devil. We find a Devil’s Lap of Stones in English-speaking Monmouthshire, but on Anglesey, in the heart of Welsh Wales, the great Neolithic mound is Barclodiad y Gawres, the Apronful of the Giantess.21 So name-giving traditions in the Welsh language seem to have resisted the changes which were reshaping English supernatural toponymy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among Aubrey’s English contemporaries, the practice of giving supernatural names of a descriptive kind – elf hills, puck pits and so on – was either updated to suit the new mythology of fairies, or abandoned for new figurative names identifying sites as the Devil’s property. And it is true that, at roughly the same time, Welsh-speakers were also marking a difference between descriptive names and those of a figurative kind. In the first category we have straightforward topographical compounds with bwbach and ellyll, which correspond quite closely to the English fairy place-names.22 But the figurative names are usually connected, not with the Devil, but with giants, or sometimes with King Arthur. He seems to have had the strength and habits of a giant, if we can judge by him hurling the dolmen of Coetan Arthur six miles into Gower because it was rattling around as a pebble in his shoe. Elsewhere there are large stone monuments named after the saints of the Dark Ages, men in no way inferior to their Arthurian contemporaries: St. Samson lifted the capstone of Samson’s Quoit in Pembrokeshire into place with his little finger. 23 The boundary between the two naming styles is one of language, or perhaps of language and culture combined. Thus, the Devil’s Bridge which crosses the Mynach river near Aberystwyth is known only as Pont y Mynach in Welsh, as if it would be unidiomatic to translate the supernatural name into Welsh. It seems that the fashion for Devil names had come to prevail within a short time throughout English-speaking communities, and it is found throughout the country; there is nothing in the distribution of forms to suggest that it radiated outwards, as so many fashions do, from London to the outer reaches of the island. Already in the eighteenth century one of these names is found beyond Welsh Wales, in the English-speaking

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enclave of Pembrokeshire, “where two stones are set up called the Devil’s Nags (at some distance from each other)”, and here, Edmund Jones assures us in 1780, “evil spirits are said to haunt to trouble passengers”.24 If Devil names were excluded from those parts of Wales where the language acted to resist English ways of thinking and speaking, then what was the situation further south, in Cornwall? Here the English language had been making steady inroads between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the lexicon of Cornish place-names seems to have followed its example, since at Botallack in Penwith there was a Stampes an Dyowl, “the Devil’s Tin-Stamps”, presumably naming some now lost rock formation.25 Generally, however, Cornwall shows a pattern typical of early Anglicisation, in which the legends and traditions which characterised the old language are taken up into the new one, instead of being lost with the last native speaker. And this would explain why Cornwall is pre-eminently the land of giants. All the legends of stone-throwing, hill-building, forts, quoits and graves – the traditions which would have been current in Cornish – are attributed to them in English-speaking folklore, and landmarks attributed to the Devil are correspondingly rare. It’s true they say that “One day the Devil, having nothing to do/ Built a great hedge from Lerryn to Looe’: but the rhyme refers to an earthwork more commonly known as the Giant’s Hedge, so that this diabolical tradition is superficial at best.26 It’s the same in Ireland, though a few Devil names can be found here and there on the map. Knockalla Mountain in Donegal is the Devil’s Backbone, and the Devil’s Bit Mountains lie to the north of Co. Tipperary; a lough in Kerry was called the Devil’s Punch Bowl, or at all events it was so called by the small proportion of eighteenth-century Kerrymen who spoke English. These names are not vernacular and seem only to have been current among the Anglicised gentry, which is why they belong, not to the ordinary level of field-names and ancient monuments, but to the most striking features of the landscape. It is as if nothing smaller than a mountain could register on the gaze of the Ascendancy. His absence from the native Irish names, along with the references made to him in English-language landmarks, suggest that the Devil was regarded there as a Protestant, or at best an unbeliever. But in England we find place-names that show the Devil’s religious side. As well as his tubs, trenchers and punchbowls, he has an unexpected interest in churches. There is a Devil’s Chapel in the quarries at Bream in Gloucestershire, and old stones are found in the Devil’s Churchyard at Minchinhampton in the same county. A Roman milestone at Aldborough is the Devil’s Cross, and rocks form the Devil’s Pulpit at Tintern and at Telby in Lincolnshire.27

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There are no early forms for these names, but the imagery implied by them goes back to the fourteenth century, for it appears in the Green Chapel episode of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Gawain’s quest for his unearthly antagonist is coming to an end as he walks around a craggy old cave, a barrow – apparently in the sense of “hillock” rather than “tumulus” – which is not at all what he had expected: ‘We! Lorde”, quoth the gentyle knight, ‘Whether this be the grene chapelle? Here myght aboute mydnyght The Dele his matynnes telle!”.28

Here, it seems, is the fearful, devil-ridden approach to hills and stones which we have been expecting from the Middle Ages, and have so far failed to find. But such an interpretation would miss much of what is going on in this ironic, multi-layered poem. For Gawain’s adversary is not the Devil at all, but his jovial host Bercilak, who is also the Green Knight, and it is Gawain’s bad conscience about three days of temptation with his host’s wife which makes him so sensitive to ideas of evil. Bercilak, with his glamorous castle in the wilderness and his mysterious comings and goings, is more like a fairy than anything else, and his testing of Gawain has the arbitrary moral quality of Faërie. The idea of a fairies’ chapel seems almost as unlikely as a diabolical one, but in fact cirice, in its modern reflexes “church” and “kirk”, is often found compounded with fairy names: with ælf in the north and with puca in the south. Early forms employing the diminutive pucela are recorded from Dorset in 1460, and Wiltshire in 1570; the Gloucestershire village of Pucklechurch, recorded in Domesday, is formally identical, but is generally assumed to be based on a real church built by a landowner who happened to look like a wizened goblin, and not a supernatural place-name at all.29 Churches also feature allusively in names of the Kirkstanes type, which go back to 1307, and usually refer to crags or standing stones; Ponden Kirk on the moors above Haworth appears, lightly disguised, as the Penistone Crag of Wuthering Heights.30 As this might suggest, the identification of natural features as “churches” is one way to make a contrast between wilderness and civilisation; as the lights of the village die away in the blackness of the moors, the central place of churches is taken by these stony habitations of fairies and the Devil. In the gentler landscapes of the south, the role of anti-church can fall to any kind of wasteland, such as the old quarry surrounded by dark yews which the villagers of Checkendon call the Devil’s Churchyard. Here they were

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going to build a church, but the Devil (or someone acting in his name) kept removing the stones by night to a new place, and eventually the church was built in the site chosen by this mysterious agency.31 The same story is told of the Devil’s Churchyard in Minchinhampton, and of many other places. In earlier versions the foundations of the new church are removed by fairies, or by some mysterious and unnamed forms, and this continues to be the usual form in Wales; here, as with the landscape lore of giants, we find that a preference for the Devil as protagonist is a new and typically English development of the nineteenth century. The first site, the one which the reluctant villagers are supposed to have abandoned, is typically an archaeological site, and many of these stories seem to have evolved as an imaginative embroidery on “sunken church” or some similar name for ruins and disturbed ground. Could people recognise the traces of stone circles, chambered tombs and Roman villas in this way? Local names and traditions of this sort suggest that they could. The mythical element is a storyteller’s gloss on the observed facts, and the Devil appears in these stories only as a late substitution for the fairies, giants and heroes who had previously been their protagonists. Thanks to generations of inquiry, we have recorded the folklore of archaeological sites, but we still know virtually nothing about the folk practice of archaeology itself. There was a plain, realistic knowledge about the remains of the past which existed alongside the fantastic stories, but it was too close for comfort to the hard-won skills of the new professional archaeologists, and that is why it has been written out of the record. When the villagers of Avebury looked around them, they saw old stones, not the handiwork of Hell. The idea that the Devil was dreaded at ancient monuments has no substance: it is a shadow which we ourselves have conjured up, in the rather ignoble hope that our own learning will shine brighter if we set it against the supposed darkness of a superstitious past.

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Notes 1

Critical analysis of this iconic moment can be found in Peter Ucko, Avebury Reconsidered: From the 1660s to the 1990s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 10. 2 Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury, (Harvard: Yale University Press, 1979), 37. Similar imaginings of a demon-haunted world can be found in Barbara Bender, “Stonehenge – contested landscapes (medieval to present-day)”, 245–80 in Barbara Bender (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (Oxford: Berg, 1993) especially 252–9. 3 John Aubrey names the Coyts in Monumenta Britannica, ed Rodney Legg and John Fowles (Sherborne: Dorset Publishing Co., 1980–2), vol. II, 822; Stukeley refers to the Brand Iron in Abury: A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R. Manby, 1743), 23–4; the Chair is apparently first mentioned in Burl, Prehistoric Avebury, 36. 4 Camden, Britannia, in Philemon Holland’s 1610 translation of the 1607 edition; this can most conveniently be accessed online at http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/. 5 See OED s.v. Wednesday. 6 English Place-Name Society volume for Wiltshire, 17, 318. Publications of the EPNS are cited here by county name only: the full references can be seen online at http://keithbriggs.info/epns_volumes.html. 7 These connections appear to have been first made by W.H. Stevenson, “Dr. Guest and the English conquest of South Britain”, English Historical Review 68 (1902), 625–42, 629. 8 EPNS Wiltshire, 15–16; Berkshire, vol. I, 6; Cheshire, vol. I, 58, 134; Oxfordshire, vol. I, 5; Yorkshire West Riding, vol. IV, 107; Middlesex, 11; Hertfordshire, 7; Cambridgeshire, 320. The Oxfordshire tradition was reported by Thomas Hearne: see Adam Fox, “Remembering the past in Early Modern England: Oral and Written Tradition”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Soc. 6th ser 9 (1999), 233–56.”, 249. 9 See EPNS Berkshire, vol. I, 6; vol. II, 496 and 528 for the Wiltshire/ Berkshire ditches, along with Leslie V. Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1976), 106. 10 Charles Warne, Ancient Dorset: The Celtic, Roman, Saxon and Danish Antiquities of the County (Bournemouth: Sydenham, 1872), 6. Fifty years later, in The Ancient Earthworks of Cranborne Chase (London: Chiswick Press, 1913), Heywood Sumner says: “I have had precisely the same experience” (62). For the earlier references, see Jeremy Harte, Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows (Dorchester: Dorset Nat. Hist. & Arch. Soc. 1986), 51. 11 See EPNS Cambridgeshire, 34, and Camden under Suffolk and Cambridgeshire. Camden also refers to the Devil’s Arrows in Yorkshire as Cacodaemonum Sagittas, as if the qualifier were plural. Devil place-names of this kind are rare in the Middle Ages although Dhoul’s Pavement, the Roman road over Blackstone Edge, was already Dowelloyn in 1492 (EPNS Yorkshire West Riding, vol. II, 63). Dyneleswude 1254 (with scribal n for v) at Ashover (EPNS Derbyshire, vol. I, 191)

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suggests a haunting by devils, rather than a legendary allusion to them, as do the Deoulepole of the fourteenth century from Caundle Marsh and the Dewelepole 1285 from Beaminster recorded by Fägersten, Place-Names of Dorset, 212; but the Dorset references may be folk-etymologies from Old Welsh *dubo gleis, “dark stream”. 12 Numerous Devil place-names of this kind can be found in Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites, and in Jeremy Harte, Alternative Approaches to Folklore: A Bibliography 1969–1996 (Wymeswold: Heart of Albion, 1998), while others appear in reference works such as Bartholomew’s Gazetteer. For the Devil’s Punchbowl in Surrey, see EPNS Surrey, 214; and for that in St. Helena, J. Charles Wall, Devils (London: Methuen, 1904), 99. Some of the American place-names are collected by Nicholas R. Mann, Sedona: Sacred Earth (Albuquerque, 1991), 18. 13 EPNS Warwickshire 109 (which also notes the Staffordshire name); Oxfordshire, vol II, 50; Buckinghamshire 69–70; Dorset vol. I, 28, 185. Several place-names with ælf as qualifier must belong to this group, but others are based on a personal name: see Alaric Hall, “Are there any Elves in Anglo-Saxon PlaceNames?”, Nomina 29 (2006), 61–80. 14 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Webb & Bower, 1989), 171. 15 William Stukeley, Stukeley’s Stonehenge: An Unpublished Manuscript, 1721– 1724, ed. Aubrey Burl and Neil Mortimer (Harvard: Yale University Press, 2005), 108. 16 “All versions of this legend that I know of, whether written or oral, treat it primarily as a funny story”, says Jacqueline Simpson, “God’s visible judgements: the Christian Dimension of Landscape Legends”, Landscape History 8 (1986), 53– 8, 57. She thinks that the modern versions derive from more terrifying originals, but this must remain speculative. 17 Roy Palmer, The Folklore of (Old) Monmouthshire (Hereford: Logaston, 1998), 72. 18 Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites, 175. 19 Katharine Jordan, The Folklore of Ancient Wiltshire, (Trowbridge: Wiltshire County Council, 1990), 35–6. 20 Charlotte Burne and Georgina Jackson, Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings (London: Trübner, 1883), 2–4. 21 Grinsell, Folklore of Prehistoric Sites, 242–64. 22 Melville Richards, “The supernatural in Welsh Place-Names”, 304–313 of Gereint Jenkins (ed) Studies in Folk Life: Essays in Honour of Iorwerth C. Peate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). 23 Chris Barber, Mysterious Wales, (London: Granada, 1983), 39. 24 Edmund Jones, The Appearance of Evil: Apparitions of Spirits in Wales, ed. John Harvey (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 125. 25 Oliver J. Padel, Cornish Place-Name Elements (English Place-Name Soc. 56/7, 1985), 85. 26 Tony Deane and Tony Shaw, The Folklore of Cornwall (London: Batsford, 1975), 141.

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Palmer, Folklore of Gloucestershire (Tiverton: Westcountry Books, 1994), 38, 65, 142; A. Hadrian Allcroft, Earthwork of England (London: Macmillan, 1908), 494; Palmer, Folklore of Monmouthshire, 70; Ethel M. Rudkin, Lincolnshire Folklore (Gainsborough: Beltons, 1936), 65–6 28 Gawain lines 2185–8 in Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. A.C. Cawley and J.J. Anderson (London: Dent, 1962). 29 EPNS Dorset, vol. I, 272; EPNS Wiltshire, 495; EPNS Gloucestershire, vol. III, 64–5. 30 Mary C. Higham, “Names on the edge”, Nomina 22 (1999), 61–71, 62–3; Elizabeth Southwart, Brontë Moors and Villages from Thornton to Haworth (London: John Lane, 1923), 173. 31 Kingsley Palmer, Oral Folk-Tales of Wessex (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), 45.

CHAPTER THREE BREAKING MEGALITHS MARK GILLINGS AND JOSHUA POLLARD

In the three decades either side of 1700, the small village of Avebury, in the north of Wiltshire, bore witness to one of the most visceral and dramatic examples of cultural reception ever to take place in or around an upstanding prehistoric monument1. This was striking in terms of both the breadth of the undertaking and the medium through which it was wrought. The focus was the megalithic settings of the vast late Neolithic henge monument, its two avenues (the West Kennet and Beckhampton Avenues) and the double stone circle of the Sanctuary on nearby Overton Hill. If we look first at how the impact was effected it is important to stress that this was not an intellectual appropriation or negotiation, whether in the emerging field of scientific discourse, personal crusade, the forging of national identity or folklore. Instead it was wrought with the very fabric of the monument, involving the direct manipulation of tens (possibly hundreds) of standing stones, some weighing upwards of sixty tonnes and standing to heights of over three metres. In practice the stones were toppled and either dragged away or broken up, either directly or through a combination of fire-setting and fracture. The resulting blocks were then used in the construction of boundary walls, barns and houses of the expanding village of Avebury and its surrounding hamlets. If we go on to consider the scale of the impact, of the estimated 174 standing stones making up the circles and settings at Avebury itself, at least fifty-eight were affected. Whilst impressive in its own right this proportion becomes even more dramatic when we consider that this calculation does not include the standing stones making up the avenues, where the number of stones broken up may in fact be greater2. If we accept that the settings may have taken upwards of a millennium to erect (between c.2800-1800BC), the breaking of around a third of the standing stones over a few decades represents one of the most striking and dynamic junctures in the site’s long history.

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That sarsen stones in the Avebury landscape had been broken down, worked and utilised for building purposes throughout the historic period is beyond question. Sarsen blocks are employed in the fifteenth-century fabric of the church and some of the early seventeenth-century structures still surviving in the village are also notable for the use of sarsen in their primary construction layers3. That the fire-setting and breaking of sarsen stones was taking place in the Avebury landscape in the middle seventeenth century is also clear, as a diary entry of 1644 recorded by the Royalist soldier Richard Symonds attests4. Further detail was provided by John Aubrey some twenty years later when he offered a concise account of the processes involved, likening the breaking of sarsen stones to collets in a glass-house5. If Symonds and Aubrey’s records related to stone-breaking more generally in the Avebury landscape, the antiquary William Stukeley appears to have embarked on what we would today recognise as a socialhistorical study of the breaking of Avebury’s megalithic settings during the early eighteenth century. As well as discussing methods and motivations with those directly involved in the activities, he also observed stone destruction taking place first-hand, producing a uniquely detailed record of a practice he deplored and actively campaigned against. Stukeley’s records were shaped during his field visits between 1719-24. When he came to publish his study in 1743 these were synthesised into a clear and coherent description not only of the processes involved but the rationale that lay behind them6. In essence Stukeley’s record adds depth and detail to the description recounted by Aubrey some sixty or so years earlier. The first stage in breaking a sarsen was to dig a pit along the side of the standing stone with the aim of removing sufficient supporting earth to cause it to fall into the pit. Prior to actual collapse, boulders and large chunks of sarsen were placed in the pit to provide support, leaving an airway beneath the bulk of the fallen stone to facilitate burning. Often the sheer bulk of the falling stone was sufficient to cause these supporting stones to crush and shatter. In such cases enormous wooden levers were used to raise the stones to enable replacement supports to be placed beneath them. Once the stone was adequately poised, bundles of straw were pushed under the megalith and set alight. The resultant blaze served to heat the recumbent stone. Once it had been deemed to have reached an appropriate temperature, lines of cold water were drawn across the surface, causing sufficient thermal shock to enable a strike from a sledgehammer to break the otherwise resilient sarsen along the line7.

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Archaeological signatures It is hardly surprising that the kind of stone breaking event recorded by Stukeley left a distinct signature in the archaeological record. In fact, almost all excavations that have taken place in the area of stone settings have unearthed evidence of stone destruction. For example, in his 1833 excavation at the Avebury Cove, Mr. Browne of Amesbury hit upon the debris left after a stone burning (if not the correct interpretation). A. C. Smith and William Cunnington III who also dug a series of trenches around the surviving stones of the Cove and Obelisk in the middle of the nineteenth century revealed large quantities of the same. Most dramatic were the campaigns carried out in the 1930s by Alexander Keiller, who found evidence of thirty-one destruction features in the henge and thirtytwo more along the line of the West Kennet Avenue8. Putting aside for one moment the ruminations of Mr. Browne, for whom the sacrificial flames of druid altars loomed ever present, if we look at how this evidence was interpreted and employed in emerging narratives of Avebury a pattern quickly emerges. The archaeological remains relating to stone breaking were firstly cited as a stark confirmation of the descriptions and records provided by Stukeley and secondly treated as proxies for stones once standing. Where interpretation ventured beyond this it was merely to test the veracity of Stukeley’s records and fill-in-thegaps where his plans were ambiguous. The trouble with this kind of circularity is that the features themselves become almost irrelevant. A good example is the distinctive two-pronged iron tool discovered by Keiller in a burning pit where the key point of note was the fact that it could be matched to a similar tool in Stukeley’s famous drawing of a stone-burning (see below for further discussion of this depiction). Although comment is passed to the effect that this unusual tool may have been manufactured expressly for use in stone burning, no further discussion is deemed necessary9. Needless to say, the presence of bespoke tools has much to tell us about the organisation and scale of the industry, if industry it was. One lasting legacy of Stukeley’s record concerns his views on the motivations for stone breaking. According to Stukeley, the first stone was burned and broken c.1694 by one Walter Stretch. The practice was then continued by five local farmers and graziers described by Stukeley as both “cuvetous” and “miserable”, whose names have since become synonymous with stone-breaking: Tom Robinson, Farmer Green, John Fowler, Farmer Griffin and Richard Fowler. As for why the stones were broken Stukeley was once again emphatic, “out of a covetousness of the

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little area of ground, each stood on” and to liberate building material10. Stone breaking was borne of greed and fuelled by wanton ignorance. This portrayal of stone breaking as an episode of vandalism – one that is viewed solely in terms of its impact (always negative) upon the once pristine Neolithic fabric of the site – has been repeated so often as to adopt the status of historical fact. This tendency is clear in the published account of the most sustained episode of excavation that has ever taken place at Avebury, the work in the 1930s of Alexander Keiller. Stone burning is placed in a section entitled Dilapidations and afforded a mere three paragraphs of discussion, only one of which mentions the results of the extensive excavations carried out upon stone breaking features. Together, the tendencies outlined above have served to effectively stifle any research into stone burning as a process (social, industrial or otherwise) worthy of study in its own right. We lament it, we despair it, we treat is as being responsible for leaving an echo of what once was (a great megalithic monument). In fact, we seem capable of doing everything except afford it a modicum of interest and study it in its own right. It is as if researchers have been content to allow the first account of the process to also be the last. Why is this the case? Could it be a result of the influence prehistoric studies have had on the subsequent history of Avebury and the curiosity of those seeking to understand the site? Avebury has occupied a central place within the creation and emergence of the concept of prehistory as an object of learned study. It has also been at the forefront of developing narratives concerning one aspect of it, the Neolithic11. It is our contention that despite over a century of lively, and frequently inventive, speculation within the academy concerning its cultural and chronological affiliation (Roman, Arthurian, prediluvian, antediluvian), once it had been agreed that Avebury was something profoundly prehistoric, few archaeologists were capable of viewing it in any other way. With prehistory firmly in mind, Avebury’s subsequent history became a series of lamentable impacts that served to progressively distance the scholar from the monument’s once pristine state. To put this another way, every assault and depredation made it just that little bit more difficult to understand its original schema and thus unlock Avebury’s singular mystery. This peculiar form of temporal tunnel vision has a number of implications, not least of which has been the tendency to interpret the archaeological remains of later periods solely in terms of their perceived impact on the prehistoric original. At the very least this serves to deny these later periods any intrinsic historical value of their own. Some cultural receptions it seems, are more worthy than others.

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A confounding factor is undoubtedly the presence of a first-hand record in the form of Stukeley’s eye-witness account. Although most historians would blanch at the prospect, in the case of stone breaking archaeologists have been satisfied enough to assume the reliability of his record. Even when sustained and painstakingly detailed archival research has revealed the partial, inherently contradictory, and frequently vague nature of Stukeley’s field records, particularly in relation to his final synthesis published some twenty years after his visits and fieldwork, caution has been advocated solely in terms of their value in reconstructing the original monumental form12. Once again, stone-breaking as a process is all but invisible.

Stone breaking as a unique Wiltshire folk practice During excavations carried out in and around Avebury between 1999 and 2003 a total of nine archaeological features relating to acts of stone breaking were excavated13. This provided a unique opportunity to not only re-consider in detail the archaeological traces left by these events, but attempt to use this evidence to reconstruct as much as was possible concerning the practices employed by the stone breakers. As mentioned earlier, the excavations carried out in the 1930s by Keiller had encountered forty-one instances of stone breaking and a cursory examination of the excavation archive revealed that detailed records, both written, drawn and photographic, had survived14. It is interesting, though given the discussion above perhaps unsurprising, that none of this corpus of information had ever been published in detail. Needless to say, when all of this information was finally brought together with the results of the more recent excavations a number of fascinating features emerged15.

Nature of the practice The orthodox account, as recounted by Stukeley, implies a single set of practices revolving around the key act of heating through fire. Key to this is a strong sense of stability and consistency. Yet what rapidly became clear from the detailed analysis of the archaeological evidence for stone breaking is that the practice was far from consistent, characterised instead by marked levels of variety and variation. For example, it is clear that the breaking of stones through heating, whilst common with the circles of Avebury, was relatively rare along the line of the West Kennet Avenue (five stones burned) where far more sarsens were simply dragged away or broken in situ using direct fracture (twenty-seven stones).

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If we focus attention solely upon the stone burnings, it is clear that there was considerable variation in the way in which stones were heated and broken. To date we have been able to identify eleven distinct methods for reducing recalcitrant standing stones into manageable blocks, five designed to deal expressly with standing stones, the remainder those that had already been toppled or fallen. As with any classification, considerable variety exists within each of these destruction-types and a degree of overlap inevitably occurs. This typological blurring most likely reflects the ways in which tried and trusted techniques and practices were interpreted, varying according to the precise mix of personnel involved, pragmatically with respect to the specific problems posed by any given sarsen, and of course temporally – the practice after all spanning some three to four generations. The simplest approach (the ramp technique) involved the digging of a sloping ramp from the surface down to the base of the stone socket. The length and steepness of the ramp reflected the size of the stone and depth of socket. Once the ramp had been dug the stone could be pushed over into the resultant pit, presumably on to boulders that had been placed there to support its bulk and allow adequate airflow beneath it. Once burning and breaking had taken place the sloping ramp would then allow stone to be raked and hauled out of the pit. This may well be the technique described by Stukeley as typifying stone burning, where “the method is, to dig a pit by the side of the stone, till it falls down”16. A more direct, if unimaginative, technique for destroying a standing stone is the upright technique. Here no attempt is made to topple the stone prior to burning. Instead a pit is dug around the base of the stone, filled with fuel and then ignited. This appears to have been preferentially applied to leaning stones though not exclusively so. That it may not have been particularly efficient is attested by the need for repeated fire-settings and/or resorting to direct fracture to render the stones down into manageable lumps. The short-pit and lever technique relied upon the digging of a discrete burning pit adjacent to the stone but separated from its base by a ridge of un-dug ground, the latter acting as a retaining-wall to stop the stone from toppling. The pit itself was carefully dug to ensure that it was too short to accommodate the full length of the stone. Once completed, the supporting ridge was dug away and the stone levered over onto the pit. Because the pit was too small, the top of the stone would end up resting on the edge thus leaving a neat cavity beneath for fuel and airflow. In the adjacent pit technique a regular dish-shaped hollow was dug adjacent to the standing stone, large enough to accommodate its fallen

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bulk and deep enough to provide a solid chalk base upon which to support its weight. The stone was then placed within the pit. Presumably boulders and fuel could either be laid on the base of the pit prior to the arrival of the stone or levers could be used to lift it once fallen to enable boulders and fuel to be placed underneath. The final tactic has been termed the roughly dug pit technique after its defining feature. This is characterised by the creation of a large, expediently dug pit with shallow sloping sides merging with an irregular base. The pit appears to have been dug around the base of the upright stone, removing much of the socket in the process; the stone was then toppled over. As with the adjacent pit method it is unclear whether boulders and fuel were placed on the base of the pit prior to, or after, toppling. As well as analysing the features involved in stone breaking we also recovered and analysed all of the debris resulting from a single burning event in an attempt to shed more detailed light upon the precise technology of stone burning17. As a result we now know that cortex (the outer “skin” of the sarsen) was prized as a building material and that some degree of control was being exerted, with preliminary shaping taking place during initial heating and sub-division of the block. This was then followed up by the careful trimming and shaping of the lumps of stone in and around the pit prior to removal, all of which suggests a much more careful and considered process than simply smashing a stone. The above represents only a small fraction of the corpus of archaeological information we have regarding stone breaking, yet should be sufficient to give a flavour of the variation and complexity that is evident18. We can learn even more about stone breaking if we treat Stukeley’s records not solely as a means to some purely prehistoric end, but instead as a social historical study of a late seventeenth-century process. Once again a single example should suffice. Since its first publication by Keiller and Piggott Stukeley’s drawing of a stone burning “An Abury Atto da fe May 20 1724” has become a commonplace in histories of the Avebury monuments, a powerful image of the dilapidations that characterised the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries19. Despite its ubiquity, this image has until now escaped critical attention as a record of a set of unique practices which is unfortunate as it contains a wealth of detail about the mechanics of stone destruction. It depicts a burning pit which is not only much larger than the stone held within it but has clearly been carefully dug, having neatly squared sides, a flat base and a ramp to facilitate access for both people and broken stone. Soil from the digging of the pit is heaped carefully to the right hand side

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and spaced sufficiently far back from the edge of the pit to prevent it collapsing back in. A pile of regular sarsen blocks are piled to the left of the pit, presumably broken stone that has been pulled clear of the conflagration. The stone itself is depicted as fissured and cracked, with the edge presented to the viewer markedly broken and angular. Beneath the sarsen are three dark lumps that most likely represent boulders placed beneath the stone to facilitate airflow, alongside tightly bound bales of fuel, most likely straw. Resting against the side of the pit are three tapering wooden levers, presumably the “timbers 20 foot long and more” that Stukeley notes as being used by a team of twenty men to lever up the stones to enable the support boulders to be inserted beneath.20 Other equipment includes twinpronged rakes, poles, iron sledgehammers and flagons of water for wetting the heated stone, refreshment or both. The rakes are of particular interest as they do not appear to be adapted or co-opted farm-implements, being specifically manufactured by the local blacksmith for the purpose; a complex practice with its own specialised equipment. In terms of personnel a team of five men is depicted with some suggestion of seniority or ranking indicated by the full frock coats and hats worn by three of the breakers as opposed to the simple breech and blouse attire of the remaining figures. We can only assume that a larger workforce was involved in the digging out of the substantial hole. One of the most striking features of the illustration is the realisation that the process of heating and breakage is a dynamic rather than static one. Chunks of stone were broken off, removed and carefully stacked whilst fresh bales of straw were pushed into the blaze. Rather than a single breaking, the result is a gradual and progressive breaking-down of the stone requiring constant and close attention. Evidence from excavated burning pits has revealed how too much sustained heat could seriously weaken the sarsen, in the worst case degrading it to brightly coloured sand. While this may have been less of a worry in the case of the extremely hard cortex, the stone-breakers would have wanted to avoid over-heating the freshly exposed faces. As a result we can imagine a continual state of flux with temperatures being gauged, burning straw bales repositioned, water applied, sledgehammers pounded and chunks being raked from the flames and soot. Treated as a whole, the various strands of evidence pointed towards considerable variety and remarkable levels of complexity. Stone breaking was clearly a difficult and highly dynamic process, one that would need to be carefully planned, choreographed and executed if it was to be successful.

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Scales of involvement A crucial question that emerges concerns the scale of the practices we lump together as regrettable dilapidations. To date, where the question of scale has been considered in relation to stone breaking it has tended to focus upon impact, i.e. extent of damage to the monumental prehistoric fabric. There has been no consideration of other relevant scales, for example those of organisation – was the practice casual, ad hoc or organised, seasonal or carried out year-round – let alone scales of involvement. Take for example the burning of one of the three stones making up the setting known as the Cove, in the heart of the Avebury circles21. On the basis of the surviving stones of the setting we can envisage a sarsen over sixty tonnes in weight and perhaps over six metres in length, standing in the midst of a working village, tucked in amongst the highly combustible haystacks, fences and hedges of a farmyard. Indeed, William Stukeley’s drawings of the remaining stones of this feature show the looming presence of a large thatched barn22. The size of the undertaking would have required a commensurately large workforce and have involved an enormous blaze. It is difficult to imagine the long hours as the stone was heated and gradually broken down as anything other than an event, a spectacle that could not fail to have drawn the bulk of the village population towards it – whether directly involved in the activity, watching in fear as glowing embers fluttered around the thatch of nearby structures like incendiary moths, or casually attendant to the hisses and clamour and the faint acrid tang of smoke carried on the wind. We can imagine the scene: the older members of the community watching carefully, ever ready to draw disparaging comparison to the way they used to break the stones; the boredom of children during the gradual and slow heating of the stone; the dance of the stone breakers as they stepped around rakes, and their comrades, carefully avoiding flames and clouds of smoke; the burns from drifting debris; even the violent sting of a hot shard of broken stone as hammer blows scatter scorching fragments into the crowd. The process left visceral memories, short- and long-term. Scars from sharp and sometimes hot sarsen flakes must have inflicted stone breakers; they would heal, but in doing so provided a tangible reminder of the destruction. There was the stink of burning straw stinging eyes, permeating hair and clothing, a memory trigger itself linked to other acts of burning – effigies and the like. Then there was the apprehension of those living in the thatched cottages close-by matching the concentration of the breakers; glee of some onlookers, indifference of others. Dares and

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admiration, a pipe dipped in and brought forth burning. This is not merely an undertaking carried out in the village, it is one carried out by the village. At this point it is important to stress that it is not only archaeologists who have shied away from stone-breaking. Historians such as Donald Spaeth and Henry Lancaster have produced detailed and highly nuanced accounts of Avebury in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Absent from either of these accounts is any consideration of stone destruction (or for that matter the fabric of the henge). It could also be argued that its absence is a direct reflection of the specific focus and scope of these studies – the impact of non-conformity (Avebury was a five-mile village with a large non-conformist population) and lay-clerical relationships respectively23. Whilst the former may well be true, it is difficult to sustain the latter as recent research by Edwards and Peterson is illustrating24. In his zeal to name the five “miserable” farmers, Stukeley omitted to mention others involved in stone breaking. These included a lawyer, Mr. Smith; the late parson of the local village of Winterbourne Monkton; and one Mr. Boak. Even his identification of his cabal as “farmers” was a gross simplification as his group of stone-breakers included three publicans: Walter Stretch (of the Catherine Wheel, Avebury), John Fowler (of the White Hart, Kennet), Richard Fowler (the Hare and Hounds, Beckhampton) and two minor land-owners (Griffin and Green) amongst their number. More interesting in the context of the work of Spaeth and Lancaster is the fact that of the principal stone-breakers identified by Stukeley, both John Griffin and Tom Robinson were active nonconformists, the former being directly involved in the founding of the meeting-house. Another prolific stone-breaker, Caleb Baily, was also a prominent non-conformist. What is more the non-conformist chapel was not only constructed within the Southern Inner Circle of the henge but out of the deliberately broken fragments of it. This is not to claim that stonebreaking was directly motivated by, or a result of, the often tense relationships between the Anglican Church and non-conformity that characterised the latter decades of the seventeenth century, being played out at the level of the village. It is merely to note that stone-breaking as a practice was thoroughly embedded in the everyday life of the village and yet is absent from historical accounts that seek to engage with this25. Whether this group of non-conformists were engaged in the breaking of megaliths for religious, political or purely mercantile or pragmatic reasons is open for debate. This is certainly an interesting time in the history of the monuments, their having recently (from the 1640s onwards)

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been recognised as antiquities, with notice of them reaching both scholars and the Royal Court. Establishment interest in the megalithic settings may not have ascribed them favourable associations in the minds of displaced non-conformists, although this does not explain why stone breaking at Avebury did not begin in earnest until three decades after the Five-Mile Act. Perhaps non-conformity, the recognition of Avebury as an antiquity, the expansion of the village and a common sense of “improvement” – physical, moral and spiritual, since all were seen as interlinked – provide contexts for stone breaking rather than explanations.

Conclusions Some cultural receptions are evidently more welcome than others. In stone-breaking we have one of the most significant and dramatic episodes in Avebury’s long history and a unique example of a cultural reception played out at the everyday scale of a rural village. Yet to date researchers have been satisfied either to regard instances of breaking as wilful dilapidations; treat them as a proxy for stones once present (but now sadly gone); and/or use them to cross-check the veracity of the surviving documentary records. In each case stone-breaking is viewed in terms of its impact upon the prehistoric fabric of the Avebury monument. In the worst case stone breaking has been totally ignored and denied any intrinsic historical or archaeological value whatsoever. Take for example English Heritage’s recent research framework for the Avebury monuments. Seeking to prioritise, structure and shape future investigations in the Avebury landscape, its temporal remit appears to stop abruptly in 1500. Fortunately, Avebury’s history did not stop in 1500 and later responses to the presence of the prehistoric monuments form an important part of this region’s history. What we hope to have shown is that far from an aberration borne of ignorance and greed, stone breaking may have been an intrinsic and important aspect of everyday village life. Rather than a scurrilous activity carried out by a small cabal of ne’er do wells, stone breaking may not only have engaged the entire village but in many ways defined it through the shared labour and participation involved in the breaking of a stone. At the very least the term can be seen to mask a wealth of variation, innovation and technical prowess, a lost Wiltshire craft tradition that is surely worthy of study and record. We are fortunate in that a wealth of archaeological evidence survives whose richness and variety hint at a peculiarly vibrant and varied set of practices. These in turn shed critical light upon the relationships between

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people and monument, and the complex ways in which they negotiated and interpreted the stones around them. The challenge is for archaeologists and historians to engage with this information instead of ignoring it; and while remembering Avebury’s prehistoric origins, also recognising that the henge, its circles and avenues were also a part of the early postmedieval landscape and the lives of its inhabitants.

Notes 1 This discussion assumes a degree of familiarity on the part of the reader with the late Neolithic monument complex of Avebury and the village that nestles within it. For useful introductions to Avebury see Aubrey Burl, Avebury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) and/or M. Gillings and J. Pollard, Avebury (London: Duckworths, 2004). Better still go visit the site yourself. It is a short bus journey away from the major town of Swindon, is free to access and, unlike Stonehenge, is not bound by restriction. You are free to effectively roam. 2 See M. Gillings, J. Pollard, D.W. Wheatley and R. Peterson, Landscape of the Megaliths (Oxford: Oxbow, 2008). 3 Sarsen is an extremely hard form of locally occurring sandstone. All of the standing stones making up the Avebury settings are unworked sarsen blocks. 4 R. Symonds, Diary of the Marches of the Royal Army During the Great Civil War, ed. by C.E. Long (London: Camden Society, 1859). 5 J. Fowles, and R. Legg (eds), John Aubrey’s Monumenta Britannica, parts 1-2 (Sherbourne: Dorset Publishing, 1980). 6 W. Stukeley, Abury, a Temple of the British Druids (London, 1743). 7 Ibid, 15-16. 8 W. Long, Abury Illustrated (Devizes: Bull, 1858), 17; A.C. Smith, “Excavations at Avebury”, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 10 (1867), 209-16; I. Smith, Windmill Hill and Avebury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 9 A.C. Smith 180. 10 Stukeley, Abury, 15. 11 See Gillings & Pollard, Avebury, chapter 9. 12 See P. Ucko, M. Hunter, A.J. Clark and A. David, Avebury Reconsidered: from the 1660s to the 1990s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991). 13 For details see Gillings et al. 2008. 14 An extensive collection of site notebooks, diaries, site drawings and photographic albums is curated by the Alexander Keiller museum, Avebury. 15 It is perhaps only fair to confess that our first reaction upon encountering a stone burning pit in 1999 was exactly the same as those who went before. Confirmation of Stukeley on the one hand and the presence of a former megalith on the other. 16 Stukeley, Abury, 15. 17 A total of 1,751 small fragments and flakes of sarsen weighing 83.5kg. 18 Needless to say, the same levels of variation are present in fuelling strategies and the fates of the burning pits once the breaking was over. For example, in the case

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of the latter, some were deliberately back-filled and levelled, a number were left open to gradually weather and fill, others were used as rubbish pits or convenient places to dispose of dead carthorses. For a thorough and detailed discussion see Gillings et. al., Landscape of the Megaliths, Chapter 10. 19 A. Keiller and S. Piggott, The Recent Excavations at Avebury. Antiquity 10 (1936), 417-27. Plate VI. As an idle aside, it is interesting to note that the upright technique described earlier resembles more closely an Atto-da-fe than the pit-based approach he has depicted. 20 Stukeley, Abury, 16. 21 According to Smith’s numbering scheme (1965) Stone III. 22 E.g. Ucko et al, Avebury Reconsidered, Plate 72. 23 D.A. Spaeth, The Church in an Age of Danger: parsons and parishioners, 16601740 (Cambridge: CUP, 2000); H. Lancaster, Non-conformity and Anglican dissent in Restoration Wiltshire, 1660-1689 (Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Bristol, 1995). 24 B. Edwards, “Changing Avebury”, 3rd Stone 47 (2003), 44-58; Peterson’s research is reported in M. Gillings, R. Peterson and J. Pollard, “The Destruction of the Avebury Monuments”, in J. Pollard & R. Cleal (eds). Monuments and Material Culture (East Knoyle: Hobnob Press, 2003), 139-163. See also Gillings et al, Landscape of the Megaliths, appendices. 25 For a detailed evaluation of the relationship between non-conformity and stone breaking see Gillings et al., Landscape of the Megaliths, chapter 10.

CHAPTER FOUR STANDING STONES AND THE POETRY OF PREHISTORY JOANNE PARKER

Studies of archaeology and literature are seldom, today, found side-byside on the same bookshelf, and rarely read intertextually. In recent years, however, there has been a growing number of assertions that archaeology should be viewed not as a science, but as a humanity – that it is concerned not with artefacts but ultimately, like much literary study, with reading people.1 This paper will take those claims as a starting point from which to construct a cultural history of British prehistoric monuments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which will read literary works and archaeological studies as one continuous discourse. In doing so, it will aim to demonstrate the centrality of the nineteenth century to the formation of modern understandings of, and ways of viewing, megaliths. The nineteenth century has typically been viewed as of only limited interest in histories of British antiquarianism. The 1989 text Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination by Stuart Piggott ends with a chapter surveying interest in prehistory in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is entitled “Relapse, Romantics and Stagnation”, with the “stagnation” in the title alluding to the Victorian period, which is otherwise untreated in the book.2 Likewise, Richard Hayman, in his 1997 Riddles in Stone, describes C19th writing on standing stones as “the dregs of the Stukleyite genre”, citing barrow-digging as the only area in which the Victorian interaction with the prehistoric past offered anything original.3 Hayman’s assertion is a fair estimate of the antiquarian writings of the period, which do for the main part simply reiterate seventeenth or eighteenth-century theories about Britain’s standing stones. The same is not true, however, of all the period’s cultural products. In the sphere of literary composition, the nineteenth century was of central importance in popularising and developing the antiquarian theories of earlier periods.

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Eighteenth-century antiquarian approaches have been differentiated by Stuart Piggott into two categories. In Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination, Piggott postulates that in the mid eighteenth century a distinct gap developed between two approaches to prehistory: one was characterised by disciplined enquiry and rigorous empiricism, and eventually developed into the modern discipline of archaeology; the other engaged with remains in more emotional and imaginative, uncritical ways, and was not, from Piggott’s perspective, destined to contribute anything to the modern discipline.4 In the process of fully integrating nineteenthcentury literature into the history of Britain’s megalithic monuments, this study will also aim to re-evaluate those more imaginative responses to megaliths, claiming an important position for them as the forerunners of the many literary responses to prehistory in the nineteenth and then the twentieth century. Before discussing the nineteenth century itself, therefore, it is necessary to briefly survey what that period inherited in terms of responses to and interpretations of standing stones, though much of this has been touched on in previous chapters. In the case of most of Britain’s monuments that history begins in the seventeenth century. As Christopher Chippendale has ably demonstrated in his study of Stonehenge, however, for that easily-accessible and particularly striking monument it begins much earlier – in the early twelfth century, with Henry of Huntingdon’s 1130 history of England and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1136 History of the Kings of Britain – texts that can perhaps be claimed as common ancestors to both later literary and antiquarian interest.5 Henry stated only that “no one can conceive how such great stones have been so raised aloft, or why they were built there”, while Geoffrey claimed, more daringly, that the stones were brought by the wizard Merlin from Ireland to mark the triumph of the British king Aurelius Ambrosius over the Saxon invader Hengist.6 Geoffrey’s work demonstrates how early literary responses can and should be incorporated into a reception-history of megalithic sites, since his claim was incorporated not only into the work of other medieval chroniclers, but also into Spenser’s Faerie Queene; into several Merlin plays of the 1590s, and into Thomas Rowley’s The Birth of Merlin in the 1620s.7 While Henry and Geoffrey’s texts applied only to Stonehenge, the Victorians also inherited a more general tradition of questioning the origins of standing stones, and associating those origins with magical agency. Ronald Hutton has suggested that the widespread folklore tradition that identifies stone circles as rings of dancers, petrified for dancing through Saturday night and into Sunday morning, may have arisen

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as part of Sabbatarianism in the seventeenth century, but the tradition may be older.8 Victorian writers inherited, then, a long-established tradition of viewing megaliths as enigmas whose origins were shrouded in mystery. By the sixteenth century, this air of inscrutability had already begun to be transformed in poetry into personifications of the stones as silent witnesses, withholding secrets. In Samuel Daniel’s 1599 Musophilus, Stonehenge is a: Huge dumb heape, that cannot tell us how, Nor what, nor whence it is.9

In the nineteenth century, this dichotomy between knowable human subject and unfathomable stone object often became more sophisticated, so that stone monuments were viewed not just as mysterious in themselves, but as symbolic of the limits of man’s understanding. So in his 1887 poem “The Broken Circle”, for instance, Oliver Wendell Holmes related a visit to Stonehenge: Who are you giants, whence and why? I stand and ask in blank amaze; My soul accepts their mute reply: A mystery, as are you that gaze.10

Until the late eighteenth century, the notion of mystery enveloping megaliths was also figured in purely negative terms – as something to be overcome. In the late eighteenth-century, however, an interesting shift took place, which seems to be attributable, in the first place, to the influence of Edmund Burke. In his 1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke identified two juxtaposed aesthetic categories – the sublime and the beautiful – which provided a theoretical basis for the aesthetic appreciation of grand and terrible scenes or objects “fitted to […] excite ideas of pain, and danger”.11 Among his defining properties of the sublime were silence, darkness, and obscurity. When applied to megaliths, this meant that the very lack of clarity and comprehension surrounding them enhanced their sublimity and their aesthetic appeal. Thus the well-known Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe was drawn to compose a long poem about Stonehenge in 1826, which opens by asking: Whose were the hands that upheaved these stones? Standing like spectres under the moon, […]

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Chapter Four And whose was the mind that willed them reign, The wonder of ages, simply sublime? The purpose is lost in the midnight of time; And shadowy guessings alone remain.12

The remainder of the poem attempts to pleasantly thrill and terrorise readers by sharing Radcliffe’s own shadowy guessings, which associated those mysterious – and therefore “sublime” – stones with sorcerers, spectres, and croaking ravens. Henry of Huntingdon’s notion that the stones were unable to communicate their meaning was also developed imaginatively around the same time that Radcliffe was writing, so that they became not inanimate and thus unable to communicate, but rather were anthropomorphised to be sentient but unwilling to speak. So in William Wordsworth’s long poem, “Guilt and Sorrow”, Stonehenge is described as “so proud to hint yet keep thy secrets”, and in his sonnet on “The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg”, the Cumbrian stone is conjured “Speak thou, Speak giant mother!” asking “at whose behest” the monument had been erected.13 Burke’s sublime also, incidentally, seems to have generated the association of megaliths with extreme and menacing weather conditions in much nineteenth-century literature and art – both Constable and Turner painted Stonehenge withstanding stormy skies, as a symbol of endurance. Radcliffe similarly imagined the monument “by the storm-light’s lurid glare”.14 In his poem “Guilt and Sorrow”, Wordsworth portrayed his lonely traveller approaching Stonehenge as: The gathering clouds grew red with stormy fire, In streaks diverging wide and mounting high.15 And, although Keats seems from his letters to have visited Cumbria’s megaliths in fine June weather, in composing his “Hyperion”, he nevertheless imagined a stone circle “upon a forlorn moor,/ When the chill rain begins at shut of eve,/ In dull November”.16 Such associations were certainly influential on a popular level: almost without exception, Victorian visitors to megaliths record the weather conditions on their arrival. By the late nineteenth century, indeed, the convention was ripe enough to be parodied. Writing for the periodical Temple Bar in 1882, Walter Frith recounted his own trip to Stonehenge on a “broad and genial October morning.” “Had I been directed to write an account [..] from anywhere but on the spot,” he wrote, “I should, I trust, have produced a picture that everybody would have recognised; I mean, of course, everybody who has never been there […] the atmospheric effects, the

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rolling banks of clouds, the driving rain would have been peculiarly grand”.17 Burke himself visited Stonehenge and wrote of it: When any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for its position nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled on each other, turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work.18

Speculation about the phenomenal skill and effort needed to have erected standing stones was one important aspect of the traditional view of the stones as mysterious, which nineteenth-century writers inherited. In his 1598 “Seven Wonders of England”, Sir Philip Sidney professed himself unable to reason “what force” had brought Stonehenge “to so unlikely ground”, and the same element of incredulity may be discerned in the seventeenth-century debates over which nation had been sufficiently advanced to have erected the stones – the Danes, the Saxons, or the Romans.19 The nineteenth century by and large ignored these specific theories, but in an age where hard work was revered as a virtue above most others, Victorian writers were inspired by the abstract notion of the human effort used to create the monument, and by the relationship of that effort to the destructiveness of time – an association that had begun to be developed in the late sixteenth century by Samuel Daniel, who in his poem “Musophilus” professed himself “angry with time that nothing should remaine/Our greatest wonders wonder to expresse”.20 This feeling was further developed in the early eighteenth century by William Stukeley who described the Rollright Stones as “corroded like wormeaten wood by the harsh jaws of time” – as fine a description as many for arguing the close kinship of antiquarianism and poetry.21 In nineteenth-century literature, contemplation of the effort needed to erect the stones, their subsequent decay, and the forgetfulness surrounding those that had accomplished the feat became tied up with contemporary interest in theories of extinction and natural selection. So in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1887 poem, megaliths are witnesses to “the strange tongues of tribes unknown/As wave on wave they go and come”.22 Annie Mountain’s 1862 poem “Old and New Sarum” can similarly be read in relation to developing Victorian understandings of history in terms of the displacement of one race by another. It laments: Oh England! England! Whence can come thy pride Thus ever humbled by the past?

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Chapter Four Such bitter proofs arise on ev’ry side, That Time does all thy little pomp deride, And to contempt’s oblivion cast. So sternly speaks thy Stonehenge giant band, And Ab’ry’s mystic serpent weird, Forgotten now who plac’d them where they stand, Or for what fancied object they were plann’d And with such mighty effort rear’d. Was it for this with toil-worn hands men wrought, Exhausted by the sun and rain, Thus to immortalize themselves they thought? Truly all man’s disquiet is for naught: He walketh in a shadow vain.23

An early example is Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe – a text less famed for its interest in prehistory than for its attempt to avert the possibility of social revolution in Britain, by depicting disenfranchised Saxons who learn to live alongside their Norman conquerors. We first see those Saxons, however, sitting on a “fallen druidical monument” – the remains of a stone circle which Scott explains has been dislodged and rolled down a hill.24 Here again, then, a megalith is used as an image of the inexorable and perpetual replacement of one civilisation by another. And Charles Le Grice similarly brought past extinctions into close relationship with the present in his 1832 “Inscription for Lanyon Cromlech in its fallen state”, which contemplates how: […] as the heart Aching with thoughts of human littleness Asks, without hope of knowing, whose the strength That poised thee here; so ages yet unborn (O! humbling, humbling thought!) may vainly seek, What were the race of men that saw thee fall.25

Grice’s cromlech is fallen, and so his megaliths represent the ephemeral, and the transience of human cultures. Other nineteenth-century writers, however, used stone monuments to represent the opposite – the eternal and inexorable – particularly those who were aware of the recently improved antiquarian understanding of the great age of prehistoric monuments. One such writer was Thomas Hardy, who corresponded during his lifetime with a number of barrow-digger and antiquaries including Edward Cunnington. For Hardy, standing stones were of such an age that they could be effectively juxtaposed with the brevity of human lives and loves. So in his “Shadow on the Stone”, a shadow flits across a

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“Druid stone”, briefly taking the shape of the narrator’s deceased wife, while in another poem, “By the Runic Stone”, a young courting couple sit in the shadow of a megalith, blissfully ignorant of their insignificance in its time-scale.26 Likewise, in Coventry Patmore’s long 1854 poem “The Angel in the House”, a hopeful suitor relates how he sat beneath Stonehenge with his love, and “despised the Druid rocks/ That scowled their chill gloom from above”, seeming to mock his earnest ardour with their long, antiquarian view of history and prehistory.27 The choice of megaliths to oppose to the young lovers in Patmore’s poem was probably inspired not just by the great age of the rocks, but also by their association with oppressive and cruel regimes. Perhaps the most influential traditional view of megaliths that the nineteenth century inherited was that which stated that the structures had once been the temples of the ancient Druids. This notion was first proposed by John Aubrey in his Monumenta Britannica, written between 1665 and 1693. Although Aubrey’s manuscript remained unpublished until the twentieth century, extracts from his section on Stonehenge and Avebury were included in Edmund Gibson’s 1695 edition of Camden’s Brittania, and the manuscript of his work was read by William Stukeley in 1717, promoting Stukeley’s own research into stone circles which led to the publication of his two monumental studies of the 1740s: Stonehenge, published in 1740; and Abury, published in 1743.28 For Stukeley, both Abury and Stonehenge had been constructed by druids whose religious beliefs had been communicated to them by the Phoenician trader Hercules of Tyre, a student of the Christian patriarch Abraham. This deduction was based on what Stukeley perceived as the serpentine form of Avebury, which to him was reminiscent of the snakes in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and so must share a common source and, likewise, be a representation of divinity. For Stukeley, the druids in the British isles had foreseen the coming of Christ, though they had worshipped that divinity at the solstices and equinoxes – it was Stukeley who, after carefully measuring Stonehenge, first suggested that the monument might be aligned with the rising sun on the Summer solstice. More seriously, however, the druids had also, according to his theory, misunderstood the nature of Christ’s sacrifice which had led – most unfortunately – to the practice of human sacrifice in their temples.29 Stukeley’s views were widely disseminated in the late eighteenth century – not least via a number of pamphlets that were published as guidebooks to Stonehenge and which plagiarised his work on that monument. He is therefore often cited as the most influential of the early eighteenth-century writers on megaliths upon later reinventions.30 This is

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certainly true of nineteenth-century historians, antiquarians and learned societies. His notion of the Druids as having followed an early version of Christianity was also perhaps the ultimate, if indirect, source of the use of megaliths in one of the nineteenth-century’s oddest novels. Elizabeth Lynn Linton’s 1873 True History of Joshua Davidson has a hero who is the son of a Cornish carpenter and (it is implied) the second messiah. He is killed by a mob of churchmen for his communist and non-conformist beliefs, and it is suggested that those notions have come to him during the hours that he has spent dreaming on top of a quoit near Liskeard, imagining that one day: “there would be a revival of national glories, national names, and leaders, under new aspects but from ancient sources”.31 William Stukeley, however, was not the only antiquarian to follow Aubrey in connecting druids to Stone circles in the early eighteenth century. The Reverend Henry Rowlands, in his 1723 study of Anglesey’s history, made the same connection, but where Stukeley’s druids (despite their human sacrifices) were upholders of the true religion of the patriarchs, Rowlands depicted the druids as “abominably corrupted, and perverted into the grossest heathenish fictions and barbarities.’32 Likewise, the Irish free-thinker John Toland, in his essay on Celtic religion and learning, published posthumously in 1726, depicted the Druids as a tyrannous and brutal priesthood whose learning was a sham and who used their elevated status to manage the mob.33 Such ideas were developed by the Cornish vicar William Borlase (whose 1754 Antiquities of Cornwall added naked women and burning torches to Toland’s megalithic ceremonies) and they were disseminated by David Hume, for whom “no species of superstition was ever more terrible than the Druids”, and no nation more admirable than the Romans, for having got rid of them.34 The influence of Toland on William Blake’s view of the Druids has been analyzed in depth elsewhere – most notably by Jason Whittaker.35 In Blake’s Jerusalem, Stonehenge is famously “a building of eternal death: whose proportions are eternal despair”.36 The view of Stonehenge as a temple built by demonic druids was also, however – far more than Stukeley’s benevolent vision – irresistible to the nineteenth-century taste for melodrama. Besides influencing Blake, therefore, it additionally spawned a wealth of less well-known poetic effusions, featuring scenes of horrific human sacrifice in stone circles. In 1843, for instance, the poet and historian Stephen Prentice looked back to the days when Stonehenge, had “superstition redly written” on its brow, and had witnessed the shrieks and blood of “holocausting torture”.37 And in his 1830 poem, The Arch-Druid, Frederick Paas imagined the dark, Druidic past of one of Dartmoor’s stone circles:

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Upon the rough hewn altar’s floor In thought I beheld the clotted gore, The hair and brains all scattered round, The hard and firmly trodden ground, Often the scene of deadly struggle E’er the spirit left in the fatal gurgle.38

In addition to this bloodbath of Gothic images, however, the demonic druids of Toland, Rowlands, and Borlase also generated more general associations between megaliths, tyranny and the sacrifice of innocents, in nineteenth-century literature. In Wordsworth’s long poem “Guilt and Sorrow”, a sailor returned from war wanders across Salisbury Plain and encounters Stonehenge. The poet addresses the monument: Inmate of lonesome Nature’s endless year, Even if thou saw’st the giant wicker rear For sacrifice its throngs of living men, Before thy face did ever wretch appear Who in his heart had groaned with deadlier pain Than he, who tempest-driven, thy shelter now would gain.39

In the advertisement prefixed to the first edition of the poem, published in 1842, Wordsworth asserted that the monuments and “traces of antiquity” on Salisbury Plain: […] led me unavoidably to compare what we know or guess of those remote times with certain aspects of modern society, and with calamities, principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject.40

In the poem, then, Stonehenge is associated with a variety of oppressive forces – including the British navy, colonialism and legal system – which together have conspired to crush the poor sailor and the other individuals he meets on the plain. The association of Stonehenge with sacrifice was also famously developed in Thomas Hardy’s 1889 Tess of the Durbervilles. At the novel’s climax, its heroine, who has killed her husband, flees across Salisbury Plain by night with her true love Angel Clare. They come upon Stonehenge accidentally: “It is Stonehenge!” said Clare. “The heathen temple, you mean?”

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Tess lies down to sleep on a fallen megalith, asking “Did they sacrifice to God here?’ “No”, said he. “Who to?” “I believe to the sun”.41

So far the conception of the monument offers no real development from Toland’s notion of it. However, when the forces of law approach to arrest Tess and take her to the gallows, past and present are blurred. Instead of simply signifying the barbarism of a distant past, juxtaposed with the civilized present, Stonehenge is also aligned with the patriarchal powers that destroy Tess. As in the Wordsworth poem “Guilt and Sorrow”, the megalith comes to represent a cruelty intrinsic to human society at all periods – particularly in the present. Hardy’s Tess hears a humming emanating from the stones of Stonehenge: “The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming sound, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp”.42 The choice of instrument again associates the monument with the druids. But the booming also seems, more generally, to represent the sound of the past. The notion that it might be possible to commune with the past through the medium of physical remains was developed as part of Romanticism, and helped to generate the Victorian vogue for historical tourism – to castles, abbeys, and battlefields. It also generated a number of poems which suggest that, through dream, vision or sympathetic imagination, it might be possible to personally connect with the past at megalithic sites. Wordsworth, visiting Long Meg, in 1849, felt “a weight of awe” suddenly cast upon him from “the dread bosom of the unknown past”.43 The Irish poet Thomas D’Arcy McGee claimed that sleeping beneath a “druid’s stone” he was “wrapt round” by voices and visions of the past.44 And in Mary Howitt’s 1827 poem, “The Peak”, she relates how: In twilight, silence, and alone, I’ve sate upon the Druid stone, The visions of those distant times, Their barbarous manners, creeds and crimes, Have come[…].45

The contemporary relevance allotted to Stonehenge in both Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and “Guilt and Sorrow” should be viewed as a development but not as a break in the reception history of megaliths. The tendency to imagine the creation, use, and meaning of British megaliths in

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ways that spoke to the observer’s own society has been identified by historians in the work of almost all early antiquaries. As John Hayman has succinctly argued, “it is clear that in writing about the monuments each generation has said as much about itself as about prehistory”.46 So John Aubrey’s view that Britain’s stone circles were created by savages dressed in the skins of beasts cannot be considered without bearing in mind the early seventeenth-century British interest in native Americans.47 Likewise, it takes little interpretative skill to discern a contemporary relevance in the 1663 text Chorea Gigantum, by Dr Walter Charleton – personal physician to Charles II – who asserted (just two years after the Restoration) that Stonehenge was constructed in the shape of a crown, and had therefore evidently been used for the coronation of Danish kings in the ninth century.48 When the Anglican clergyman Stukeley wrote about Stonehenge and Avebury his conception clearly owed much to a desire to assert the moral authority of the Church of England, while Toland’s opposing view, that megalithic monuments were built by corrupt Druidic priests, should be read in relation to his own Deist point of view that the priesthood represented a pernicious obstacle between the individual and true religion.49 Megaliths continued to be read in relation to contemporary social and political developments in the twentieth century. In Ian Crichton Smith’s 1975 poem “At the Stones of Callanish” as in Wordsworth’s “Guilt and Sorrow” and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the categories of cruel past and civilised present are blurred and the stones represent the cruelty of man across the ages. Smith relates: At the stones of Callanish yesterday I heard one woman saying to another: “This is where they burnt the children in early times”. I did not see druids among the planets nor sun nor robe: But I saw a beautiful blue ball like heaven cracking, And children with skin hanging off them, Like the flag for which Nagasaki was sacrificed.50

Many of the conventions of viewing megaliths which were developed in nineteenth-century literature, and which have been discussed here, became central to how standing stones were depicted in twentieth-century literature – and in modern culture more broadly – whether that relationship was one of simple continuation, or rather of subversion and questioning. The nineteenth-century convention of wishing to question prehistoric stone monuments, for instance, was maintained but subverted in twentiethcentury literature. In Sean Street’s 1989 “Poem at Avebury”, “the stones

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strive to speak,/ their incomprehensible language/ smoothed to a muffled grunt/ by the unimaginable years”. But although the narrator feels, in line with Victorian tradition, that “there ought to be a poem in them,/ a metaphor to prize out,/ a song carved into their bodies”, he concludes that the “place negates all words”, that there is “nothing to write of here”.51 Similarly, Edwin Morgan’s 1990 “Ring of Brodgar” begins like a Victorian megalith poem, “If those stones could speak…” But then instantly subverts the question: “Do not wish too loud./ They can, they do, they will. No voice is lost. Your meanest guilts are bonded in like frost”. Here again that dissolving of distinctions between object past and subject present, begun in nineteenth-century literature, is developed further – so that the past is suddenly something being constantly augmented and reinvented in the present. When Morgan’s stones do speak, they “fill an auditorium with pain” and with the sound of splintering bones.52 If the tragedies of twentieth-century history seem to feed into Morgan’s relationship with the past, then this is more explicitly the case in Richard Hugo’s 1980 poem “The Standing Stones of Callanish”, which revisits the Victorian interest in connecting with the past at megalithic sites, but only to dismiss this as a tragic impossibility: “See them in snow under a full moon” they told me. “The shadows will take you out of yourself to when The Stones were erected”

But, thinking of history, the narrator “can’t get past World War 1”.53 Conversely, however, in the modern genres of fantasy and science fiction, the possibility of connection with the past through megaliths often becomes physical, and the monuments a literal gateway – as, for instance, in the children’s fantasy novels Darkhenge by Catherine Fisher and Elidor by Alan Garner.54 The Victorian juxtaposition of the great age of megaliths with the transience of human life continued as a theme of twentieth-century literature. In Louis MacNeice’s 1945 poem “The Cromlech, a couple hold hands and kiss and we are told that they are: […] young and supple, as what stands Obtuse and old, in time congealed, Behind them as they mingle hands – Self-contained, unexplained, The cromlech in the clover field.55

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Likewise, the rise and fall of different peoples and civilisations was revisited in twentieth-century megalith poetry. Kenneth Rexroth’s 1940 poem “Ice shall Cover Ninevah” describes how: The stars come over The standing stone Sacrifices and populations dissolve We shall go away and not know when.56

However, whereas in the nineteenth century such transience caused Annie Mountain to feel “heartless and depressed”, amid the horrors of twentiethcentury warfare, it could be a source of comfort.57 In the 1940 poem, “R.A.F.”, written shortly after the Battle of Britain by Hilda Doolittle (better-known as H.D.), the narrator contemplates Stonehenge and thinks “we will be saved yet”.58 So theories developed in seventeenth and eighteenth-century antiquarianism fed into nineteenth-century literature about megaliths, and that literature in turn influenced twentieth-century authors in important ways. On the other hand, those “druidic temples and sacrificial altars” of the eighteenth-century antiquaries, may have left their legacy in many place-names, and have certainly importantly influenced modern countercultural groups and alternative religions, but by and large they have had only an indirect influence on twentieth-century literature. From a literary perspective, therefore, the nineteenth century is of crucial importance in the reception history of standing stones. I would also like to argue, however, that nineteenth-century literature has had a more general and pervasive influence on twentieth-century and contemporary perceptions of standing stones. This paper has thus far focused entirely on the influence that antiquarian texts can exert upon literature. This pattern continued into the twentieth century, with new archaeological discoveries feeding into poetry. In Seamus Heaney’s “Parable Island”, for instance, we learn that: to one school, the stone circles are pure symbol; to another, assembly spots or hut foundations.59

I would like to conclude, however, by suggesting that the relationship between poetry and archaeology has not operated in only one direction. According to one best-selling contemporary writer, the stones at Scorhill on Dartmoor “deceive and tease” their visitors, and the megaliths of Stonehenge are like “the dead fingers of time”. Stonehenge also “grudges its secrets”, and its use is as indecipherable as “the song the sirens sang”.60

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These lyrical descriptions are not from poetry or a novel – not even from travel writing – but from the best-selling archaeology texts published over the last thirty years by Aubrey Burl. Burl’s relationships with megaliths echo in many ways those of the poets of the nineteenth century. He seeks connection with the stones, speaking of his attempts to sense something of their atmosphere. He juxtaposes the unchanging nature of megaliths with the fluctuations of modern life: in the midst of the changing relationship between Britain and Europe there remains, he suggests, “the ultimate consolation, that the megalithic rings stay where their builders put them”.61 And, set against his megaliths, with dramatic care, is the ephemeral: “the flicker of a butterfly” or “the soaring and swooping of curlews”.62 Aubrey Burl’s work represents the most striking example of what seems to be a tendency in late-twentieth-century popular archaeological writing. That tendency is to incorporate the sympathetic response to prehistory found in many eighteenth-century antiquarian studies – the element of antiquarianism which allowed a man like Stukeley to aver that he was “struck into an exstatic reverie” whenever he entered Stonehenge. It was an aspect of the study which gradually disappeared as antiquarianism evolved into the modern, professionalised discipline of archaeology, during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But it was not a response to megaliths that died out entirely – instead it grew and blossomed in the nineteenth century’s poetry. Writing of Avebury, Aubrey Burl avers, “Even the most Gothick of poetry could not evoke the impact that this colossus has upon any mind sensitive to the lingerings of prehistory”.63 It is a telling comment, for Burl’s work does not only represent the fruit of centuries of antiquarian and archaeological research. It is also very much the legacy of the nineteenth-century poet.

Notes 1

See, for instance, Aubrey Burl, Great Stone Circles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 2: “Science analyses the facts. Art gives them life. […] Pottery and postholes are little more than pathways to people.’ 2 Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), 123. 3 Richard Hayman, Riddles in Stone (London: Hambledon, 1997), 274; see also 89, 123. 4 See Piggott, Ancient Britons, 150-159. 5 Christopher Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994 [1983]), 20-24. 6 Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 20, 22. 7 Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 25-6.

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See Chapter One. In Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 42. 10 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Broken Circle”, in The Complete Poetical Works (London: George G. Harrap, 1913), 2. 11 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987 [1757]), 39. 12 Ann Ward Radcliffe, “Salisbury Plains: Stonehenge”, in Gaston de Blondville and St Alban’s Abbey (London: Colburn, 1826), 109. 13 William Wordsworth, “Guilt and Sorrow: Or, Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain”; “The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and her Daughters”, in The Poetical Works, vol. I (London: E. Moxon, 1849-50), 45, 43. 14 Radcliffe, “Salisbury Plains: Stonehenge”, 116. 15 William Wordsworth, “The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and her Daughters”, in The Poetical Works, vol. IV (London: E. Moxon, 1849-50), 43. 16 John Keats, “Hyperion”, in The Poetical Works of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats: Complete in One Volume (Paris: A. and W. Galignari, 1829), 51. 17 Walter Frith, “Stonehenge”, Temple Bar (Jan. 1882), 132. 18 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 77. 19 Philip Sidney, Seven Wonders of England (1598). On Sidney, see Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 44. 20 Samuel Daniel, Musophilus”, in Alexander B. Grosart, ed., The Complete Works of Samuel Daniel (London: privately printed, 1885), vol. I, 237. 21 William Stukeley, Palaeographia Brittanica: Or, Discourses on Antiquities in Britain (London: J. Deighton, 1743), 10. 22 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Broken Circle”, 2. 23 Annie Mountain, Old and New Sarum (London: Brown, 1862), 5. 24 Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898 [1820]), 5. 25 Charles Le Grice, Inscription for Lanyon Cromlech in its Fallen State, in The Petition of an Old Uninhabited House in Penzance (Penzance: T. Vigurs, 1823), 2. 26 Thomas Hardy, “The Shadow on the Stone”, in James Gibson (ed.), Complete Poems (London: Macmillan, 1976), 483; “By the Runic Stone”, in Complete Poems, 408. 27 Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House”, in Frederic Page (ed.), The Poems of Coventry Patmore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), 110. 28 On Aubrey and his connections with Stukeley see Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 66-82. 29 On Stukeley see Richard Hayman, Riddles in Stone, 61-73. 30 See, for instance, Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany, xi; Chippindale, Stonehenge Complete, 86. 31 Elizabeth Lynn Linton, The True History of Joshua Davidson (London, 1873), 16. 32 H. Rowlands, Mona Antiqua Restaurata (London, 1766), 46. 33 John Toland, Christianity not Mysterious (London, 1695). On Toland see Hayman, Riddles in Stone, 65; Rosemary Hill, Stonehenge (London, 2008), 37-39. 9

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David Hume, History of England (London, 1813), 3. On Borlase see Hayman, Riddles in Stone, 74-83. 35 See Jason Whittaker, William Blake and the Myths of Britain (London, 1999). 36 William Blake, “Jerusalem”, in The Selected Poems of William Blake (London, 1915), 39. 37 Stephen Prentice, Prentice’s Canterbury Guide (Canterbury, 1843), ii. 38 Frederick Paas, The Arch-Druid: An Historical Poem (Sidmouth: [n.pub.], 1830), 4. 39 William Wordsworth, “Guilt and Sorrow: Or, Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain”, in John O” Hayden (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 123. 40 William Wordsworth’Guilt and Sorrow”, in William Wordsworth: The Poems, vol. I, 118-9. 41 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the Durbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1963), 502-3. 42 Hardy, Tess of the Durbervilles, 501. 43 William Wordsworth, “The Monument Commonly Called Long Meg and her Daughters”, 43. 44 Thomas D’Arcy McGee, “The Poet’s Prophecy”, in The Poems of Thomas D’Arcy McGee (London: [n.pub.], 1869), 300. 45 Mary Howitt, “The Peak”, in The Desolation of Eyam (London: Wightman and Cramp, 1827), 8 46 Hayman, Riddles in Stone, 274. 47 On John Aubrey and primitivism, see Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 39-40. 48 On Walter Charleton see Hill, Stonehenge, 27-8. 49 On the religious views of Toland and Stukeley see Smiles, The Image of Antiquity, 85-88. 50 Ian Crichton Smith, “At the Stones of Callanish” in The Permanent Island (Loanhead: MacDonaldh, 1975), 15. 51 Sean Street, “Poem at Avebury”, in A Walk in Winter (Petersfield: Enitharmon, 1989), 21. 52 Edwin Morgan, “Ring of Brodgar”, in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), 38-9. 53 Richard Hugo, “The Standing Stones of Callanish”, in The Right Madness on Skye (London and New York: Norton, 1980), 48. 54 See Chapter 11, below, on these texts. 55 Louis MacNeice, “The Cromlech”, in Collected Poems 1925-1948 (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), 246. 56 Kenneth Rexroth, “Ice shall Cover Ninevah”, in Collected Shorter Poems (New York: New Directions, 1966), 131. 57 Mountain, Old And New Sarum, 5. 58 Hilda Doolittle, “R.A.F.”, in Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983), 491. 59 Seamus Heaney, “Parable Island”, in John Carey (ed.),William Golding: The Man and his Books, A Tribute on his 75th Birthday (London: Faber, 1986), 170.

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Aubrey Burl, The Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 153, 350; The Stone Circles of the British Isles (New Haven and London, 1976), 6. 61 Burl, The Stone Circles of the British Isles xix. 62 Burl, The Stone Circles of the British Isles, 1. 63 Burl, The Stone Circles of the British Isles, 321.

CHAPTER FIVE EAST ANGLIAN STONES: ERRATIC PREHISTORIES FROM THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY DAVID MATLESS

The fact that Norfolk and Suffolk, although abounding in prehistoric relics, possess no imposing megalithic remains such as circles, dolmens and menhirs must not be taken as proof that the prehistoric inhabitants of this part of the country never participated in the particular religious rites with which many megaliths, and especially the standing stones, were originally associated. That the people who set up these stones in most parts of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland never occupied what is known as East Anglia is incredible, and in the absence from it of such megalithic material as was elsewhere easily obtainable, we must seek for evidence of the use of such substitutes as were most readily accessible during the period or periods in question. (WA Dutt, 19261) So long ago as in 1884, Sir John Evans, while walking along the East Runton foreshore at low water with Mr. Savin, picked up an ochreous flint flake, which he presented to the latter gentleman with the remark that it was, apparently, of Paleolithic age. (James Reid Moir, 19272)

1. Regional Stones In The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles Ronald Hutton comments on the lack of megalithic remains in East Anglia, noting that the neolithic inhabitants of that area “apparently did not require these great ritual monuments”, and “did not trouble to put up any stone rings, even where stone was available”.3 Rich in prehistoric artefacts, East Anglia

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lacks stone monuments. Ritual deposits were made “without requiring the sacred monuments which featured so prominently elsewhere”.4 The absence of stone monuments may denote a non-monumental prehistoric culture or, as Burl suggests, a region where other abundant material, notably wood, could serve.5 This paper explores early twentieth century enquiries into prehistory which might in some ways be regarded as attempts to compensate for such lithic absence, via the upholding of other worked stones as signs of ancient human presence, or the stamping of human value on apparently natural stones in the landscape. Boulders, flints and chalk become markers of ancient culture, and East Anglian ancient stones appear. WA Dutt’s phrase “we must seek for evidence” could be taken as an urge to find such markers in the region, with the ideal find being other stone equivalents for the megaliths. James Reid Moir’s “So long ago as in 1884” gives an ironic take on duration in a work seeking to extend regional human presence back hundreds of millenia. Through the researches of figures such as Dutt and Moir, East Anglia is made a region of stones after all. Dutt and Moir also illustrate enquiries which at the time and in retrospect occupied and defined border zones of archaeology and antiquarianism, the amateur and professional, the grounded and the speculative; enquiries which can thereby be especially telling of the cultural presence of the prehistoric, and might be termed, following Dutt’s claim on glacial erratics as megaliths, erratic prehistories.

2. Erratic Megaliths WA Dutt (1870-1939), journalist, prolific East Anglian topographer and resident of Carlton Colville, near Lowestoft, was a founding member and first joint secretary of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia.6 Throughout his topographical writing Dutt pursued the prehistoric and the related category of the primitive. Thus in Wild Life in East Anglia, Dutt’s predominantly natural history account diverts into a meditation on the Breckland region as primitive space, with primitivism sparked by contrast between empty present landscape and populous prehistory: “For man there seemed to be no place upon these barrens; yet almost everywhere there were traces of his having dwelt upon them. But these were relics of a remote past – grouped and isolated barrows, mysterious banks intersecting ancient highways, abandoned trackways, and innumerable tools and weapons of flint strewn about the sites of vanished settlements”.7 In 1926 Dutt pursued one aspect of antiquity in The Ancient MarkStones of East Anglia: Their Origin and Folklore. Dutt moves across a range of East Anglian sites to suggest that stones such as the “Druid’s

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Stone” at Bungay may fill a gap in areas previously thought to be empty of megalithic monuments. Here were the “Norfolk and Suffolk Megaliths”,8 utilised for purposes of ritual, magic, festivities, or territorial marking: “in a part of England usually supposed to be entirely without prehistoric megaliths there are certainly some large boulders, recognized as markstones, that seem to have originally served like purposes to those of many of the more widely known menhirs or standing stones and probably had contemporary origin”.9 Such stones would have functioned alongside other materials long gone: “Idols and symbols of wood, as well as stone, were worshipped at that time, or associated with rites of which vague knowledge has been preserved in folk memory and the survival of certain significant customs; but such wooden idols as may have survived the general adoption of Christianity would naturally ere long fall into decay and disappear”.10 Dutt investigates the stones through field study, folkloric associations and antiquarian record, positing their use as boundary stones, in sacrificial ceremony and ritual dancing, and as magical devices capable of healing and movement. Via an argument for the survival of Neolithic physical characteristics among populations throughout the country, rather than the assumption that populations were driven west by invasion, Dutt suggests that: “On the whole we seem to be justified in concluding that there has never been any serious obstacle to the survival among us of beliefs, traditions and folk customs to which prehistoric origin may be credibly ascribed”. Studies of folk memory indicate the persistence of ancient lore: “It is now agreed that even the strange, and often apparently meaningless, stories attaching to an old boulder by the roadside may have an important significance when compared with like stories similarly associated elsewhere”.11 Erratic glacial boulders offered “the best local substitute”, scattered over the boulder clay during the last glaciation, rocks brought from elsewhere by the ice, which could serve as megaliths in situ or be moved for the purpose. In all but the “marsh and fen districts” such stones were “probably more numerous than most of us imagine”.12 Dutt notes folk tales, curious names, supposed magical properties, and the sheer material presence of such objects: “Nearly all of us, at some time, have had our attention attracted by one or another of the large boulders that often appear to have been designedly placed in certain positions by the roadside, or elsewhere, for some purpose not often at first obvious”.13 Such stones could be assumed to have survived in their place due to subsequent use as boundary markers, difficulties in movement, and adaptation in later Christian rites allowing or indeed encouraging “preservation of pagan stones”.14 There was also the uncanny quality

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which flowed from their origin elsewhere and their cultural association: “The early sacredness of some of them, the mysterious qualities attributed to others, and the curses anciently invoked upon removers of boundary marks, combining to endow them with importance or uncanniness, would, in the rural districts where most of them are found, tend to perpetuate the belief in the “unluckiness” of removing them”.15 Dutt’s argument diverts across Britain for comparative discussion, returning at intervals to alight on East Anglian boulders, which thereby gain significance. Boulders crop up in a number of East Anglian churchyards, Dutt concluding that they are a meaningful presence denoting religious continuity, and deploying place name argument in support of this, as where a glacial boulder outside the churchyard wall at Beccles gathers weight via the element eccles, derivative of the old Welsh egluys denoting a place or structure of more lasting kind than the ordinary British village: “Latinized the word is ecclesia, so the “structure of a more lasting kind” here may have been the sacred stone itself”. If Beccles thereby rests on its boulder, so in nearby Bungay the “Giant’s Grave” or “Druid’s Stone” sits in the churchyard: “there is a tradition that girls, after dancing round it twelve times, placed their ears against it to receive answers to their wishes”.16 A line drawing of the Druid’s Stone by FW Baldwin of Lowestoft features on the cover of Dutt’s book; a further drawing shows a man in a long coat loitering by Stockton Stone, a boulder by a Norfolk hedge supposedly marking a former site of assembly (see figs vi and vii).17 Various East Anglian boulders gather legends of movement; stones running across the road in Sheringham, wandering to water to drink in Flegg, turning over and groaning in Debenham, dashing down to the sea for a dip in Lowestoft. Dutt concludes: “Most of these and other similar stories told about standing stones and ancient boulders are, it seems, difficult to account for, unless we agree that they are distorted versions of primitive facts or debilitated survivals of primitive beliefs”. The ludicrous becomes readily explicable, though Dutt notes that we should guard against assuming that “every old boulder of which such tales are told must necessarily be a pagan idol, symbol, or sacrificial stone”.18 Such qualifications hardly however detract from the general tenor of the book, and scepticism does not become the prevailing mood. Dutt’s markstone work also engages with the then novel ideas of Alfred Watkins on ley lines. If Dutt has been cited in recent decades it has been for this connection, with Dutt an East Anglian outlier of the inter-war ley community.19 The ley is only a minor element of Dutt’s book, though nonetheless revealing of Dutt’s mode of argument. Watkins is cited on a number of occasions from his 1925 The Old Straight Track in relation to

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ancient markstones as foundation sites for churches, features in funeral rites, sacrificial sites, and boundary markers.20 Only towards the end of Dutt’s book is Watkins noted in terms of the “Alignment of Ancient Sites”, with his theory “tested by many observers in different parts of the country with results that have surprised most of them”.21 Dutt traces an alignment between two of his best known markstones, at Stockton and Harleston, passing through earthworks, tumuli, bridges, mounds and churches, and thus supporting Watkins’ ley theory. Sites include Bell Hill, an artificial mound near Belton, inland from Great Yarmouth, suggested to be a site of ancient Beltane ceremonies of fire worship. In a district “where mark-stones are few and far between”, such alignments through “the two most noteworthy of them” can “hardly be by accident”.22 In The Old Straight Track Watkins quotes a letter from Dutt, “a well-known East Anglian topographer”, on how tracing leys can help reveal other features now almost hidden.23 In Ancient Mark-Stones Dutt makes the same point in noting how a friend found that ley-tracings on maps could lead to the discovery of hidden boulders in the field: “The instructions given to the early Christian priests to hide the pagan sacred stones, no doubt led to many such stones being buried out of sight”.24 Lines of argument circulate in confirmation. Watkins’ 1927 The Ley Hunter’s Manual credits Dutt as one of the “practical investigators” identifying leys, in this case in Norfolk, from Narborough to Happisburgh,25 and in The Old Straight Track Dutt appears in the chapter on “Confirmation”, where Watkins cites Dutt as the first of other authorities in other districts, quoting letters from this “experienced investigator” and author of Highways and Byways in East Anglia. Dutt had noted fourteen leys going out from Tasburgh hillfort south of Norwich.26 Dutt’s enquiry into East Anglian stones might thereby appear a parochial affair, rummaging for churchyard erratics and collecting tales from local acquaintances. As however with many stories of the ancient Dutt exhibits the capacity to leap scales, to shift from Beccles nomenclature to world history. Dutt’s final sections concern “The Megalithic Culture”, “The Earlier the Higher Culture”, and an “Enduring Nature-Worship”, which lasted into and through Christianity, with Dutt presenting what he deems a common argument for megalithic culture arriving in Britain towards the end of the Neolithic from the Mediterranean. Dutt consistently uses the term “African” to describe the people who brought this culture, which he argues was a “higher culture” than the “Celts” who came after: “degeneration, rather than advancement, ensued upon contact with the Celts”.27 If at one point Dutt mentions “The African race – to which, in view of their early migrations, the name of

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Mediterranean better applies”,28 it is the term African which he consistently employs, citing the “African or Lybian race … still represented by the Berbers in Northern Africa”,29 “this wonderful race, which gave to many parts of Europe such a remarkable and distinctive culture”.30 The atmosphere of cultural praise for the North African fostering of East Anglian stones is however tempered as Dutt compares Neolithic customs of animal, adult and child sacrifice with customs prevalent among “the Lybians of North Africa” in “historical times”,31 and adds: “Their rites of nature worship, often bloody and orgiastic, appear to have been very similar to those the Lybians are known to have practised on and around just such megaliths as are found in most parts of the British Isles”.32 Dutt’s eulogy for a wonderful race turns to a characterisation of pre-Celtic and recent North African cultural savagery, which might be fearfully remnant in today’s British selves: “Into the British Isles they brought forms of nature-worship conducive to a mystical ecstasy, which often degenerated into orgiastic revelry – a lack of self-control approaching mania which has not been without manifestation among modern representatives of the race under circumstances creating extreme emotion. Even in our own day, it may be this African element among us which is occasionally responsible for startling revelations of primitive superstition and savagery. Yet while there are these survivals, and occasional outbreaks of an ancient and obscure malignity, this same element is probably accountable for much of the weird and beautiful of the old Celtic mythology”.33

The long-coated man by Stockton Stone may be wondering just what this roadside boulder could prompt. Neolithic survivals might trigger erratic conduct in twentieth century East Anglia.

3. Flints and a Chalk Mammoth James Reid Moir (1879-1944) was a prominent figure in regional archaeology in the interwar period, playing a significant institutional role through Ipswich Museum and the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (PSEA), of which he was a founding member, and producing the official guide to the Neolithic flint mines of Grimes Graves in 1936.34 Moir was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1937, though he figured in a number of prehistoric controversies. PGH Boswell’s obituary in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society noted Moir’s “intolerance of criticism and pugnacity in controversy”.35 Sir Arthur Keith’s appreciative memoir for the Royal Society extended to physical anthropology: “Reid Moir was of medium stature, stockily and stoutly built, with a roundish

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head, of a form I have met with so often in Gaulish graves”.36 Moir often figures as representative of the kind of enquiry Grahame Clark and others were seeking to usurp and professionalise through the transformation of the PSEA into the Prehistoric Society in 1935, lessening the already diminishing regional focus and connecting into university academic research.37 Moir was however by no means antagonistic to university research, attending the first meeting of the Fenland Research Committee in 1932 at the University of Cambridge. Apart from but with some connection to university archaeological culture, Moir appears a figure who encouraged change, indeed supporting the appointment of Clark as editor of the Prehistoric Society’s Proceedings.38 Elements of his work would however become subject to academic dismissal, even ridicule. Moir brought together much of his East Anglian research in his 1927 The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia, published by Cambridge University Press. Here Moir, like Dutt, alighted on glacial boulders, again making them subject to a racial imagination: “To explain what these are in an easily understood manner, I would put it in this way. When we meet a negro, for example, in England, we know that he is not indigenous to this country, but that he has come to this country from abroad. In a similar manner, when we find, say in Suffolk, large pieces of rock that do not occur in a natural state in that county, we know that such specimens have been brought into the area by some means”.39 Human analogies convey stones and people not belonging in East Anglia and England. Moir discussed glacial erratics in the context of evidence for the Ice Age rather than as revered megaliths; for him “The Great Ice Age” had interrupted rather than preceded the human occupation of the region, of which more below. Moir’s visions of prehistoric conduct are far more controlled, indeed respectable than Dutt, with few signs of orgiastic revelry, and from The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia there emerges a picture of human occupation dating back half a million years, and characterised by the functional working of flint, and the occasional shaping of artistic and religious artefacts. Moir seizes on East Anglian stones which would both make and damage his reputation; worked flints more ancient than others would credit, chalk sculpture which others would put down as natural work. Like many members of the PSEA, Moir was a collector and classifier of flints, his works crammed with meticulous drawings of flint implements. There is an obsessive quality to such itemisation, and Moir reflected on the psychology of the flint collector. The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia began with a short account of “The Pleasures of Flint Hunting”, the pursuit entailing communion with the past and the natural

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world, if not with fellow humans, indeed there is a sense that the latter absence may be as much a part of the allure of flint as the former presence. Moir begins: “The collecting of the flint implements, and other relics, of prehistoric man is, essentially, an open air branch of science, for the sites where men now congregate are often far removed from those occupied by the people of the Stone Age, and thus it is that those who follow the trail of the ancient hunters of the remote past, find themselves, frequently, in the wild and unvisited places of Nature. To the gregarious person – who experiences little pleasure except in the company of numbers of his fellow-men, and surrounded by manifold evidences of modern civilisation – the solitude of the great open spaces makes little, or no, appeal, but, for others, to sojourn for a time in such places brings a deep and a lasting happiness”.40

East Anglia is offered as the “prolific hunting ground” for the flint enthusiast, and the introductory landscapes highlighted to draw in the prospective reader and hunter are the Breckland heaths and the north-east coast of Norfolk, where cliff erosion exposes prehistory: “The Cromer coast is, in fact, an Eldorado for the geologist and the archaeologist, and moreover is one of those places, not now easily found, where it is possible to walk for hours amidst beautiful surroundings and to avoid seeing any signs of civilisation so apparent at most seaside resorts”.41 Moir conveys the invigorating east coast air and the beauty of the scene, and suggests a visit may be most rewarding in stormy winter weather when the sea has worked on the shore and cliff; the hunter will require “a hardy constitution and a deep-seated archaeological keenness”.42 Moir’s book and work also though takes in more prosaic modern spaces of provincial urban life; various brickfields, power station construction sites, suburban diggings: “In 1914 my attention was drawn to the discovery of a number of flint implements and flakes that had been found by sinking an inspection-pit for a motor garage in a garden in Ivry Street, situated on the high ground in the northern part of Ipswich”.43 Moir argues that “successful tracking of prehistoric man” will require patience, endeavour, a love of work for its own sake, “a trained mind and eye, and, as in all science, a well ordered imagination”. Such an imagination could be further sustained by a resulting collection of flints: “These, if correctly labelled and preserved in a cabinet, will always give pleasure as works of art, and, when interpreted aright, will enhance this pleasure by revealing a part of the stupendous history of man upon this planet”.44 For Moir’s critics though a well ordered collection did not necessarily signify a well ordered mind, indeed could nurture and give misplaced confidence to a disordered imagination. Moir was one of many

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supporters of the authenticity of Piltdown Man after its announcement in 1912, and a friend of its leading advocate Sir Arthur Keith. He also attracted individual controversy for his arguments on the existence of eoliths, which had been the subject of fierce debate, including in the pages of Man in 1913 and 1923.45 Moir’s chief antagonist here was S Hazzledine Warren, who described himself as “a practical student of flint fracture since the year 1889”, and proposed that what Moir saw as the human shaping of flint implements could simply be the outcome of natural processes, which he claimed to demonstrate through practical experiment.46 The tone of exchange between Moir and Warren was acrimonious, reflecting what Moir felt was at stake concerning knowledge of prehistory, and his own reputation. The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia sums up Moir’s eolith theories, though with little hint of the controversy they had attracted. Moir deduced from eoliths that the “most ancient works of man” 47 could be up to one million years old, “the Eolithic, or Stone Age of the Dawn”,48 and might be traced to “a race of ape-like people living in Kent”.49 Moir argued that humans occupied present day East Anglia in pre and inter-glacials, with their works being found beneath successive layers of glacial material, and the quality of flint implements improving with each inter-glacial. An “orderly development” of eoliths could be traced from earliest times to the Neolithic, thus for Moir supporting Darwin’s evolutionary theory.50 Moir’s key East Anglian examples came from the Ipswich area and the north Norfolk coast. Moir devotes a chapter to “The Men of the Cromer Forest Bed”, beginning memorably: “About 400,000 years ago great events were taking place in Norfolk”.51 Moir describes a flint workshop found on the current foreshore at Cromer, and other outcrops of the bed from Weybourne to Kessingland in Suffolk. The size and shape of implements suggested a large handed people: “We conclude, therefore, that the primitive Cromerians were of great strength and size of hand, but we cannot absolutely prove this because, up to the present, no human bones have been found in the Forest Bed”.52 Moir describes parallel finds in Germany, and suggests animal bones show signs of being cut by humanly shaped flints. Moir’s account mixes his own researches, which he presents as scrupulously scientific yet with little account of the controversies which had surrounded them, with the publications of other East Anglian archaeologists, including WG Clarke and JE Sainty. Moir claims Clarke as the first to find evidence of Pliocene “Tertiary man in England”, with flint implements located within a stratum beneath the Norwich Crag, described in the Proceedings of the PSEA in 1905; Clarke’s own accounts of eoliths, and his ancient periodisation, echo

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Moir.53 Dutt’s Highways and Byways in East Anglia had noted flint weapons found near Brandon beneath boulder clay as confirming preglacial human occupation.54 Moir made from such work an archaeological regional and national boosterism, reflecting that assumptions that Asia was “the birthplace of mankind” lacked convincing evidence, and wondering if East Anglia could yet claim the title: “Thus, it is possible, that what is now England was the home of the earliest men”.55 Moir’s connection to amateur enthusiasts led him to another object of controversy, the Great Glemham “chalk mammoth” (fig. viii). Again The Antiquity of Man reports the find with little sense that it had been the object of fierce argument and even ridicule. In his chapter on “Late Palaeolithic Man in East Anglia” Moir reproduces a photograph of the mammoth from the pages of Man, and reports the finding as an example of Palaeolithic art in East Anglia to put alongside an engraving of a goat on flint found at Nayland,56 and the engravings of deer claimed by AL Armstrong at Grimes Graves, “Norfolk drawings … the most ancient of their kind hitherto discovered”.57 If, as Moir put it, “Unfortunately, there are no ancient caves in East Anglia, so that the Magdelenian people of this area would have had no opportunity for indulging in their artistic leanings in painting the walls of such places with hunting scenes, and pictures of animals”,58 these goats and deer provided equivalent images, and the chalk mammoth a further “example of Palaeolithic art”. The mammoth “was found upon the surface of the ground at Great Glemham House, Saxmundham, by the Hon. Robert Gathorne-Hardy”. Moir notes the view of Dr Charles Andrews that this may simply be the internal cast of the chamber of an ammonite, but argues that its roughly elephant-like form “bears marks showing that it has been modified by man with a view to increasing a natural resemblance to this animal”.59 Moir notes that Andrews’ comments led him to modify his original view that the whole form was humanly shaped, but nevertheless finds evidence that here is ancient art: “The specimen was subjected to a very searching examination by me, and the above is my considered opinion upon it”.60 The reader picks up a degree of doubt here, and those familiar with the contents of Man over a few years would have recalled the mammoth as a highly contentious lump of chalk. Moir first announced “A Piece of Carved Chalk from Suffolk” in February 1919, discussing the site and the likelihood that “the carving was brought to the surface by rabbits”. Moir provided a rough outline drawing of a woolly mammoth, and photographs of the chalk object from either side, above and below. The mammoth measured 4¼ inches in length, 2¾ inches height, 23/8 inches width; Moir’s measurements suggest not only

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dimension but orientation. The underside showed the stumps of the four legs and penis, although the latter and hind legs seemed to have been “broken off in ancient times”, as had part of the trunk. Moir stressed the still evident marks of sculpture, with thin lines from flint carving, applauded “the skill and accuracy of the ancient craftsman”, and imagined the mammoth’s former glory: “When the sculpture was complete and uneroded it must have presented a quite remarkable appearance, and the pose of the legs shows that it was intended to portray the animal as if in rapid motion”. 61 Three months later the mammoth was put into question by Sir Henry Howorth, who identified “The Latest Prehistoric Mare’s Nest’: “As one of the oldest members of the Royal Anthropological Institute … I crave a short space in which to protest against the insertion of the paper in the February number of Man, which is not worthy of that publication”. Howorth found Moir’s attribution of carved mammoth status to the object “astounding”, seeing instead an object “perfectly familiar to geologists and palaeontologists”, namely the cast of the internal chamber of an ammonite, commonly known as “pigs”. Howorth outlined the process of formation, and lumped Moir in with those placed below science: “It is natural that labouring men should consider the natural casts representations of pigs, just as the poor people of Whitby in old times thought the Ammonites were petrified snakes whose heads had been cut off by St. Hilda”. Moir’s explanation he found “still more extravagant”.62 In June the editor noted that Moir had written a “strong protest” against Howorth’s criticism, accepting the ammonite derivation but claiming its human modification, and promising “a further communication”.63 Howorth had mentioned palaeontologist Dr Andrews in his commentary, and it was to a letter published by Andrews in Nature on March 13th that Moir directed his subsequent full reply in Man in December 1919. Andrews had shown Moir his four chalk “pigs”, but none of these resembled a mammoth, nor did they show the human working evident to Moir on the Great Glemham specimen. Moir goes through the evidence for the latter over several pages, and challenges those who disagree to show comparable specimens demonstrably of natural origin: “If Dr. Andrews is able to bring forward facts demonstrating my conclusions to be wrong, I shall at once acknowledge this to be the case”.64 The chalk mammoth thereafter remained in suspension, before a further outing in The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia. Moir’s reputation has then not only suffered retrospectively, but was under attack as it was made. The attack however was based upon Moir being a credulous rather than deceitful figure. Such criticism indeed plays on Moir’s own self-presentation as a thoroughly rationalist student of the

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ancient world, one who believed in reason and progress and saw his own work as contributing to both, in its methods and findings. The final chapter of Antiquity addresses “The Place of Origin and the Progress of Man”. In his evolutionary spirit Moir seeks to heighten regard for the achievements of early humans, such that they become less pantheistic stone worshippers than proto-modern East Anglian citizens: “but for their triumphant, though enormously difficult, fight for survival we would not be in existence today”. At the same time Moir emphasises the progress made since ancient times, with the possibility of further dramatic rather than gradual change: “if the present rate of progress is maintained, even the next few hundred years will witness an astounding change in man’s whole environment, and it may be taken for granted that the present state of things will then be regarded in the same way as we regard, for instance, the condition of affairs existing in the Early Middle Ages”.65 Moir concluded: “Man is not engaged in a hopeless conflict with his environment – a weary swinging of the pendulum between advancement and retrogression – but from his earliest days has progressed, and, there is every reason to believe, will continue to do so in the future. That, in my judgement, is one of the most important lessons to be learned from prehistoric archaeology”.66 Moir’s tone of progress is echoed in a minor non-archaeological work which further underlines his devotion to reason, and indicates how the principles exercised through prehistoric enquiry could be put to work elsewhere. In an undated pamphlet, privately printed in Ipswich and probably dating from the 1930s, Moir considered Disembodied Spirits. This “short Essay on Spiritualism” is an exercise in scepticism, a rationalist account which, while taking a sympathetic tone to those who sincerely practise seances, ultimately posits spiritualism as misguided or deluded folly, a leftover from an earlier primitive and barbaric evolutionary stage. If Moir was a target for those suspecting him of naïve credulity regarding the men of the Cromer Forest Bed and ancient chalk mammoths, here his own sense of being a clear sighted man of reason is to the fore. Spiritualism, along with belief in ghosts, is an example of how “the ancient superstitions, believed in during man’s primaeval condition, sometimes surge upwards”. This was a “retrogressive movement”, supported in part because of its association with those showing “distinction and ability” in other fields, but it cut against the “upward struggle to a more rational outlook on life”.67 Spiritualism and a belief in ghosts had no scientific basis, and Moir argued for a proper investigation, which would most likely relegate ghosts “to the limbo of past, and happily forgotten things, associated with the childhood of mankind”.68 Moir’s essay underlines the prevailing tone of progressive scientific reason

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throughout his work, targeting a practice itself often looked down upon as suburban and provincial, giving to others the kind of criticism he himself received.

4. From East Anglia to the World, Not Simply Via Cambridge Moir’s relegation of spirits to a netherworld of superstition, and his devotion to the progress of humankind as evident from prehistory, serves to complicate characterisations of Moir and fellow PSEA members as provincial antiquarians with time on their hands, looking only backwards, beating an otherwordly retreat from modern life. Stuart Piggott thus in 1963 rightly identified the cultural milieu and “social geography” of early twentieth century prehistoric enquiry as connecting ruralism, arts and crafts and the “country-dwelling professional middle class”, 69 though he missed some of that milieu’s complexity, not least its propensity to move between local and much wider argument, and to deal with time in a manner which did not simply involve looking back in linear fashion. Moir, Dutt and others indeed illustrate the complexities of tradition and modernity, and of geographical scale, which shaped much of the engagement with landscape in England in the early and mid twentieth century.70 The differences between individuals such as Moir and Dutt also suggest a complex and varied culture within an organisation such as the PSEA, which would repay further research. Flint collectors and boulder spotters resist being lumped together into one nostalgic and provincial bunch, left behind by, in Clark’s phrase in his story of the conversion of the PSEA into the Prehistoric Society, the institutional move “from East Anglia to the World”. 71 Or perhaps the route map is more one from East Anglia to Cambridge, the latter within yet apart from, hovering above, the former. Dutt and Moir leap spatial and temporal scales in other fashion, take other routes from East Anglia to the World, and such devotees of the prehistoric deserve attention as complex cultural figures in their own right.

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Notes 1 W. A. Dutt,, The Ancient Mark-Stones of East Anglia: Their Origin and Folklore (Lowestoft: Flood, 1926), 6. 2 J. R. Moir, The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 48. 3 R. Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 73. 4 Hutton, Pagan Religions, 87. 5 A. Burl, The Stone Circles of the British Isles (London: Yale University Press, 1976), 273. 6 Dutt’s work included Highways and Byways in East Anglia (London: Methuen, 1901); The Norfolk Broads (London: Methuen, 1903). On the P.S.E.A., founded in 1908, see J. E. Sainty and R. R. Clarke, “A Century of Norfolk Prehistory”, in P. Millican (ed), Norfolk Archaeology: The Centenary Volume (Norwich: Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 1946), 8-40; G. Clark, “The Prehistoric Society: from East Anglia to the world”, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 51 (1985) 1-13. W. G. Clarke was joint secretary of the P.S.E.A. alongside Dutt. 7 W. A. Dutt, Wild Life in East Anglia (London: Methuen , 1906), 58. On cultures of prehistory on twentieth century Breckland see D. Matless, “Properties of Ancient Landscape: the Present Prehistoric in Twentieth-Century Breckland”, Journal of Historical Geography 34 (2008) 68-93. 8 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 6. 9 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 3. 10 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 6. 11 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 5-6 12 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 7. 13 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 7. 14 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 10. 15 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 8. 16 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 12. 17 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 16. 18 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 20. 19 A. Stout, “Choosing a Past: The Politics of Prehistory in Pre-War Britain”, University of Wales Lampeter PhD, 2004; A. Stout, Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters and Archaeologists in Pre-war Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). T. Williamson and L. Bellamy, Ley Lines in Question (Kingswood: World’s Work, 1983), 85 notes Dutt’s markstones work without mention of his book. Dutt’s work also features in S. Toulson, East Anglia: Walking the Ley Lines and Ancient Tracks (London: Wildwood House, 1979), though the markstones book is not mentioned and Dutt is approached via his link to Watkins (‘a traveller who shared many of Watkins’ beliefs”, 34) and his other topographical writing. Toulson, 226, also notes a hostile review of Watkins’ 1922 Early British Trackways by Dutt’s PSEA colleague WG Clarke. 20 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 11, 13, 15-16. 21 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 24.

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Dutt, Mark-Stones, 25. A. Watkins, The Old Straight Track (London: Methuen, 1925), 24. 24 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 26. 25 A. Watkins, The Ley Hunter’s Manual (Wellingborough: Turnstone, 1983; first published 1927), 82; for a tracing see Toulson, East Anglia, 55-60. 26 Watkins, Old Straight Track, 192; for a tracing see Toulson, East Anglia, 65-74. 27 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 30. 28 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 30. 29 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 28. 30 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 31. 31 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 28. 32 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 29. 33 Dutt, Mark-Stones, 30. 34 J. R. Moir, Grime’s Graves (London: HMSO, 1936); on Grime’s Graves see also Matless, “Properties of Ancient Landscape”. 35 P. G. H. Boswell, “James Reid Moir, F.R.S. (1879-1944)”, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 11 (1945), 66-68. 36 A. Keith, “James Reid Moir 1879-1944”, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society 4 (1944), 733-745. 37 Clark, “The Prehistoric Society”; S. Piggott, “Archaeology and Prehistory”, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 29 (1963), 1-16. For an account critical of this narrative see P. J. Smith, “‘The coup’: how did the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia become the Prehistoric Society?”, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 65 (1999), 465-470. 38 B. Fagan, Grahame Clark: An Intellectual Life of an Archaeologist (Boulder: Westview, 2001). 39 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 53. 40 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 1. 41 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 2. 42 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 3. 43 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 108. 44 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 3. See also the final chapter of W. G. Clarke, Our Homeland Prehistoric Antiquities (London: Homeland Association, 1922). 45 Clark, “The Prehistoric Society”; D. K. Grayson, “Eoliths, archaeological ambiguity, and the generation of “middle-range” research”, in D. Meltzer, D. Fowler and J. Sabloff (eds) American Archaeology Past and Future (Washington: Smithsonian, 1986), 77-133. The themes of Moir’s work resurface in recent studies identifying humanly worked flints up to 700,000 years old on the Norfolk and Suffolk coast; W. Roebroeks, “Archaeology: life on the Costa del Cromer”, Nature 438 (2005) 921-922; C. Stringer, Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain (London: Penguin, 2006). 46 S. H. Warren, “Problems of Flint Fracture”, Man 13 (1913), 37-38. Also S. H. Warren, “The Eolithic Problem: A Reply”, Man 23 (1923), 82-83, a response to S. Barnes and J. Reid Moir, “A Criticism of Mr. S. Hazzledine Warren’s Views on Eoliths”, Man 23 (1923), 51-55. 23

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Moir, Antiquity of Man, 14. Moir, Antiquity of Man, 4. 49 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 13. 50 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 20. 51 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 39. 52 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 44-45. 53 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 33. Clarke’s account appears in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia 2 (1905), 213-229; see also Clarke, Our Homeland, 39-43. 54 Dutt, Highways and Byways, 332-333. 55 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 162. 56 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 118-119. 57 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 145. On these drawings see G. Varndell, “Seeing Things: A. L. Armstrong’s Flint Crust Engravings from Grimes Graves”, in P. Topping and M. Lynott (eds) The Cultural Landscape of Prehistoric Mines (Oxford: Oxbow, 2005), 51-62; Matless, “Properties of Ancient Landscape”. 58 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 118. 59 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 119. 60 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 120. 61 J. R. Moir, “A Piece of Carved Chalk from Suffolk”, Man 19 (1919), 17-18. 62 H. H. Howorth, “The Latest Prehistoric Mare’s Nest”, Man 19 (1919), 68-70. 63 “A Piece of Carved Chalk from Suffolk”, Man 19 (1919), 95-96. 64 J. R. Moir, “A Piece of Carved Chalk from Suffolk”, Man 19 (1919), 183-186. 65 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 164. 66 Moir, Antiquity of Man, 165. 67 J. R. Moir, Disembodied Spirits: A short Essay on Spiritualism (Ipswich: W.E.Harrison, n.d, likely 1930s), 3-4. 68 Moir, Disembodied Spirits, 7. 69 Piggott, “Archaeology and Prehistory”, 2. 70 D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1988). 71 Clark, “The Prehistoric Society”. The phrase provides the subtitle of Clark’s article, given as an address to the society at its 50th anniversary meeting in Norwich. It should be noted however that Clark includes a detailed and far from straightforwardly dismissive account of “the East Anglians”, crediting Moir, for example, with converting “a provincial association of flint hunters into the prototype of our present society”, 2. 48

CHAPTER SIX IMAGINING THE PAST: ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND ARTISTIC PERSPECTIVES SAM SMILES

The central question of this paper may be simply posed: how can prehistory and modernism find an accommodation? What should their relationship be? On the face of it, the answer to this conundrum would be curt indeed and would run roughly as follows. The reality of prehistoric life can be found within a temporal and material horizon that binds it to field monuments and artefacts that are sharply differentiated from twentieth-century culture; the prehistoric and modern eras are incommensurable and any presumed relationship between them would work to the detriment of our understanding of both. But of course both “prehistory” and “modernism,” as accounts of different phases of material culture, are modern constructions. The idea of prehistory emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century as archaeology developed new understandings of technological development, stratigraphy and an expanded time frame for the remote past. Likewise, the possibility of modernism, as an artistic project self-consciously engaged with modernity, is routinely ascribed its beginnings at the same period with the transformation of society, the development of new industrial processes, expanding cities and a dominant middle-class culture. This temporal congruence should alert us to the possibility that a relationship between prehistory and modernism, insofar as both were in formation in the nineteenth century, can after all be posited. What has tended to obscure this relationship is the assumption that modern artists, by definition, have little interest in the past; indeed, that the purpose of modern art is to efface the past and to work only with the present conditions of culture. If that were so, then modern archaeology and modern art would have little to communicate. Likewise if it were true that

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archaeologists, by virtue of their specialized concern with the remote past, can have little interest in the modern, the activities of modern artists would be entirely inconsequential. In fact, from at least the mid-nineteenth century the archaeological profession shared with artists an interest in museological developments for the display of vanished cultures, it offered artists patronage and, on occasion, it modified its approach because of these exchanges.1 The idea that modern art universally turned its back on history is also suspect: for many artists, architects and designers the historic legacy was a resource to be deployed. Yet while it is relatively easy to show how archaeological researches into Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures influenced nineteenth-century art and architecture, academic and avant-garde, the relationship between prehistory and modernism, essentially a twentieth-century development, is more elusive. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to examine British prehistory in the context of artistic modernism, or, rather, to see what may follow if we treat them as cultural orientations produced at the same moment. We only need to remember how prehistory became a topical and popular concern in the early years of the twentieth century and how the two most significant megalithic complexes in Britain, Stonehenge and Avebury, were conserved and interpreted for the public between the wars. Not only was legislation used to schedule ancient monuments and to place them under the custodianship of the Ministry of Works, their physical appearance and setting were also subject to professional intervention. The hinterland of Stonehenge was taken into guardianship in 1929, following a two-year campaign by the National Trust to protect the surrounding land from speculative builders. Avebury as we see it today is, similarly, a product of these decades. In the 1930s Alexander Keiller restored the site, reinstating the silted-up ditches, removing trees and re-erecting fallen sarsen stones. Wiltshire County Council’s planning scheme for the Avebury area, announced in 1937, was established to stop undesirable modern development. The majority of the complex – nearly 1000 acres including Windmill Hill, the northern third of the Avenue and the Avebury stone circles - was handed over to the National Trust in 1943, with the monuments themselves under the custodianship of the Ministry of Works. The site had thus been preserved for public benefit and its archaeological significance safeguarded. But it was, of course, a modern Avebury that Keiller produced; the twentieth century supported each of those stones, not just in Keiller’s practical work of excavation and restitution but also in the assumption that a restored monument is more valuable to the public and to the nation’s historic identity than a decayed one.

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When the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology opened in 1937, Country Life noted how “archaeology in the last few years has caught the imagination of the general public in a way that would have seemed impossible before the War. Plans, maps, photography … have all made archaeology a much more exciting subject than it was”.2 The excitement referred to here included Mortimer Wheeler’s excavation of Maiden Castle (1934-7), where he created a dramatic narrative for the site, used students to offer visitors “lecturettes” about the dig and turned the whole complex into a public spectacle to promote the cause of archaeology in Britain. The more general dissemination of archaeological knowledge via “plans, maps, photography” included the Ordnance Survey’s publications and the archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford’s pioneering work on aerial photography. Between the wars, the Ordnance Survey produced seven maps detailing historic sites, from the Neolithic era to the seventeenth century, starting with Roman England in 1924 and ending with Britain in the Dark Ages in 1938-9.3 Crawford wrote on prehistoric archaeology for the Observer and founded the journal Antiquity in 1927. With Alexander Keiller he published Wessex from the Air (1928), which gave archaeologists and general readers a sense of the archaeological riches just below the surface of the land. The dialogue between this resurgent archaeology and modern art can be envisaged as taking place within a field of four competing interpretations of the past, one of which is the interpretation offered by arts practice itself. What distinguishes these competitive interpretations is that they operate with different conceptions of history, or perhaps one should say different understandings of the work a historical monument should do when we moderns deploy it for our various purposes. We might say that the mainstream archaeological position looks on monuments as sources of data from which can be retrieved information about the past. There are no necessary inferences to be drawn from this information that would have a bearing on our own time. On first glance, this is indeed what Keiller, Piggott, Wheeler and others seem to advocate. The more maverick archaeological position makes use of archaeological data and larger archaeologically-informed speculations on the development of civilisation, to elicit from field monuments and excavated material an understanding of megalithic culture from which inferences are drawn which are intended to bear on our own time. In the hands of writers like H.J. Massingham and Vaughan Cornish, this lost culture stands as something of a rebuke to contemporary Britain.4 If Avebury and Stonehenge are evidence of a sophisticated, arts-loving, pacifist people, living in spiritual harmony with nature, then modern Britons have fallen far from the state of grace enjoyed

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by their remote progenitors. The third interpretative stance, aligned with the conservationist camp, recognises the historical importance of megalithic sites and actively intervenes to preserve them from destruction. The campaigns mounted against the Marconi radio station planned for Overton Hill above Avebury in the late 1920s and against the Air Ministry’s plan to use an area close to Waylands Smithy as a bombing range in the 1930s, are good examples. Within the conservationist cause there are those who ascribe value to these sites not because they help archaeological understanding of prehistoric culture, nor because they have lessons to teach, but rather because of their longevity. Descending to the present from time immemorial, their placement in the landscape says something about the nature of Britain; a megalith is something that guarantees the historicity of these islands. The fourth and last interpretative position is found in the creative arts. The importance of megalithic Britain for visual artists cannot be so easily summarised, even in this over-reductive interpretative map, but what does seem constant is an approach to megalithic Britain that emphasises the enigmatic and numinous potential of these sites (see fig. ix). Both Paul Nash and John Piper, for example, recorded their disquiet at the archaeological approach to British antiquity, which had robbed the sites of their vitality. For both artists, megalithic remains had a living presence that the modern artist was in a unique position to bring forward. The work achieved by Nash and Piper is of interest for its ability to align itself with the other three interest groups, on occasion, as well as working in its own special sphere of competence. To take the most straightforward case, as well as his more surreal artistic investigations of Avebury and other sites of remote antiquity, Paul Nash also engaged with representatives of the other three interpretations of prehistoric Britain identified above. Nash knew Mortimer Wheeler, both having studied at the Slade, and visited his Maiden Castle dig; he also met Keiller and Piggott at Avebury in 1938 and perhaps earlier.5 Nash was not convinced that archaeologists should control access to megalithic monuments. He had remarked at Stonehenge in 1927, that people “airing archiological (sic) small talk should be fined five shillings and hustled into the highway with the utmost ignominy”.6 The same resistance marks his response to Keiller’s work at Avebury in the 1930s, with his preference for the unimproved site as he first saw it in 1933 and his dismay at the sterility of Keiller’s restoration project. In an article published in 1939, Nash worried that Avebury would inevitably become “an archaeological monument, as dead as a mammoth skeleton in the Natural History Museum”.7

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Away from professional archaeology, Nash provided the cover design for Massingham’s autobiography, Remembrance, published in 1942. Whether or not this indicates his sympathy for Massingham’s diffusionist approach to megalithic Wessex cannot be ascertained but it is certainly a possibility. If Nash had taken the trouble to read Massingham, some of his speculations would have struck a chord in his mind. To emphasise his belief that Wessex had been colonised by sophisticated and peaceful peoples from the Mediterranean, Massingham had entitled one of the chapters in his book Downland Man (1926), “Egypt in Downland.” Nash, of course, had an interest in ancient Egypt and when referring to the Avebury landscape, in the statement he provided for Unit 1 in 1934, he described Silbury Hill as a “green pyramid”. Nash was also sympathetic to the conservationist movement. His commitment to their cause is clear from his Shell Guide to Dorset (1936), whose dedication is to “all those courageous enemies of “Development” to whom we owe what is left of England”.8 Nash also contributed one of his more orthodox drawings of the Avebury menhirs for the cover of the conservationist magazine Countrygoing, which published it in 1945, after his death. John Piper had been interested in archaeology from a young age. He wrote the Shell Guide to Oxfordshire at John Betjeman’s behest and included in it his own drawings of the Rollright stones, which illustration functions in much the same way as its nineteenth-century equivalent in a book of topography. It was this aspect of Piper’s work that probably recommended him to Stuart Piggott. Betjeman, their mutual friend, introduced them in the late 1930s and they struck up a lifelong acquaintance. In 1941 Piggott wrote of his plans for a joint project with Piper: ..text by me & drawings by him, on British field archaeology by natural regions in which we could exploit a new angle and a new public by dealing not only with the thing on a sound archaeological basis but also stressing the importance of the field monuments as a part of the English scene and as important features of the landscape. His extremely sympathetic renderings of the countryside and of the barrows and megaliths and stone circles and hill forts and what-not would I think give a new reality that photographs lack, and would also have the great merit of enticing a new public – the non-scientific literary and artistic world – into the domain of sound archaeology with nothing of the Massingham touch about it.9

For reasons that aren’t clear the book proposed in this letter was never, in fact, produced, but Piggott’s proposal is intriguing. He seems to have

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wanted to use the conservationists’ sense of place, as hypostasised in Piper’s images, to bait the archaeological hook. His admission that this represents a kind of reality that photographs can’t attain clearly indicates that Piggott was aware of the need to find a way of capturing the one aspect of megalithic interest that had no place in sound archaeology: a poetic approach to the age and the grandeur of field monuments. Of course, once the public had swallowed the lure, Piggott’s own writing would have provided the antidote to the kinds of effusions associated with Massingham and others. His proposed ally in this venture, however, for all his personal good will, had major reservations about what “sound archaeology” was doing to the monuments. In 1944 Piper declared that a good archaeologist is someone “who can treat his subject scientifically without losing hold of the main romantic threads that connect it with life”.10 Five years later, in 1949, Piper published an article on Stonehenge in Architectural Review, in which he contrasted the rectitude of archaeological knowledge with the possibility of a more creatively responsive apprehension of the monument. Piper insists that Stonehenge should be appreciated aesthetically as “one of the most beautiful man-made objects in Britain …in its size, material and colour in relation to its site.” Moreover, he insists that the patina of legends, antiquarian interpretations and creative responses to Stonehenge over the centuries has given it an imaginative identity as legitimate as any “truth” uncovered by archaeological research. These responses are valid, Piper declares, because they choose to work with the sense of wonder the monument provokes; to choose not to respond to that is to ignore what makes Stonehenge significant. Thus, while Piper can accept that the Ministry of Works had every right to give visitors the orthodox description of Stonehenge, discrediting its association with Druidism, this rectitude had been achieved at the expense of intuition and imagination. For Piper, Stonehenge had become commodified not just by its function as a tourist attraction (the custodian’s chalet, the barbed wire fence, the public lavatory and the piles of spare turf for repairs) but also by its containment within archaeological discourse. Today we are permitted to call Stonehenge beautiful and ugly at will, but we are warned that it is not the point about it; we refer to its atmosphere of worship at our own risk, on the same terms as we leave our car in the carpark; but if we make a guess about its date and about who built it and why, and if these guesses do not add up to an arid “megalithic, for an unknown purpose,” then we are drunk and disorderly. The archaeologists have had a great deal to put up with at Stonehenge and this is their reply.11

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Nash and Piper’s reservations about the archaeological project seem to oppose two approaches: the “artistic” apprehension of antiquity and the “objective” research imperatives of archaeology. Needless to say, this polarity is too stark and in the rest of this essay I aim to show how archaeological practice, especially at Avebury, can be aligned with a creative approach to megalithic monuments. As a preliminary, however, we need to remind ourselves of the relations between artists and archaeologists in the 1930s, to insist that these were not isolated worlds but linked, however tenuously, by education and professional circumstances. Piper, as already indicated, became a close friend of Stuart Piggott in the late 1930s and he also knew O.G.S Crawford well, writing an appreciation of archaeology and air photography for the progressive art journal Axis in 1937.12 As we have also seen, Nash visited Wheeler’s Maiden Castle dig and got to know Piggott and Keiller at Avebury in the 1930s. Piggott, for his part, not only appreciated Nash and especially Piper’s art, but developed a keen interest in the relations between art and archaeology. He pioneered the exploration of the antiquarian drawing tradition and well understood how all archaeological representation is a coded system of representational artifice.13 His artistic friendships, most of which developed during and after the 1930s, included Alan Sorrell, John Craxton, Michael Ayrton, David Jones, Louis le Broquy and Ben Nicholson.14 Keiller was also interested in the arts, visiting exhibitions locally and in London and entertaining the Surrealist artist John Armstrong at Avebury in 1938, who was working on commission for a contribution to the Shell advertising campaign. Keiller’s knowledge of art and artists probably derived from his marriages. His first wife, Florence Phil-Morris, was the daughter of the artist Philip Richard Morris. Following the war, Keiller divorced her and married Veronica Liddell, divorcing her in 1934 and marrying his third wife, the artist Doris Emerson Chapman, in November 1938.15 On Nash’s visit to Avebury in 1938 Keiller photographed his object personage, Perturbed, which Nash perhaps made on that visit and which was clearly an object of discussion for the archaeologists there.16 Nash had recently completed the lithograph Landscape of the Megaliths (1937) and this, too, was the subject of discussion.17 He gave an impression to Piggott, who reciprocated by providing Nash with a copy of his 1935 article in Antiquity “Stukeley, Avebury and the Druids”.18 In an article published in 1939, Nash referred to the discussions he had at Avebury about his print, which show how sympathetically it was received by the archaeologists. …in my design I, too, have tried to restore the Avenue. The reconstruction is quite unreliable, it is wholly out of scale, the landscape is geographically

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and agriculturally unsound. The stones seem to be moving rather than to be deep-rooted in the earth. And yet archaeologists have confessed that the picture is a true reconstruction because in it Avebury seems to revive.19

As these details indicate there is circumstantial evidence of a shared community of interest between certain artists and archaeologists in the 1930s. But beyond that we can also posit a deeper connection, as caught in Nash’s remarks about reconstruction quoted above, that the restoration of megalithic sites is inevitably a creative act. Nash’s travelling companion at Avebury in 1933 was Ruth Clark and in the account she later provided for his biographer, Anthony Bertram, she talks of how Avebury and Nash had a reciprocal relationship. The personalities of the Stones were now to invade his pictures as they had invaded his imagination – and [in] his pictures he was to give them a new life and a new world to inhabit.20

I would argue that this is an apposite remark for the sorts of restoration projects associated with Stonehenge and especially with Avebury in the twentieth century. Piggott referred to Keiller’s modus operandi as megalithic landscape gardening, for in truth there was no urgent archaeological reason to restore the site as well as excavate it.21 Keiller’s restoration project, as Piggott surmised, was ultimately a projection of his wealth and ownership in much the same way as an eighteenth-century patron might improve his estate. But Keiller was determined to gave the complex a new life and, if not a new world, at least an approximation of an ancient world quite unlike what one might have expected of modern Wiltshire. The village of Avebury was purged of “unsightly” modern domestic and commercial accretions and Keiller was proud that each of his re-erected megaliths would look out over a landscape from which the twentieth century had been erased – “as far as she can see … green hills … not a house or a petrol station”.22 The re-erection of the avenue and the circles at Avebury was suspect for Piggott because it moved archaeological work from empirical research (where stratigraphy, layers and depth, offers insights into the authenticity of the excavated material) to a species of performance (where only what is above ground and in plain sight signifies). Keiller, on that analysis, was approaching Avebury with too much emphasis on the spectacular, in both meanings of the word. Not only would the complex become a spectacular “must-see” for the modern tourist, almost as important a destination as Stonehenge, it was also spectacular insofar as it had been produced as something predisposed to visual capture, its configuration and orientation

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easily and clearly perceived. Simply plotting the position of each stone would have offered sufficient evidence to draw archaeologically sound inferences about construction and use; yet Keiller seems to have presumed that only by seeing the megaliths in their proper relations could their full impact be felt. Keiller’s insistence that the stones be re-erected saw him produce an Avebury whose meaning lay on the surface of the land, as though the recreated patterns of alignment would allow the complex to become articulate once more. But beyond that, Keiller’s restoration invited a physical reaction to the megaliths as wrought objects. Once the stones were re-erected weight, shape, colour and mass became tangible, sculptural qualities. Avebury, in Keiller’s hands, thus offered the prospect of a direct and sensual apprehension of the complex, as opposed to the mediated understanding of prehistory offered by archaeological method. Seen thus Keiller’s project is not so far removed from what Nash, especially, was undertaking. When the artist visited the site in July 1938, Keiller gave him a guided tour, noting that Nash had little archaeological, historical or religious interest in the complex but “remained, as he had always been, fascinated by the forms of the megaliths themselves”.23 Ruth Clark’s reminiscences describe how Nash responded to Avebury on his first visit in 1933, before Keiller’s work had started. Paul was excited and fascinated…We spent long hours on the great grass banks entranced at the sight of the stones below in the large green enclosure – great “personalities” erect, or lying prone or built into the structure of houses by indifferent generations of dwellers in Avebury…His response was to the drama of the Stones themselves in this quiet setting. His sensitiveness to magic and the sinister beauty of monsters was stirred, and he long contemplated the great mass of their forms, their aloofness, their majesty, the shadows they cast on the green, the loveliness of their harsh surfaces and the tenderness of their colouring.24

It was this formal understanding, shot through with the excitement occasioned by such massive objets trouvés, that helped Nash produce a sequence of memorable pictures in the 1930s in which megaliths or their equivalents are protagonists. Yet, unlike Keiller, Nash’s approach was capable of more than a surface engagement with Avebury. His manipulation of the prehistoric landscape allowed its identity as historical palimpsest to be reconfigured. In Nash’s presentation the megaliths, these survivors from remote antiquity, are not made safe as archaeological specimens – “as dead as a mammoth skeleton in the Natural History Museum” – but remain active presences in the landscape, with the power to disturb or subvert rational

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enquiry. Whereas Keiller, too, could see the stones as personages (“as far as he can see”), his megaliths would inhabit a simulated pre-modern landscape and would be under his control. Nash, in contrast, was attracted precisely to the idea that these monument-personages acted in the present and resisted their incorporation into any dominating system of interpretation. What Nash and Piper perceived, their “gift” to archaeology, was the need to accept the vitality of the past in the present, a recognition that has re-emerged since the war in the conflict over use and ownership of megalithic sites.25 If archaeology’s traditional concern was to recuperate the past, as far as the evidence allowed it, such that it could be understood in and of itself, our contemporary focus has as much to do with the mediation of the past into modern consciousness. The apprehension of megalithic monuments is inescapably a creative activity.

Notes 1

Stephanie Moser, Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 2 Country Life, May 1937, 500. 3 See C.W. Phillips Archaeology in the Ordnance Survey, 1791-1965 (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1980). For information on Crawford and photography see Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1927-1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 4 See H.J. Massingham Downland Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926); Vaughan Cornish The Scenery of England: a study of harmonious growing in town and country (London: Council for the Preservation of Rural England, 1932); Timothy Champion “Egypt and the diffusion of culture,” in D. Jefferys (ed.) Views of Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte: imperialism, colonialism and modern appropriations (London: UCL Press, 2003), 105-123; Ronald Hutton “The Neolithic Great Goddess: a study in modern tradition,” Antiquity, vol. 71, 1997, 91-9; David Matless “Nature, the modern and the mystic: tales from early twentieth-century geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, N.S. 16, 1991, 272-286; also David Matless Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), especially 73-86. 5 See Sam Smiles “Antiquity and Modern Art in Britain, c. 1930-1950,” in Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 19.1, 2004, 81-98. 6 Anthony Bertram, Paul Nash: The Portrait of an Artist (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), 237. 7 Paul Nash, “Landscape of the Megaliths,” Art and Education, 1939, 8. 8 Nash was supportive of the preservationist lobby fighting attempts to turn Chesil Beach into a bombing range. 9 Letter dated 1 July 1941 to Peggy Piggott, Piggott Correspondence, Oxford Institute of Archaeology.

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John Piper “Topographical Letter from Devizes,” Cornhill Magazine, vol. 161, no. 963, 194. 11 John Piper “Stonehenge,” Architectural Review, vol. 106, no. 633, 1949, 177-82. 12 John Piper “Prehistory form the air,” Axis, vol. 8, early winter 1937, 4-8. 13 See Stuart Piggott “Archaeological Draughtsmanship: Principles and PracticePart One: Principles and retrospect,” Antiquity, vol. 39, 1965, 165-76. 14 Piggott knew Sorrell from 1936, Craxton from at least 1941 and Louis Le Broquy from at least 1948. Correspondence between David Jones and Piggott between 1953-67 is in the National Library of Wales, NLW MSS 23559E. Piggott contributed an appreciation “David Jones and the past of man” to the poetry journal Agenda in 1967. 15 Chapman had joined Keiller’s Morven Institute of Archaeological Research in 1937. 16 Letter from Keiller to Nash, dated 8 July 1938 in Tate Archive, 7050/704. 17 Letter from Keiller to Anthony Bertram, dated 18 June 1951 in Tate Archive 7615.1.64. 18 Inscribed “from Stuart Piggott 1938” in Tate Archive, 964.5.112. 19 Paul Nash “Landscape of the Megaliths,” Art and Education, March 1939, 7-8. Nash’s mention of the agriculturally unsound landscape refers to Keiller’s comments that the furrows were too close to the megalith to allow the plough to turn. See letter from Keiller to Anthony Bertram, dated 18 June 1951 in Tate Archive 7615.1.64. 20 Ruth Clark “Paul Nash at Avebury,” Tate Archive 7615.1.23. 21 “If only Keiller was a real archaeologist and organised and subsidised work as he ought, instead of wasting thousands on grandiose landscape gardening of megaliths! But that’s a vain hope.” Letter dated 7 April 1936. Piggott correspondence. Oxford Institute of Archaeology. 22 Conversation recorded by the novelist Antonia White, 13 November 1935, in Susan Chitty (ed.) Antonia White. Diaries 1926-1957, vol. I (London: Constable, 1991), 62. 23 Letter to Anthony Bertram dated 18 June 1951. Tate Archive 7615.1.64. 24 Ruth Clark “Paul Nash at Avebury,” Tate Archive 7615.1.23. 25 See Barbara Bender Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford: Berg, 1998); Christpher Chippindale Who owns Stonehenge? (London: Batsford, 1990).

Illustration 1: “The Oxenham Arms Megalith”. Copyright Joanne Parker (2009).

Illustration 2: “The Other Monolith in the Oxenham Arms”. Copyright Joanne Parker (2009).

Illustration 3: Percy Robertson, “The Devil's Punchbowl”, Surrey Landscapes (c.1890), plate vii.

Illustration 4: J. Charles Wall, “The Devil Digging the Devil’s Dyke”, in Devils (London: Methuen, 1904), p. 114.

Illustration 5: William Stukeley, “An Abury Atto da Fe, May 20 1724”, in Abury, A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R. Manby, 1743).

Illustration 6: Cover of W.A. Dutt, The Ancient Mark-stones of East Anglia: Their Origin and Folklore (Lowestoft: Flood, 1926).

Illustration 7: “Stockton Stone”, from The Ancient Mark-stones of East Anglia (1926), p. 16.

Illustration 8: “Chalk Mammoth Found at Great Glemham, Suffolk”, from J.R. Moir, The Antiquity of Man in East Anglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 118.

Illustration 9: Paul Nash, “Equivalents for the Megaliths” (1935), oil on canvas 457 x 660mm. Copyright Tate, London 2009.

Illustration 10: Still from The First Circus (Public domain, 1922).

Illustration 11: Detail from Captain Britain (Marvel Comics, 1976). Copyright Marvel UK.

Illustration 12: William Stukeley's view of Avebury, laid out as a serpent. From William Stukeley, Abury, A Temple of the Druids (London: W. Innys & R. Manby, 1743).

Illustration 13: Arthur Pendragon (left) in a ceremony at Avebury, vernal equinox 2003. Copyright Andy Worthington.

Illustration 14: Emma Restall-Orr (left) conducts a goddess ceremony at Avebury's portal stones, vernal equinox 2003. Copyright Andy Worthington.

Illustration 15: Yes (1973), Tales from Topographic Oceans. Cover artwork by Roger Dean including images of Chichen Itza (Mexico), geoglyphs from the Plain of Nazca (Peru), stones at Avebury and Stonehenge (Wiltshire), Brimham Rocks (North Yorkshire), Last Rocks at Land’s End (Cornwall), and Logan Rock near Treen (Cornwall). Copyright Atlantic Records.

Illustration 16: Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros (1999), Rock Art and the X-Ray Style. Cover artwork by Damien Hirst and others. Copyright Mercury Records.

Illustration 17: Advertisement for the “Sonic Rock” festival (2005).

Illustration 18: Dick Bauch, “Silbury Hill”. Public domain (2005).

Illustration 19: “Newgrange”. Copyright Charles Butler (2007).

Illustration 20: John Matthews, “The Seven Circles of Annwn”, in Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman (Inner Traditions, 2000). By permission of John Matthews.

CHAPTER SEVEN PULP ARCHAEOLOGY: MEGALITHS IN POPULAR CULTURE NEIL MORTIMER

The representation of megalithic monuments in popular forms of the mass media in the last and present century has rarely reflected scientific archaeological progress, instead referring back to ideas more usually associated with antiquarianism, the Romantic Movement and the vernacular narratives of folklore. The general rule of the iconography of popular culture megaliths seen in films, television programmes, pulp literature and comics is that old stone monument are all-encompassing symbols of the inherent mystery of the ancient past, of which they are physical manifestations in the modern landscape. Megaliths are prehistoric only by implication, rather they exist in a mythic realm labelled ‘old and spooky’, and it is assumed that the audience will subconsciously and sometimes consciously acknowledge a raft of popular associations about the nature and meaning of standing stones. Megaliths therefore have a somewhat ambiguous place in popular culture; on the one hand appearing as natural aspects of the apparently unprocessed pre-modern landscape, while at the same time symbolising the wildness, disorder and potential danger of the uncivilised ancient past. It goes without saying that reality is rarely enough for the makers and consumers of pop culture megaliths. Stone circles, standing stones and chambered tombs are inevitably treated as a single phenomenon, sidestepping the archaeological complexities of prehistoric sites. Films and TV shows shot in actual megalithic locations will often make indiscrete additions to the real monument or monuments. So, for example, scenes from the 1976 Stones of Blood episodes of Doctor Who filmed at the Rollright Stones have the addition of a polystyrene dolmen within the circle, and 1970s TV show The Children of the Stones, set within the real Avebury, adds anthropomorphically-inclined megaliths to what is already there.1

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The bumbling, eccentric archaeologist is one of popular culture’s stock stereotypes (Russell 2002), but it is not only archaeologists who frequent megalithic sites. Well bred ladies with an interest in the occult, and mysterious be-suited men - often driving an old Jaguar or Bentley - are rarely far away from megalithic storylines. Indeed it is a quirk of pop culture megaliths that the people who are most notable by their absence are the very people who built the monuments, and naturalistic depictions of life in prehistoric Britain are few and far between. Where megaliths are used in more-or-less historical settings, Druids, Vikings and King Arthur may all be invoked in an anachronistic mish-mash of perceived ‘oldness’. Ultimately it is the symbolic value of megaliths as a stylistic device, rather than the sites or the people that built them, that feed into this material. The earliest celluloid appearance of a megalithic monument features, needless to say, Stonehenge. The First Circus is the opening section of a series of short films made in 1921 by US animator Tony Sarg. The twoand-a-half minute film is an example of shadow puppetry, using marionettes to transfer to screen what was then already an archaic art form, and not unlike the Victorian lantern slide shows that would occasionally feature prehistoric settings. In the film, stereotypical cavemen perform various stunts within the ruins of the Stonehenge Circus, carrying out acrobatic feats on top of a dinosaur while spectators watch from the top of a trilithon. However, the first really interesting on-screen appearance of Stonehenge was in the 1949 movie adaptation of Nigel Balchin’s novel The Small Back Room, by film-makers Powell and Pressburger. The story concerns a shell-shocked military intelligence agent who is brought out of alcoholic retirement to investigate reports of mysterious unexploded bombs being found around Britain. A pivotal scene is shot in the real Stonehenge, where experimental weapons are being tested. Here, Stonehenge is directly associated with the defence of Britain, and frames a mystical-patriotic undertow that runs throughout the film. Released just a few years after the end of WWII, The Small Back Room is a fascinating collision of megalithic imagery, issues of post-war nationhood and the sense that despite it all, Stonehenge, and by association the core values of Ancient Albion, has emerged unscathed. It is hardly surprising that similar symbolic processes were at work when Winston Churchill and General Marshall were photographed at Stonehenge in 1944 (Chippindale 1983). The first film to capitalise on the so-called Occult revival (Lachman 2001) of the first half of the last century was Curse of the Demon, released in 1957. The film places megaliths in a modern, albeit supernatural setting, and concerns an ancient ‘runic’ inscription on Stonehenge which if spoken

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has the power to summon an elemental demon. The appearance of Stonehenge in ‘Curse of the Demon’ is a fairly arbitrary device used to associate the demon with the distant past, but the interesting thing is that the film’s plot was very likely inspired in part by press reports of Richard Atkinson and his team’s discovery of previously unnoticed carvings of Bronze Age flat axes at Stonehenge in 1953. Real-life archaeological discoveries about prehistoric monuments do occasionally feed into popular culture, and indeed Curse of the Demon is not the only example of Atkinson’s research inspiring a megalithic storyline. The Doctor Who story The Daemons, broadcast in 1971, was partly inspired by the excavation of Silbury Hill a few years earlier.2 In the story, which is widely regarded as one of the classic Doctor Who storylines amongst aficionados, a chambered tomb is being excavated live on air with an expectation that lavish grave goods will be contained within. Needless to say chaos breaks out when the barrow is opened, and the Doctor realises that it hides an ancient spacecraft piloted by the Devillike Daemons. The programme makers, who intended to film inside West Kennet Long Barrow but had to make do with the Aldbourne Four Barrows group, subsequently acknowledged that the programme brought in a whole raft of archaeological and folkloric themes that specifically sought to reflect public attitudes to antiquity.3 Around the same time books such as John Michell’s The View over Atlantis (1969) and the earth mysteries scene that they inspired were introducing the public to notions of a very English sort of alternative archaeology, its Radical Traditionalist worldview owing as much to William Blake and William Stukeley as any specifically archaeological theories (Stout 2001). By the end of the 1960s Stonehenge had made an appearance in The Beatles movie Help! and The Rolling Stones had been photographed by David Bailey ambling up the West Kennet Avenue at Avebury. Rock, folk and jazz musicians were tapping into the counter cultural interest in Britain’s megalithic heritage (Darvill 2004), on one level displaying their turned-on hipster credentials, while at the same time simply responding to a wider interest in prehistoric monuments.4 Underground filmmakers were also being influenced by what John Michell would later call ‘megalithomania’. Kenneth Anger’s famous ‘Magick Lantern Cycle’ films shot at Stonehenge and Avebury, and Derek Jarman’s 1971 short film Journey to Avebury, presented psychedelic versions of megaliths as both mystical and unknowable, but equally potentially full of power - if you happened to have the occult knowledge with which to tap into them.5

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The famous monolith-like slabs which featured in Stanley Kubrick’s baffling 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey raised questions about the origins of civilisation on Earth, in that instance megaliths used as a cipher for the mind-boggling vastness of time and space. Interestingly, the sleeve of The Who’s 1971 LP Who’s Next satirised the megaliths in Kubrick’s film, featuring a photograph of members of the band after just relieving themselves on a monolith-like slagheap core outside Sheffield. The Who’s Pete Townshend subsequently reported that the image, ‘a potent symbol of alienation and the mundane uniformity of modern life’, was intended not as a comment on the film as such, but more on what he described as ‘the Glastonbury effect’, or the unquestioning acceptance of fantastical fringe ideas which were current at the time5. Megaliths had certainly taken on a momentum of their own, turning up in the unlikely settings of 1970s The Goodies TV show, the schoolboy smut of Carry on Camping (1969), TV dramas such as Play For Today and Mills and Boon popular romances. Even Hell’s Angels novels, those mainstays of the brainlessly violent literature that was passed around school playgrounds during the 1970s and early 1980s, were not free from the unstoppable march of the megaliths.6 But the standard by which Popular Culture megaliths must be judged is provided by the 1971 B-Movie Psychomania (Jones 2001). The film concerns a gang of bikers, The Living Dead, who frequent an unnamed stone circle. The gang’s leader Tom learns from his occult priestess mother – played by Beryl Reid of all people – the secret of immortality, which is to kill yourself while simply wishing as hard as possible to stay alive. Tom crashes his bike off a bridge and appears to die, and soon after the gang bury him upright on his bike within the stone circle. Needless to say Tom returns to life, and tells the members of the Living Dead gang how great it is being really dead. Tacky it may be, but Psychomania does have a peculiarly effective closing sequence in which Tom and his fellow gang members are turned to stone, forming part of a newly enlarged megalithic complex, a modern take on the old folktales suggesting that stone circles were revellers turned to stone for infringements of the Sabbath (Grinsell 1976). For all its faults, Psychomania, with its allusions to stone circles as the natural home of outsiders and those disenchanted with the perceived unnatural order of life in the technological age, encapsulates perfectly a major element of popular culture megaliths of the early 1970s and beyond. Another source of pop culture megaliths can be found in comics; indeed Superman, The Thing and Rip Hunter Time Traveller to name but a few have all found themselves at megalithic sites, almost always

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Stonehenge, at various times.7 These American comics offered a particularly US slant on pop culture stones, with megaliths little more than devices to set particular storylines in the British countryside. But a largely forgotten example of pop culture megaliths that plays out a more specifically British perspective is found in the 1976 Marvel comic Captain Britain. The title was launched to capitalise on domestic interest in Marvel superheroes, and is the story of Brian Braddock, a young scientist at a nuclear research facility situated in Darkmoor, ostensibly in the Cheviot Hills, Northumberland. The facility is attacked and most of its employees killed, but Brian manages to escape on a motorbike. Unfortunately, Our Hero crashes into a stone circle, but on the edge of death Merlin and the rather lesser known Goddess of the North appear before him and offer Brian a choice between accepting death, or taking a sword or mystical amulet. He takes the amulet, which, it turns out, is the right decision. ‘Be one with thy brothers of the Round Table – with Arthur and Lancelot, Gawain and Galahad’, announces Merlin as Brian Braddock is transformed into Captain Britain. ‘And amid the ancient, knowing stones, a legend is born’. Popular culture megaliths can enter fictional storylines in many ways, but a recurring motif of film and TV megaliths is the concept that while there is nothing mysterious or magical about megaliths themselves, beliefs in such things can be manipulated by those wishing to exploit the superstitious. This notion, perhaps inspired by the writings of Edwardian mythographers (Trubshaw 2005), suggests that religion and magic are ultimately forms of social control. In the 1973 British horror-thriller The Wicker Man, Lord Summerisle, played by Christopher Lee, encourages the inhabitants of a remote Scottish island to follow a phony pagan religion (with attendant stone circle) in order to create social cohesion (Brown 2000). Similar themes are present in The Children of the Stones, and also in Nigel Kneale’s TV adaptation of The Quatermass Conclusion (1979) and subsequent heavily edited cinema release. In this, the final Quatermass story, society has broken down and young people, calling themselves Planet People, roam the land following lines of energy to stone circles and other significant locations in the landscape. Much of the action centres on a fictional stone circle, Ring Stone Round, where the Planet People congregate and are subsequently vaporised. Professor Quatermass learns that an extraterrestrial force is harvesting human beings, and realises that stone circles are not there to attract people, they are there to warn people to stay away. Quatermass resolves to hit back at the extraterrestrials by blasting them with a nuclear device. The Quatermass Conclusion’s closing

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scene takes place in the old Wembley Stadium, possibly an observation on the contrasting monumentality of prehistoric and historic structures. Nigel Kneale’s work in film and TV forms in itself a distinct group of archaeology and folklore-themed popular culture. Much of Kneale’s writing works around the notion that science and the supernatural are mutually incompatible, although they have parallels in that they both deal with the potential of the unknown. In The Quatermass Conclusion, one of the Planet People asks Professor Quatermass the telling question: “Why are you always trying to explain things?”, a philosophical question which some archaeologists have turned to themselves in recent years (Holtorf 2005). 1967’s Quatermass and the Pit involves the archaeological discovery of crashed UFOs below London, and his 1971 television play The Stone Tapes took its cues from aspects of maverick archaeologist TC Lethbridge’s paranormal research. Kneale also scripted the truly dire 1982 film Halloween 3: Season of the Witch in which chips from one of Stonehenge’s bluestones are placed in Halloween masks, resulting in the horrible death of the mask’s wearer. But this being the pop culture version of megaliths, the filmmakers got confused somewhere down the line and used a reproduction of an upright sarsen rather than a bluestone. So what do pop culture megaliths add up to? It is not hard to sympathise with archaeologists and historians who may sometimes feel that they are banging their heads against a brick wall with regard to popular representations of the past. Over the last century the manufacturers of popular culture have paid little regard to the progress of archaeological and historical analysis, and it is likely that this is a reflection of the fact that megaliths have their own place in the cultural fabric of Britain that has little to do with archaeology or history. Perhaps these modern takes on megaliths are best seen as contemporary folktales about prehistoric sites, adding to the sum total of the experience of prehistory, rather than detracting from it. Ultimately pop culture megaliths have never set out to explain the past, but simply to tell stories about it. A full account of the interface between megaliths and popular culture would cast its net over a wider area than this brief overview, which is largely concerned with popular forms of media. It would take in megalithic ephemera; stones on beer bottles, stamps, postcards and other disposable items. Little has been written about modern reconstructions and follies of megalithic settings, despite the fact that stone circle construction has gone through a great revival since the 18th century.8 Another subject worthy of future investigation is the popular depiction of ancient sites in geographic regions rich with visually dramatic prehistoric remains, where

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megaliths can appear in company logos, newspaper mastheads and street murals.9 The examples pulled out for this paper have tended to be from the late 1960s and early 1970s, and that period certainly was a high point for pop culture megaliths. But these symbols of the real or imagined distant past continue to appear in the unlikeliest of settings, recent sightings including Commando comic (issue 3582, 2003) and children’s television shows The New Adventures of Captain Scarlet (2004) and Fireman Sam (2005).10 In some strange way I am peculiarly reassured that the future of low-rent megaliths is in such eminently reliable hands, and that the life history of megaliths continues to evolve in the modern age.

Notes 1

For an overview of celluloid standing stones see Leslie Ellen Jones, “Megaliths and Movies”, 3rd Stone 40, Summer/Autumn 2001. 2 Information from the documentary Return to Devils End (Reeltime Pictures, 1997). 3 The mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (MGM, 1984) lampoons rock musician’s aspirations to prehistoric enlightenment in the film’s famous Stonehenge sequence, and again in the lesser-known concert movie The Return of Spinal Tap (Second Sight Films, 1992) in which the band’s Stonehenge stage set is too large to fit through the doors of the Albert Hall. 4 Rick Kemp’s Avebury (Rick Kemp, 2004) and Ridgeway (Rick Kemp, 2006) short films continue the tradition of experimental films featuring megaliths. 5 Details of Ethan A. Russell’s iconic photograph from the sleeve notes to the “Deluxe Edition” reissue of Who’s Next (Polydor, 2003). 6 For example Alex R. Stuart’s The Biker From Hell (New English Library, 1973). 7 Fine examples of megalithic imagery in comics can be seen in Rip Hunter… Time Master 12 (DC Comics, 1963), All New Monster Hunters 6 (Charlton Publications, 1976), Superman Starring in Action Comics 527 (DC Comics, 1982) and The Thing is Big Ben Summer Special (Marvel Comics, 1984). The long-running French comic Asterix is also notable for its menhir-wielding character Obelix and its very many depictions of dolmens and other megalithic structures. 8 The revised edition of Aubrey Burl’s A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005) contains a supplement regarding megalithic follies. 9 Details of the relationships between megaliths and art can be found in Sam Smiles’ The Image of Antiquity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), John Michell’s Megalithomania (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982) and Colin Renfrew’s Figuring It Out (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003). 10 Although not covered here there are many examples of video and computer games featuring megaliths, such as the recently released Barrow Hill (Lighthouse Interactive, 2006).

CHAPTER EIGHT MYSTICS AND MAVERICKS: THE PAGAN REINVENTION OF AVEBURY ANDY WORTHINGTON

The extraordinary Neolithic and early Bronze Age complex at Avebury, 18 miles north of Stonehenge, has, over the last 30 years, been the subject of a formidable array of archaeological and historical analyses, which have contributed enormously to our understanding of the timebleached remains left by our distant forbears. Curiously, however, the revival of neo-pagan interest in Avebury, which has blossomed spectacularly over the same period, has received little critical attention. This paper attempts to redress this omission by sketching a brief history of the mystics and mavericks whose left-field observations, whilst often infuriating the archaeological establishment, have frequently shone an unexpected light on the contours of the past, as well as bringing what would otherwise be dead monuments to sometimes uproarious life. The pagan reinvention of Avebury can largely be traced to four particular sources. The first of these was the pioneering antiquarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and in particular, two colossi in the field, John Aubrey and William Stukeley. It was Aubrey who first deduced that the monumental remains at Avebury were pre-Roman, subsequently proposing that they may therefore have been raised by the Druids, the iconic priests of the Iron Age Britons, but it was Stukeley who, in addition to conducting remarkably detailed fieldwork and recording much of the stones’ destruction in the early eighteenth century, ran wildly with the Druidic concept, establishing a template for ancient philosopher-priests which infuriated generations of sober-minded archaeologists, but which also had such poetic resonance that it has never quite gone away. The second group of pioneers were those who concerned themselves with lines upon the landscape, which they imbued with astronomical or mystical significance. These include: the Reverend Edward Duke, a retired cleric who suggested, in 1840, that the ancient sites of Wiltshire had been

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laid out by the Druids as a giant planetarium, with Silbury Hill at the centre, and Stonehenge as the outer ring representing Saturn; the physicist Sir Norman Lockyer, whose detailed – and often accurate – investigations of astronomical alignments were shamefully undermined by the archaeologists of the early twentieth century; and Alfred Watkins, a Herefordshire merchant whose investigations of ancient lines across the countryside – which he referred to as ley lines – also infuriated the archaeological establishment, this time in the 1930s, when O.G.S. Crawford, the editor of Antiquity, was so opposed to Watkins’ theories that he refused to accept a paid advertisement for one of his publications.1 A third source can be traced to the happy coincidence whereby – in the 1940s and 1950s in particular, inspired by influences as diverse as the poetry of John Keats and the thoughts of Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator of Knossos in Crete – writers and philosophers, including Carl Gustav Jung, Gertrude Levy and Robert Graves, and archaeologists, including Crawford, Jacquetta Hawkes, Richard Atkinson, Stuart Piggott and Glyn Daniel, began to express their belief that the people of the Neolithic had worshipped a Great Goddess. According to the varying interpretations, this deity may, or may not, have represented a matriarchal Golden Age, but she was certainly widely perceived in the thousands of tiny figurines that had been unearthed from the Middle East through to Europe, and, more boldly, in the ground plans of structures as diverse as the temples of Malta and the chambered long barrows of southern England.2 A fourth source – although this is rather inconclusive at present, and much research remains to be done – can be traced to the fascination with witchcraft that was held by Avebury’s great restorer Alexander Keiller, and the influence that Keiller – and his work at Avebury – had on two influential figures of the 1950s, both of whom had been involved in the Ancient Druid Order, the revivalists who had been staking a claim on the summer solstice at Stonehenge from the start of the century: Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, and his close colleague Ross Nichols, who split from the Druid Order to create the more consciously neo-pagan Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids in 1964. Keiller, whose collection of 243 volumes on witchcraft and demonology is held in the National Library of Scotland, was particularly fascinated by the history of witchcraft in Scotland in the late sixteenth century, and wrote a well-researched article for Folklore in 1922, which was openly critical of the myth-making tendencies of the anthropologist Margaret Murray, the author of The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921). Although Keiller’s biographer Lynda J. Murray pointed out that his interest in witchcraft was “usurped” around 1930 by the demands of his

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new passion, archaeology, she also noted that he did not completely abandon his former preoccupations, and that “one Halloween night [in the 1930s] found him leading a small group of associates out into the garden of the Manor at Avebury. He carried before him a phallic symbol, and bowing three times before the Statue of Pan, he chanted ‘witchlike’ incantations”.3 This was almost certainly not a one-off event, and it may be that Keiller’s interest in witchcraft attracted the attention of Gardner, contributing to the modern witch cult that the former colonial administrator launched in the early 1950s. Researchers have not yet uncovered evidence that Keiller and Gardner met, but Gardner mentioned Avebury in Witchcraft Today, his first book about Wicca, published in 1954, and Philip Heselton, who has spent many years researching the roots of Gardner’s new religion, has suggested that the use of the name Morven, a character in High Magic’s Aid, Gardner’s 1949 novel about the witch religion, “could have occurred to Gardner because of his contacts” with Keiller, whose archaeological institute, the Morven Institute, was named after his family home in Aberdeenshire. It is, it must be said, just the kind of sly reference that appealed to Gardner and that was scattered throughout his work.4 While these various theories were fermenting in the ether, the 1960s counter-culture crashed in on Avebury from an even more unlikely source: the UFOlogist Tony Wedd, whose speculations about UFO activity in the countryside of southern England led a small group of aficionados to rediscover the works of Alfred Watkins, establishing the Ley-Hunters Society and turning up at Avebury on a field trip in 1962. Undergoing a transformation that mirrored the counter-culture in general, the ley-hunters opened a path for increasingly cosmic field trips, resulting, in 1969, in the publication of John Michell’s The View Over Atlantis. This, the founding document of a movement that became known as “earth mysteries,” revived Avebury, Glastonbury and Stonehenge as centres of mystical power, and introduced themes of geomancy, earth energies and sacred geometry which began to exert a powerful influence on those interested in both archaeology and spirituality.5 Despite this dawning interest in Avebury as a spiritual centre for the “New Age”, it wasn’t until 1976 that Avebury was definitively transformed into a powerful sacred landscape for the new paganism, when Michael Dames, an art historian, suggested, in his book The Silbury Treasure, that its builders had worshipped the Great Goddess and had celebrated the quarter days of Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain, which were revived by Gerald Gardner and had been embraced by the Wiccans and, in particular, by Ross Nichols’ Order of Bards, Ovates and

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Druids. Dames suggested that Silbury itself had been sculpted as a representation of the Great Goddess, and cleverly combined archaeological discoveries from Silbury itself with folklore from Scotland and Ireland to conclude that Silbury was a harvest hill, used by the people of the Neolithic to celebrate the Goddess and the fertility of the land at Lughnasa.6 The following year, in The Avebury Cycle, Dames extended his theory to include the rest of the Avebury complex, concocting a seasonal round that involved initiation rites at the Sanctuary at Imbolc, celebrations of fertility in the stone circles at Beltane, and ceremonies at the West Kennet Long Barrow at Samhain. Along the way, other landscape features were incorporated, in particular the source of the River Kennet, Swallowhead Springs, which regularly dries up at Samhain only to be reborn – miraculously, or so it can appear – at Imbolc.7 For those who were unaware of the discrepancies in Dames’ theories – and there were many, including the fact that the monuments had not all been in use simultaneously, and the assumption that there had been a universal Great Goddess who had been worshipped throughout the Neolithic, a notion that several archaeologists had actually been assiduously demolishing for the previous decade – his vision was compelling. As Bob Trubshaw commented in his book Sacred Places: Prehistory and Popular Imagination: The “tales” that Avebury inspired Michael Dames to tell remain, in my opinion, among the most remarkable examples of alternative archaeology of the 1970s. This “remythologising” of a Neolithic sacred landscape in terms which resonate readily with late 20th century aspirations may or may not be “true” in any objective sense, but their “truth” (or otherwise) is largely irrelevant when the ideas of professional archaeologists from the 1970s era are also now rejected as largely false by present day academics.8

Personally, I’d even go so far as to suggest that, although the archaeologists’ views have indeed been discredited, Dames’ poetic resonance is such that, although he created works which clearly do not stand up to reason, what he created instead was a full-blown contemporary mythology. Throughout the early 1980s, spiritual feminists, inspired by Dames’ writings and by the growth of feminism, paganism and the peace movement at Greenham Common, were drawn to Avebury in increasing numbers, where they held a number of Women’s Peace Festivals. The first of these took place at Lughnasa in 1984, when a local newspaper, under the salacious headline “Naked women moon worshippers who invaded

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Avebury at the weekend are gone,” reported that “40 hippy women, many with children, arrived in the stone-circled village on Friday for a weekend of open-air worship.” The report described how, at the weekend, “the women, some of them topless as they walked, made their way to the Ridgeway,” where “they danced naked in the sunshine and for moonlight rituals too”.9 At Beltane in 1985, 200 women gathered on the summit of Silbury for a three-day pilgrimage to Stonehenge. Almost all were involved with the peace camp at Greenham Common, and in many ways the Beltane Walk was the pagan peace movement personified. The women chanted, sang and danced on the summit of Silbury and “asked the Goddess to bless us with cosmic energy and through us to join it with the energy of the earth so that we might become cauldrons in an alchemical marriage.” As their pilgrimage progressed, they confused the police who had been sent to stop them on Salisbury Plain by singing, We are the flow and we are the earth We are the weavers and we are the web We are the flow and we are the earth We are the witches back from the dead

and managed to reach the monument unmolested, where they “performed an anarchic ritual,” with many of them staying overnight, sleeping in the stone circle under the light of a full moon.10 Significantly, one of the women on 1985’s Beltane Walk, “the woman focalising our rituals,” in the words of Linda Lee, who later wrote an article about it for the magazine Festival Eye, was the American witch Starhawk, who had been trained in Gardnerian Wicca and initiated into one of its North American derivations, and whose 1979 book The Spiral Dance had become the best-selling book on witchcraft to date, replacing Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today as “the model text for would-be witches”.11 In many ways, Starhawk – and her Reclaiming movement – represented the coming of age of modern paganism, as Starhawk renewed the balance of female and male energies, updating the leaning towards the feminine – though not to the exclusion of the male – that had been one of Gardner’s most radical bequests in the first place, and managing to reintegrate men without compromising her position as a spiritual leader of women, caught up in the forefront of the peace movement against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Reinforced not only by Starhawk, but also by the popularity of other Goddess-themed work – especially the writings of Marija Gimbutas, a California-based archaeologist whose excavations of Neolithic sites in

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eastern and central Europe convinced her that a universal Goddess had indeed been worshipped throughout the ancient world – the Greenham women’s fascination with Avebury continued into the 1990s. In 1992 Katrina Howse wrote from the Peace Camp, “We try when we can to get to Silbury Hill, Avebury stone circle and West Kennet Long Barrow, ancient matriarchal sacred sites. To go there is to be refreshed spiritually in the struggle against the patriarchy and its militarism,” and in 1995 Rosy Bremer and twelve other Greenham women undertook a walk from the Uffington White Horse along the Ridgeway to Avebury, camping on Silbury Hill, where they were “observed by very thuggish plainclothes police,” and ending in the great stone circle, where they “moved from stone to stone, focusing on [a] ritual specifically to stop [the] Trident [nuclear submarine programme]”.12 It’s also worth noting that by this point the struggles of the Greenham women had partly contributed to the impulses behind a whole new protest movement, which also ended up focusing some of its spiritual concerns on Avebury. The anti-roads campaign began on Twyford Down in 1992, when two young travellers, appalled to discover that an extension to the M3 was about to be hacked through the downland on which they were camping, set up a protest camp that almost overnight became a national phenomenon. Demonstrating a raw, untutored paganism that went further than any previous protest movement in embracing the concept of the whole of the earth as a sacred landscape, the majority of those who came to the road protest movement opposed the government’s road expansion plans as “the carving up of the “Great Mother”.13 The protestors – who became known as the Dongas tribe, after an African name for the ancient tracks that crossed Twyford Down – also adopted the eight-fold year (the solstices, the equinoxes and the quarter days) that had by now become ubiquitous in modern paganism. One of them, Gary, described “following the old pagan calendar of pre-Christian England, which is very dear to me now, as with anyone who is close to Nature,” and for this new wave of protestors, ancient sacred sites – and Stonehenge in particular – assumed a central symbolic position. Gary described Stonehenge as “one big, stone calendar – one of the most historic places in the world,” and added that “travellers meet there because of the celebration of summer”.14 To be strictly accurate, what Gary should have said was that travellers would have met there had it not been for the exclusion zone that was imposed around Stonehenge on the solstice every year from 1985 onwards, after the annual free festival – an anarchic jamboree that had grown to the size of a small city over the previous eleven years – was shut

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down with unprecedented violence at the Battle of the Beanfield, a statesponsored showdown in which a vanguard of festival-goers, travellers and environmental activists was ambushed and arrested by a paramilitary police force drawn from six counties and the Ministry of Defence.15 Another of the Dongas – Alex Plows – recalled how she and others were effectively forced to abandon Stonehenge, as they were unwilling to spend the solstice “having a ruck with the police.” She added, “It was hardly like we were depoliticised – most of us were having a break from protest camps for a couple of weeks. We needed down time, to recharge in a sacred landscape.” The alternative sacred landscape chosen by the Dongas was Avebury, where, unlike Stonehenge, people were “having lovely times in a more amenable landscape every summer,” and the Dongas in particular were “hanging out in a semi-permanent state of magic reality in West Woods near Avebury, a whole bunch of us living in benders deep in the woods, wandering all over the landscape on moonlit nights”.16 As well as catering to Goddess-worshippers, modern witches and pagan road protestors, Avebury also began to draw adherents from a raft of new Druid Orders, which began to emerge in the late 1980s. Five groups in particular were established at this time, one derived from the historical Druid tradition, one from Wicca and the other three from the years of the Stonehenge Free Festival. The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, which had ground to a halt when Ross Nichols died in 1975, was revived in 1988 by Philip Carr-Gomm, a psychotherapist who had been a teenage disciple of the elderly Nichols in the 1960s. From Wicca came the British Druid Order, founded by the musician and poet Philip Shallcrass, with the aim of establishing “a native British spirituality”. And from the festival years came the Secular Order of Druids, founded by Tim Sebastian, a passionate devotee of John Michell; the Glastonbury Order founded by Rollo Maughfling (who had been involved in an offshoot of Gerald Gardner’s Wicca); and, last but not least, the Loyal Arthurian Warband, led by Arthur Pendragon, a former soldier and biker leader, who became involved in the road protest movement and who has been described by Ronald Hutton as “a sincere natural mystic, whose very strong libertarian political convictions are bound up with a sense of guidance by supernatural forces”.17 These five Orders came together briefly to form an organization known as the Council of British Druid Orders. While the Council’s attentions were directed largely towards Stonehenge – with mixed results – its most notable success was actually at Avebury, with the establishment of the Gorsedd of Bards of Caer Abiri. Based in the stone circles, the Gorsedd developed from a multi-faith conference convened by Tim Sebastian in

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1993, and was focused on a ceremony composed by Philip Shallcrass, using parts of one of the oldest existing Druid ceremonies – conceived by a highly creative stonemason called Edward Williams (also known as Iolo Morgannwg) – which was first conducted on Primrose Hill in London at the autumn equinox in 1792. The Avebury Gorsedds soon became regular occurrences, taking place on each of the festival days of the eight-fold year, and becoming, in Ronald Hutton’s words, the “central event” of the new Druidry. By the late 1990s, they were attracting up to a thousand participants for each festival, with representatives from “many different spiritual traditions including Druids, Witches, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Heathens, Baha’i and Shamans”.18 Despite this success, the differences between the various Orders involved in the Council were such that the coalition soon split up. But while this was partly attributable to differences of opinion regarding access to Stonehenge, the incident that brought the simmering conflict between the two camps to a head actually occurred in Avebury at Beltane in 1997, and even then it was precipitated not by conflict between individual Druids but by pressure from the general public. As Ronald Hutton described it, various people “shouted down the political Druids when they began giving speeches upon the progress of campaigns over Stonehenge and road building schemes. The vast majority of people at Avebury wanted to have a spiritual experience, they wanted the processions, the ceremonies of naming and blessing, the music”.19 After a tense weekend, in which tempers flared and the National Trust’s manager for Avebury joined the fray, making some unwise comments and raising – briefly – the prospect of some kind of “Battle of Avebury” and a Stonehenge-like exclusion zone, separate days were agreed for future gatherings – King Arthur and the “political” Druids on the nearest Saturday to the festival days, and Philip Shallcrass and his company on the Sunday. And this, more or less, is how the situation stands now. Many other groups and individuals with their own takes on Avebury’s spiritual resonance continue to be drawn to the complex, and a Pagan Pride Day in September has now joined the calendar of events that take place in the circles. Perhaps the most significant development of the last few years has been the knock-on effect that the renewal of access to Stonehenge on the summer solstice – which has been taking place since the year 2000 – has had on Avebury, where, “traditionally,” the major festivals were at Beltane and Samhain. While the increase in visitors on the solstice has caused some minor concern to established pagan groups, the response of various members of

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the parish council has, at times, been almost hysterical. In the aftermath of the solstice in 2002, chairman John Cronk raised the spectre of the Beanfield, commenting, “I have always been concerned about the risk of confrontation in the village”, and the police’s representative, Superintendent Jerry Wickham, was obliged to assure him that “next year the police will be in Avebury in much greater numbers than they were this year”.20 In the meantime, the council embarked on plans to restrict access on the solstice, putting pressure on the National Trust to end its long-standing tolerance of camping and overnight parking in the overflow car park, and, more contentiously, enraging everyone from pagans and travellers to the Council for the Protection of Rural England by painting double yellow lines on all the roadside verges in and around the village in the week before the solstice in 2003. On the night, while 30,000 people cavorted at Stonehenge, many of the thousands who had gathered at Avebury instead found that their enjoyment was marred by a heavy-handed policy towards their vehicles that had arisen as a direct result of the council’s determination to restrict parking, aided by an increased police presence. At the time of writing, this conflict was, unfortunately, no closer to a solution. In September 2006, Kennet District Council issued the National Trust with an enforcement notice on its visitor car park in Avebury, obliging the Trust “to stop tolerating the occupation of the car park for overnight stays at pagan observances,” even though, as was noted in a press release by Alex Brennan, the Regional Communications Officer for the Wessex region, “For the past ten years, the Trust, with Kennet’s full knowledge, has allowed the pagan community to park their motorhomes and vans in the car park to alleviate the potential knock on effect of camping elsewhere in the village or within the World Heritage Site”.21 The solution, I suspect, is less Nimbyism on the part of local residents and councillors, and a creative, consensual approach to locating land in the vicinity of Avebury that can be used as an official campsite and car park. In conclusion, I can only hope that a compromise will soon be found that enables Avebury to continue to balance its many roles – as a World Heritage Site, a living village and a sacred space of global significance.

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Notes 1

Rev. Edward Duke, The Druidical Temples of the County of Wilts (London: J.R. Smith, 1846); Sir J.N. Lockyer, Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered (London: Macmillan, 1906); Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track (London: Methuen, 1925). 2 Jacquetta Hawkes was the most enthusiastic convert to the Goddess theory, and the only one who maintained her belief after it was discredited in the 1960s. The most unlikely, in contrast, was Glyn Daniel. See, inter alia, O.G.S. Crawford, The Eye Goddess (London: Phoenix House, 1957); Jacquetta Hawkes, Dawn of the Gods (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), p. 25; and Glyn Daniel, The Megalith Builders of Western Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1958), p. 74. 3 Lynda J. Murray, A Zest for Life: The story of Alexander Keiller (Swindon: Morven Books, 1999), pp. 21-23. 4 Philip Heselton, Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration (Milverton: Capall Bann, 2003), p. 241. 5 http://www.leyhunt.fsnet.co.uk/lhunt62.htm; John Michell, The View Over Atlantis (London: Sago, 1969). 6 Michael Dames, The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976). 7 Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle (London: Thames & Hudson, 1977). 8 Bob Trubshaw, Sacred Places: Prehistory and Popular Imagination (Market Harborough: Heart of Albion, 2005), p. 140. 9 http://www.weirdwiltshire.co.uk/stones/130884.html. 10 Linda Lee, “Greenham women revive Beltane Walk,” Festival Eye, June 1986. 11 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 345. 12 Beth Junor, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp: A History of NonViolent Resistance 1984-1995 (Manchester: Working Press, 1995), pp. 233, 300301. 13 Dominic Cryer, “A Visit with the Dongas Tribe,” http://tash.gn.apc.org/dongas.htm. 14 “Gary’s Story – From Printer to Donga,” http://tash.gn.apc.org/gary.htm. 15 Andy Worthington, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion (Market Harborough: Alternative Albion, 2004); Andy Worthington (ed.), The Battle of the Beanfield (Eyemouth: Enabler, 2005). 16 Alex Plows, quoted in Alan Dearling, “Not only but also… some historical ramblings about the English festivals scene”, http://members.aol.com/adearling/enabler/nointro.htm. 17 Arthur Pendragon and Christopher James Stone, The Trials of Arthur (London: Element, 2003), p. 238. 18 Philip Shallcrass and Emma Restall Orr, “The Gorsedd of Bards of the Isles of Great Britain” (London: Piatkus, 2000). 19 Ronald Hutton, “Another Dialogue with Ronald Hutton,” in Barbara Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 186.

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http://www.weirdwiltshire.co.uk/stones/260702.html. http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=38184.

CHAPTER NINE SUPERNATURAL NATIONALISM AND NEW AGE ECOLOGY SHELLEY TROWER

Prehistoric monuments tend to stay where they are put. That was the idea, it would appear, as stone circles and other monuments have survived – and remained in their original place – for a very long time. This is why the many tales in which huge granite boulders move about, shuffle and dance, drink water, kill people, and generally don’t behave as might be expected seem to me so striking, imaginative, and confusing. From the tales of maidens and sportsmen being turned into stone for dancing or hurling on a Sunday, and returning to life at certain times of the year, to more recent associations between the powers of ancient stones and ley lines or earth energies and the living Earth, Gaia, the very heaviness of many monuments seems to endow them with a certain liveliness, a magisterial power of transcending their inanimate condition. The term “prehistoric monuments” implies that they were constructed in the distant past (in prehistory) for the future, as by definition a monument is a structure intended to commemorate an event or action or person. In fact, of course, their survival is usually dependent on acts of preservation in that past’s future, and most have long since been lost to property and other developments. That concepts of nationhood are closely connected with acts of preservation along with changes in the interpretation, description, and imagination of antiquity and its stones since the seventeenth century has become increasingly clear over the last two decades in the work of such critics as Sam Smiles, Nuala Johnson, and Yannis Hamilakis.1 The interpretation of monuments in this context is obviously related to how nationalist discourses attempt to root nationstates in the immemorial past, rather than acknowledge their construction over the past few hundred years. As Johnson puts it in her article about a National Heritage Park in Ireland which displays recreated field monuments from the Mesolithic to the Norman period, “While historians

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have generally located the emergence of ideas of nationhood in the last two centuries... the park’s displays suggest that nationhood can be situated in the early antiquities of the island”.2 This chapter will trace connections more specifically between tales of living stones – especially monuments which move, in the context of geological formations more generally – and national or local identity, taking Cornwall as a case study and focusing on the period from 1970 to the present. Because prehistoric monuments are of course widely understood to be very old, felt even to be as old as “the land” itself, identification with them can underpin a sense of long-standing belonging and claims of ownership, which are at times bound up with a desire to exclude “newcomers”. The aliveness of stones, especially relatively indestructible stones like granite, seems to enable some people to identify with them, with their timelessness, to feel they belong and will continue to indefinitely – often through their ancestry – almost as part of the very land, of the “bones of this land.”3 And such claims to belong have increasingly taken on the stance of respecting, protecting and preserving the environment, and as such, in the face of growing ecological concerns, to have a certain moral authority which this chapter will eventually question. The geological sub-structure of Cornwall is often considered a major aspect of its distinctiveness, and some of its difference from England, along with its literature and dialect, for example. As Philip Payton points out in Cornwall: A History, the geological features of this region have massively shaped the lives of inhabitants, particularly through the occupations which the mining industry has generated, as well as being the subject of folklore. Giants are said to have built St Michael’s Mount, for instance, and to have played games with slabs of granite, which help explain surrounding rocky debris.4 “Thus folklore”, according to Payton, “conveniently explained the origins of geological features, noting (or inventing) their raison d’etre and accounting for the profusion (or otherwise) of rocks and boulders in the Cornish landscape. In so doing, the imagery of ancient stones became an essential ingredient in representations of Cornwall”, a trend which developed through the Romantic movement and continues in the work of numerous poets, storytellers and other writers and artists today, including D. M. Thomas and Ithell Colquhoun.5 Payton, like many of the writers he discusses, does not distinguish between geological formations (by which I mean to refer to accidental features of the landscape, which may be explained through the activities of giants or God or other entities) and prehistoric monuments (which are seen to have been designed and erected by humans, but were not always thought to be6, and, as we will see, also continue to take on supernatural associations).

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More importance seems to be placed on the fact that they are all very old, and can be imagined the result not of chance but of living beings or powerful deities, than on the differences in age and construction. Prehistoric monuments could be, it seems, as old as the land itself.

“A hill that lurked and loomed” The Cornish nationalist writer Donald Rawe provides an interesting instance of the blurring of any distinction between various kinds of geological formations and monuments – all of which come to life, or at least appear to move – in his short story, “Night on Roughtor”. Rawe has written and collected many tales, often involving Cornishness and the supernatural, which are published in collections including Denys Val Baker’s Haunted Cornwall (1973) and Rawe’s own Haunted Landscapes (1994).7 The inside cover of the latter presents Rawe as Cornish: “DONALD R. RAWE was born in 1930 in Padstow, of a very old Cornish family (the surname is the Cornish form of Ralph or Radulphus, and has not been Anglicised to Rowe)”.8 His antagonism toward “newcomers” is also set out here, while Cornwall’s ancientness is emphasised, as Rawe goes on to explain that he hopes to continue to write his stories, to the annoyance and hindrance of bureaucrats, developers, big business... and city-oriented newcomers who do not understand life in Cornwall and the Westcountry. He is a firm believer in the Celtic and pre-Celtic traditions of South-West Britain (the ancient Kingdom of Dumnonia), which, if maintained and nurtured, will counterbalance the evils of greed and materialism now threatening us all. (Inside cover)

The very old and Cornish – including Rawe’s ancestry and “Celtic and pre-Celtic traditions” – is pitted against the new, the English and urban. This idea of using the ancient to counteract modern “evils... now threatening us all” is an ongoing theme which takes on an increasingly ecological dimension in the twenty-first century, as we will see. It can of course be argued that Rawe’s opposition between the old and new, the “insider” and “outsider”, is a contradiction, as Celtic traditions – including associations with stone circles – have been constructed relatively recently from outside those regions defined as Celtic, according to critics like Malcolm Chapman.9 But I am less concerned with attempting to establish exactly how fiction deviates from fact than in exploring how a selection of nationalist writers use living stones to elaborate fantasies of belonging and exclusion. In Rawe’s collection of stories, the opposition between the ancient and new, the Cornish and non-Cornish, provides a context for how

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some of the stories are about “newcomers” to Cornwall, who are skeptical with regards to traditional tales of the supernatural, and who are finally driven away. “Night on Roughtour” is about three young men who have been at university, who are visiting Cornwall and want to go on a camping trip on Bodmin Moor. They firstly stay at the house owned by the father of one of the men, McMahon (they refer to each other by their surnames), looked after by Mrs Tregellas (a Cornish surname, like Rawe’s), who makes pasties, has a strong Cornish accent, is superstitious, and advises them not to go on the moors. They tell her she’s just being irrational, but she continues to warn them against it: “all I can say is you’e all three of you furriners when it come to the point, and where none of our crowd ud set foot there after sundown you certainly never ought to” (75). McMahon’s own ancestry is only partly Cornish, which is presented as the reason why he is not superstitious, and will get into trouble with supernatural entities including Tregeagle, a “giant ghost”. McMahon responds to Mrs Tregellas by mocking the superstitious Cornish, and by referring to his own ancestry: “Anyway you needn’t worry, Mrs Tregellas: my grandmother was Cornish, so I’m entitled to play the host and entertain friends, even on the holy of holies.” But the narrator’s sinister comment suggests that this ancestry is not Cornish enough to protect him: “McMahon’s father was half-Cornish, half-Irish. His mother was French. He called himself an Englishman” (75). So he ignores Mrs Tregellas’s advice and drives with his friends to the moor. A sense of the landscape as not simply inanimate matter but potentially living, and as very old or ancient, is presented when the three men first park the car. The narrator compares the landscape to a rather threatening, primitive creature: “On the other side of the shallow valley was Roughtor, with its crest broken, jagged like the backbone of a skeleton saurian” (77). Shortly after they find a spot to camp the nearby standing stones appear to have the potential to move. This disturbs McMahon, who is left alone while the others fetch the rest of their things from the car: Standing on the brow overlooking the precipitous west end, he could see vague stone pillars set in a circle immediately beneath. In daylight no doubt they would look mundane enough, but here in twilight their very vagueness seemed to promise life: at any moment they might begin to shuffle and dance. A half-forgotten tale about maidens changed into stones for dancing on the Sabbath came back to him. (78)

West Country folklore in the sixteenth century enlisted stone circles in the new cause of sabbatarianism, as Ronald Hutton points

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out in his chapter in this volume, “Megaliths and Memory”. Stone circles were described as revellers or sportspeople petrified for enjoying these activities on a Sunday. This tale was attached to several monuments by the early eighteenth century, and folklorists including M. A. Courtney, William Bottrell and Robert Hunt continued to collect such tales in the late nineteenth century, which in turn continue to be reproduced and retold in the twenty-first, to explain the origin of stones such as those named the “Merry Maidens” and the “Trippet stones”.10 The suggestion in Rawe’s tale is of course that the revellers might return to life, that the stones “might begin to shuffle and dance.” And it is not only the circle of stones which appear to McMahon to “promise life”, but in the following paragraph an entire hill: Westwards there was a white hill, a china claytip which by its incongruity attracted his attention. Perhaps it was a mile off, but he could not say because at every second it seemed to be at a different distance away. It was a hill without roots or foundations; a hill that lurked and loomed, having no fixed place for its being. He found it disturbingly easy to imagine it approaching, stealing nearer and nearer and then slipping away among the other tors, all fast losing their identities in the gloom. (78)

The distinction between the ancient stones and the much more recent pile of industrial waste (most of the claytips were generated in the twentieth century when the industry thrived) appears literally here to blur. The crucial point is that it is not only stone circles that “promise life” – the very land itself is described as though reacting against the “newcomer” McMahon and his friends. Its movement refuses to allow them to settle for the night, and eventually drives them away altogether. Another moving stone which appears repeatedly in folktale collections is the Logan Stone11, which, in “Night on Roughtor”, after goblin-like “spriggans”12 have chased the three friends back to their increasingly precarious tent, rocks frantically in the stormy wind: “The Logan Stone oscillated yet more wildly, a gauge of the wind’s violence; clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk, like a mad thing” (84). It is the movement of stones through the air that eventually causes the tent to collapse, as “with the rain sheeting down on the canvas came stones flung by the gale. Then a guy roped snapped and the tent collapsed on top of them” (86). We are finally told that McMahon later inherited the property left to him by his father, but hardly ever visits Cornwall. The “Englishman”, as he was earlier described, has been successfully driven out.

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In contrast to McMahon is of course the author himself, with his “very old Cornish family” and his knowledge of old traditional tales. The folklorist Bottrell similarly described himself as “an Old Celt”,13 as do other contemporary collectors and storytellers. A repeated claim, often made in introductions to collections of short stories like this, is that both the land and the stories, the stones and the storyteller’s ancestry, are very old or even ancient, and more specifically, but still vaguely, Celtic. Like Rawe, Michael Williams, a Cornish folktale collector in the late-twentieth century, presents himself as Cornish and Celtic, and describes the land as bodily, stones as bones: “I am a Cornishman and proud of my nationality. There is a Celtic something in the bones of this land, in some of its people, too”.14 The implication is that through his ancient ancestry, a Cornishman like Williams is part of the very land itself. He gives authority to his work by suggesting that stones might have their own tales to tell, even that he is a receptive kind of spokesperson for them. Writing about Avebury, he speculates: “Maybe the bones of this ancient landscape are not speechless – that is provided we are humble and receptive”.15 Rawe’s comparison between Roughtor and “the backbone of a skeleton saurian” (above) could be taken even further back in time, beyond pre-Celtic ancestors to the primitive creatures from which the first inhabitants of Cornwall evolved. The image of land as bones is not just applied to Bodmin Moor but to Cornwall itself, in Daphne du Maurier’s description for example of “Cornwall’s backbone, that high hinterland running from north to south, comprising Bodmin moor, the uplands of St. Breock, and the startling perimeter of the china-clay district... where the white soil heaps thrust skywards, a mountain range in miniature”.16 For Du Maurier, who also supported Cornish nationalist principles17, repeatedly emphasising the independence and uniqueness of Cornwall, its geological structure was crucial. In Vanishing Cornwall she identifies herself, with her “Breton forbears”, as sharing “a common ancestry” with the Cornish and Irish, before moving onto the stones: Superstition flows in the blood of all three peoples. Rocks and stones, hills and valleys, bear the imprint of men who long ago buried their dead beneath great chambered tombs and worshipped the earth goddess. Nowhere else in England do these symbols of eastern ritual stand, but here in Cornwall the tombs are with us still. Great slabs of granite, weatherpitted, worn, with another mighty slab, tip-tilted, to form a roof; these were the burial places of priests, perhaps of queens... they stand as memorials to a forgotten way of life and a once-living cult. (12-13)

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Du Maurier goes on to suggest that these “memorials to a forgotten way of life” enable her to remember, to transcend time, to connect with her ancestry: The stones, like the natural granite cast up from the earth by nature, defy the centuries. To stand beside them... is to become, as it were, an astronaut in time. The present vanishes, centuries dissolve, the mocking course of history with all its triumphs and defeats is blotted out. (13)

Again in Williams’s writing ancient stones are seen as a spiritual link to one’s ancestors, even to a past life. In one of his accounts of his encounters with mystical and spiritual phenomena and people, called “Meeting a “Wise Woman”, he travels to Bodmin Moor to meet Joan Bettison, known as “a charmer”. They soon discover their shared CornishBreton ancestry, which is identified immediately with a prehistoric monument: Within minutes of meeting we were on the same wavelength: not surprising really because we discovered we’re as Cornish as Lanyon Quoit [a burial chamber located near Penzance] or Dozmary Pool, though there’s some Breton blood in both our family trees.18

Similarly, a leading bard of Gorseth Kernow, an organisation that aims to “maintain the national Celtic spirit of Cornwall”,19 identified himself with prehistoric sites in an interview which the oral historians Kayleigh Milden and Garry Tregidga consider representative in showing how family in Cornwall “can be a critical factor in the way in which individuals make connections with events before their own lifetime”,20 even as far back as antiquity. The importance of stones to the Gorseth is manifest in the fact that its ceremonies are traditionally held at ancient sites in Cornwall.21 When asked to talk about his family background, the interviewee, John Jenkin, moved rapidly back in time from his mother to pre-Tudor times and earlier, reporting a sense that his origins lie at “sites like Chysauster and Carn Euny”, two ancient settlements: Well, my mother’s family lived in West Cornwall: Newlyn, St Just, Mousehole, going back. I’ve got records going back to 1740 and it’s quite likely that they were there well before Tudor times. In fact I often feel when I go to sites like Chysauster and Carn Euny and that sort of thing... I do get a funny feeling that this is where I began.22

As for Du Maurier and Jenkin, the ancestry shared by Williams and Bettison, also described as “Celtic” (81), seems to provide them with

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special access to the long distant past, to which “ancient stones” provide the key. They perceive these stones as far from inert or inanimate, but as having a kind of energy which radiates outwards, and enters the body of the living Cornish person. Joan is reported as saying that “I believe too we Cornish can pick up the power from ancient stones”, and that when she touches a stone Celtic cross “I feel a link with the past go up my arm” (812). The author then goes on to relate a similar feeling of connection with the past earlier that day: I had visited the Hurlers [like the “Merry Maidens” these are named after those who enjoyed their Sunday activities, and appear frequently in folklore collections23], and even though much of the landscape was cloaked in a grey mist I still felt their magic. Contact with these aged, mysterious stones, for me, is not only a communion with the old people, but I feel a sense of peace and power seeping through... Some people have suffered a tingling sensation, rather like a mild electric shock, when touching segments of a stone circle. I cannot make such a claim, but I have felt physically, mentally and spiritually better for a visit to the Hurlers. (83)

New Age Eco-nationalism Du Maurier’s idea of “the earth goddess” and Williams’s feeling of connection with the energies of stones are, despite their differences, recognisable as characteristic of the kinds of spirituality often grouped together as part of the “New Age movement”. Participants in various forms of “alternative” spiritual practices (including channeling, crystal healing, astrology, geomancy, dowsing) became aware of themselves in the 1970s, according to Wouter Hanegraff, as belonging to a unified though highly disparate movement.24 While there are no doubt many exceptions to this sense of unification, the “New Age” being a far less coherent movement than it suggests, many commentators see the rise of new or “experimental” forms of religion in the 1970s and beyond as a symptom of dissatisfaction with conventional religion or as a search for meaning in secularised Western societies, while global communications and commodification have opened up a “spiritual supermarket” for individuals to choose among countless spiritual products.25 But if the most significant thing about New Age thinking in the 1990s was its correlations with popular science, as Steven Connor has observed26, the twenty-first century is seeing it tighten its association with nature and environmental concerns. For Marion Bowman, while there is a widespread sense of damage to society and the environment, “there are those who feel sure that in the past our ancestors understood the symbiotic relationship of people

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and planet, were in tune with nature and each other, cherished the earth...”.27 A trajectory could be traced from the Romantic understanding that megalithic stones were left behind by nature-worshipping Druids, which as Hutton points out played into nationalist celebration of “wise and noble ancestors”,28 and more recent associations between nation, nature, and stones. Contemporary eco-nationalism, as I will call it, presents a mixture of romanticised ancient religions, folklore, and semi-scientific theories of phenomena like earth energies, and tends to favour those aspects which conceive of earthly matter as animate. Cheryl Straffon for example, another Cornish writer with nationalist views, has edited and published a tri-annual magazine Meyn Mamvro [Cornish for “Stones of our Motherland”]: Ancient Stones and Sacred Sites in Cornwall since 1986 which includes articles about the earth goddess, earth energies and ley lines, along with folktales (about petrified dancers and such like). The first issue sets the scene by referring to the high concentration of ancient sites in Cornwall, and to the importance of respecting and protecting the environment which is increasingly under threat from nuclear waste, and from landowners and speculators “who would turn our country into just another part of England”.29 It goes on to describe a meeting at the “Merry Maidens” of the bards of the Cornish Gorseth (2-4). Further, like the authors and bard discussed above, Straffon refers to her origins in Cornwall (18). The concern with distinguishing Cornwall from England remains prominent in more recent editions of Meyn Mamvro. In particular, a piece entitled “How Celtic is Cornwall?” (2007) refers to the ongoing controversy over whether Cornwall can be viewed as a Celtic land that is separate from England, and claims that DNA research has now shown that “Cornwall is indeed a Celtic place”. People who could trace their Cornish lineage back several generations apparently tend to have a distinctive gene and features, which leads illogically to the racist view of the Cornish as somehow more “special” or native than other people: the Cornish after all are descended from the original inhabitants of Britain, those that built the megalithic sites, and first settled and farmed this land. The Cornish who come from Cornwall are the great-great grand-children of the earliest hunter-gatherers who first arrived here 10,000 years ago, and eventually settled down to become our Neolithic & Bronze Age ancestors.30

For Straffon, ideas of the earth goddess seem to have become increasingly important since the 1990s. As well as the occasional item in Meyn Mamvro from 1991 onwards (issue 16), she has written and

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published booklets entitled Pagan Cornwall: Land of the Goddess (1993), The Earth Goddess: Celtic and Pagan Legacy of the Landscape (1997), and Daughters of the Earth: Goddess Wisdom for a Modern Age (2007), and in 2001 began and has maintained the online annual magazine Goddess Alive.31 The view of Cornwall as separate from England, and the land as “alive”, again features in these publications, as in the first paragraph of the preface of Pagan Cornwall: Land of the Goddess, for example: From one end of Cornwall to another I have journeyed, always aware of the special separate quality of the land. For each individual person there will be different reasons why Cornwall is so special and different, but for me it is because I can feel the ancient ways and the sacred land still alive in a way I feel nowhere else. Those ancient ways and that sacred land take me to the heart of the mystery known as The Goddess, a spiritual essence who was once revered, loved and acknowledged in this land, and whose ways lingered on here perhaps later than many other places.32

Straffon goes on in the following paragraph to claim that Cornwall is the land of the Goddess, and that the Goddess is the “life-giving and sustaining force of the universe”. In other words, it seems, Cornwall – “my country”, not county – is the centre of just about everything: Many books have been written on ancient Cornwall, but for me they have generally lacked the insight that the land and its peoples was [or were], and in many ways still is [are], the children of the life-giving and sustaining force of the universe, known to our Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age and Celtic ancestors as The Goddess. This book then is my small attempt to reclaim her again, to find her rightful place in the land that is hers... always it was the awareness of her presence in my country and in my heart that led me on, and will, I hope, lead you on to find her again in the pages of this book and in Cornwall herself – land of the Goddess. (4)

Straffon is not of course the only New Age spiritualist whose interest in “the Goddess” has grown since the 1970s, and Cornwall is not the only place to be especially associated with “Her”.33 Straffon herself notes in the introduction to her most recent Goddess book that the last two decades have seen a revival in Goddess spirituality, indicated by an increase in the number of books and magazines about it and “the Goddess Conferences, Festivals and Events”.34 But while Straffon has focused mainly on South West Britain, it is of course James Lovelock who has developed the idea of the earth Goddess in its most global form, both in terms of readership and application. Widely reviewed and debated, Lovelock’s use of the earth

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goddess Gaia to describe his theory of the Earth as a living organism was firstly accepted only within the New Age movement, according to the foreword to The Revenge of Gaia: “At the beginning some New Age travellers jumped aboard, and some otherwise sensible scientists jumped off. They are now jumping on again.”.35 I’ll say more about this in a moment, as the potential of the Goddess for global environmental thinking is, despite the “localism” of Straffon’s Pagan Cornwall, indicated in its introduction, written by Monica Sjöö, who, like many of the other writers I have so far discussed, seems to identify with the living land, while placing it in an apparently feminist context: I knew that Earth is our living and creating Mother and I experienced vividly her great pain and grief and the danger all biological life now faces at this time. Patriarchal genetic engineers and nuclear physicists, and the Western-led “New World Order” they work for, could annihilate all life as we know it. We must now dream alive the past and future and we must return to the Mother if we want to live.36

The connection between ecology and feminism is strong, partly because both can be seen to have developed in the 1970s and to have promoted critiques of science and technology, while habitual associations between Nature and Woman have at times led to the view of both as dominated and otherwise damaged by patriarchal and imperialist forms of oppression. For Carolyn Merchant it is a specifically female and living earth that has given way to the scientific view of nature: “the image of an organic cosmos with a living female earth at its center gave way to a mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstituted as dead and passive, to be dominated and controlled by humans”.37 Some “radical ecofeminists” maintain oppositions between nature and science, spirituality and reason, and women and men, which have been criticised for appearing, as Greg Garrard puts it, “to present us with a mirror-image of patriarchal constructions of femininity that is just as limited and limiting”.38 Kate Soper connects this with nationalism and the family. She observes that women have been devalued through their naturalization, and nature through its representation as female, and goes on to consider the nation state as sexualised. “The idea of the motherland”, Soper argues, “invokes nationality in its supposedly eternal territorial fixity as land or earth, as “natural” precondition and spatial background to its historical and cultural existence”.39 This serves to disguise how the nation has actually been constructed quite recently, and also to present the oppression of women and the gender division of labour as “natural” (110-1). Cornwall, to return to the imagination of this particular “nation”, in Straffon’s

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publications is clearly sexualised as female, while the very title of her magazine, Meyn Mamvro, means stones of our motherland. “Patriarchal genetic engineers and nuclear physicists” seem to be naturally, perhaps inevitably, in opposition to both the motherland and mother earth. (Cornwall can also of course be perceived as “fatherland”, which also emphasises ancestral connections. For example, Charles Thomas, an archaeologist, the first Professor of Cornish Studies, and a Cornish nationalist, has referred to the “loyalty” of the “blood of the Celt” for the “fatherland”, which for Thomas seems to connect with his self-identity as British and not English.40 The name of the political organisation Mebyon Kernow, the Party for Cornwall, also embodies the principle of the male family line, its Cornish meaning being “Sons of Cornwall”.) Straffon’s most recent work, Daughters of the Earth: Goddess Wisdom for a Modern Age, appears to take a leap out of the prehistoric nation to engage with contemporary and global environmental issues, referring explicitly to Lovelock’s work: This complex dynamic of life of [or on] earth has been maintained by Mother Earth Herself, what James Lovelock has called “the Gaia principle”. This principle maintains that the Earth’s biosphere works as a single living organism, able to respond to changes in the climate and ecosystems and makes adjustments accordingly.41

According to Graham Harvey, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis is “considered a justification of far more than Lovelock intended” among Goddess-feminists and other Pagans (who he argues typically engage with animist and pantheist beliefs, both of which see nature as in some way conscious), being used not only to describe the self-regulation of living processes, but the Earth’s consciousness as a living planet.42 Lovelock himself seems to acknowledge and to appreciate the relation between the New Age and “Gaia”, however, saying that although when he first began to use the word he didn’t expect the New Age to take the goddess myth up again, and although this contributed to the resistance of scientists, the New Agers were more prescient than the scientists. We now see that the great Earth system, Gaia, behaves like the other mythic goddesses, Khali and Nemesis; she acts as a mother who is nurturing but ruthlessly cruel towards transgressors, even when they are her progeny.43

Like Straffon, Lovelock also seems to associate the goddess with South West Britain, where he lives. He explains that he moved to the West Country because it was one of the few places with “good countryside” left,

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and that “in my mind these last remaining areas of countryside were the face of Gaia” (about to be “sacrificed” to wind turbines) (193). An emphasis on locality is highly compatible with the understanding of an interconnected global ecosystem, as individual action can have global effects—a concept that has caught on with the slogan “think global, act local”.44 That nationalist groups, including the political party Mebyon Kernow and Plaid Cymru, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have tended to support the principles of the Green Party also makes manifest a sense of connection between global and local or national environmental issues.45 But there are crucial differences, as well as similarities, between the work of Lovelock and eco-nationalism. We have observed the movement, or slippage, between ancient stones and the land itself, between the “motherland” and the earth goddess, the nation and the globe. I have wanted to use the well-established connection between prehistoric monuments and nationalism to point toward a contradiction within some New Age, apparently global environmental thinking about the future. It is not simply that environmental causes may be used unjustifiably within eco-nationalism to support claims that nations are natural, that natives, through their ancestors, belong to the ancient mother or fatherland – mystifying nature and retarding practical action in the process46 – but that nationalist ideology and current perceptions of environmental crisis are opposed. Whereas eco-nationalism uses “nature” to promote, to borrow Soper’s words, “fictitious conceptions of national and tribal identity that have been all too destructive in their actual effect”,47 Lovelock uses Gaia as a metaphor for an earth that has absolutely no regard for nations, and which will expel humans – however native – if, or when, necessary for its survival. Part of the problem, according to Lovelock, is that “we care more about our national tribe than anything else... We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth”.48 Lovelock’s non-nationalist and non-human centred view of the world might even encompass the notion that monuments are living, but they would be living because they are part of the earth, not Cornwall. Or the vision of the whole earth as living could be seen as a kind of super-nationalism, an extension of the sense of national belonging to encompass the entirety of our planet. Timothy Morton sees the Romantic idea of holism, which Lovelock and others have developed, as “a major ecological ideology” which also “constitutes the ‘feel’ of nationalism— ‘we’ are interconnected in a whole greater than the sum of its parts”.49 Such a feeling of interconnectedness is described in the many accounts provided by Straffon of contact with the Earth Goddess, in womb-like

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caves and other stony surroundings. A member of a group of women provides an account in Daughters of the Earth of a Goddess ritual by the sea in Cornwall, for instance: .

I stand before time in a place which is not a place, in time out of time, on a day not a day. Sacred space, feet firmly rooted in wet earth or firm cold granite, soft sparkly water, elemental place, timeless, wild and beautiful as the Goddess herself. She comes to me, this ancient deity, called, summoned. She is within me, I am Her, She is me.50

The fantasy is of feeling part of something timeless and global if not universal, of identifying with, or even becoming, a powerful entity that extends back into the distant past and forwards into the future, that extends beyond the limits of any one nation, and that determines the fate of all. In contrast, in Lovelock’s more recent work the greater whole that is the earth will not hesitate to expel humans. Lovelock has become progressively more critical of green ideas of sustainability, and seems now to view the idea of living in harmony with nature as a regressive and dangerous fantasy—we need to find technical and not spiritual solutions.51

Notes 1

Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994); Nuala Johnson, “Framing the past: time, space and the politics of heritage tourism in Ireland”, Political Geography 18 (1999), 187-207; Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology, and the National Imagination in Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2 Johnson, “Framing the past”, p.190. 3 Michael Williams, Supernatural in Cornwall (Bodmin: Bossiney, 1974), p.2. I will return to this below. For further observations of how identities are bound up with ancient stones within Cornish archaeological writing see Nicholas Johnson, “Introduction” to Robin Payne, The Romance of the Stones (Fowey: Alexander Associates, 1999), p.vi; Caradoc Peters, The Archaeology of Cornwall: The Foundations of our Society (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2005). 4 For more about giants in Cornwall and other parts of Britain see Jeremy Harte’s chapter in this volume, and Richard Hayman, Riddles in Stone: Myths, Archaeology and the Ancient Britons (London & Ohio: Hambledon, 1997), pp.812. 5 Philip Payton, Cornwall: A History (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2004), p.6. Further examples will follow. 6 As Ronald Hutton observes in “Megaliths and Memory” in this collection. 7 Denys val Baker, Haunted Cornwall (Devon: Heritage, 1973), pp.73-88; Donald Rawe, Haunted Landscapes (Truro: Lodenek, 1994), pp.72-89.

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Rawe, Haunted Landscapes, inside cover. Malcolm Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1992); John Collis, The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions (Tempus: Gloucestershire, 2003); Leslie Jones, “Stone Circles and Tables Round: Representing the Early Celts in Film and Television”, in Amy Hale and Philip Payton, New Directions in Celtic Studies (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000), pp.30-51. 10 See for example M.A. Courtney, Cornish Feasts and Folklore (1890); repr. as Folklore & Legends of Cornwall (Exeter: Cornwall Books, 1989), p.77; J.A. Brooks (ed.), Cornish Ghosts and Legends compiled from William Bottrell’s Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (Norwick: Jarrold Colour Publications, 1981), p.131-2; Jennifer Westood, Gothic Cornwall (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 1992), p.39; Cheryl Straffon, Pagan Cornwall: Land of the Goddess (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 1993), pp.27-28; John Michell, Prehistoric Sites in Cornwall (Wessex: Wessex Books, 2003), pp.24-5; Paul Newman, Haunted Cornwall (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), p.27. Hayman explains that this set of stones was actually erected to commemorate the victory of the Saxon King Athelstan against the Cornish King Hywel in about AD 930, Riddles in Stone, p.12. 11 See for example Courtney, Folklore & Legends, pp.68 12 For more on spriggans see for example Courtney, Folklore, p.126; Hayman, Riddles in Stone, p.14. 13 Bottrell, Traditions, 1st series, title page. 14 Michael Williams, Supernatural in Cornwall (Bodmin: Bossiney, 1974), p.2. 15 Michael Williams, Supernatural in the West (Bodmin: Bossiney, 1996), p.75. 16 Du Maurier, Vanishing Cornwall, p.9. 17 This is evident in her membership of the political party Mebyon Kernow, noted by Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (London: Chatto & Windus), p.372. 18 Michael Williams, Superstition and Folklore (Bodmin: Bossiney, 1982), p.80. 19 “Gorseth Kernow’s” homepage [consulted 30.3.2008]. 20 Garry Tregidga and Kayleigh Milden, ““Before My Time”: Recreating Cornwall’s Past Through Ancestral Memory”, Oral History 36 (2008), 23-32 (p.25). 21 See Hayman’s comments on this, and on the Welsh Gorsedd, in Riddles in Stone, p.98. It is also observed further in the next section below. 22 Interview with John Jenkin, Cornish Audio Visual Archive (2000), CD reference AV1/372. 23 For example Courtney, Folklore & Legends, p.21; Westwood, Gothick Cornwall, p.30. 24 Wouter Hanegraff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), p.17. Though it takes on distinct characteristics in the 1970s the New Age movement can be traced back further through Alistair Crowley’s work in the first half of the twentieth century to nineteenth-century spiritualism and earlier. For 9

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consideration of “energies” in the nineteenth century see for example Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Anthony Enns, “Psychic Radio: Sound Technologies, Ether Bodies and Spiritual Vibrations”, in ed. Shelley Trower, special issue “Vibratory Movements”, The Senses and Society 3 (2008), 137-152. 25 See for example Marion Bowman, “Contemporary Celtic Spirituality”, in New Directions in Celtic Studies (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000), p.71; Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman (eds.), Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp.1-8. 26 Connor, “Weird Science” (2000) [consulted 27.3.2008]. 27 Bowman, “Contemporary Celtic Spirituality”, p.71. Hanegraff considers how ecological concerns are particularly prominent in “neopaganism”, viewed as part of the New Age movement, New Age Religion and Western Culture, p.76. 28 Smiles, The Image of Antiquity; Hutton, “Megaliths and Memory” (above). 29 Cheryl Straffon, Meyn Mamvro (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 1986), p.1. 30 Cheryl Straffon, Meyn Mamvro (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 2007), p.23. 31 Cheryl Straffon, Pagan Cornwall: Land of the Goddess (Penzance: Meyn Mamvro, 1993); The Earth Goddess: Celtic and Pagan Legacy of the Landscape (Blandford, 1997); Daughters of the Earth: Goddess wisdom for a modern age (Hants: O Books, 2007); Goddess Alive [consulted 27.3.2008]. 32 Straffon, Land of the Goddess, p.4. 33 Glastonbury is another obvious location, and its association with the Goddess is observed by Marion Bowman, “More of the Same? Christianity, Vernacular Religion and Alternative Spirituality in Glastonbury”, in Steven Sutcliffe and Marion Bowman (eds.), Beyond New Age: Exploring Alternative Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp.83-104. For more on the feminist goddess movement further afield see Wouter Hanegraff, New Age Religion, p.88; Lawrence Joseph Lawrence, Gaia: The Growth of An Idea (London: Penguin, 1990), pp.236ff. 34 Straffon, Daughers of the Earth, p.1. 35 James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (London: Penguin, 2007), p.xiv. 36 Straffon, Land of the Goddess, p.7. 37 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), p.xvi. 38 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2005), p.24. 39 Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1995), p.106. 40 Interview with Charles Thomas, Cornish Audio Visual Archive (2002), CD reference AV1/379. 41 Straffon, Daughters of the Earth, p.209. 42 Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living world (London: Hurst & Co., 2005), p.87.

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43 Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p.188. For an account of how Lovelock’s first book on Gaia, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), helped to generate an “industry” of New Age books, and even a new “religion”, see Lawrence Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of An Idea, pp.63-73. For further reflection of Lovelock’s work in relation to the New Age movement see Hanegraff, New Age Religion, pp.155158. 44 Lovelock refers to the relationship between local action in The Ages of Gaia: A biography of our living Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp.235-6. For use of the phrase “think global, act local” by Friends of the Earth for example see the press release, “FOE mourns death of founder” (2000) [consulted 29.3.2008]. 45 For coverage of an election deal between the Green Party and Mebyon Kernow see “Historic election deal between Cornish party and Greens” (2004) [consulted 31.3.08]. For the more general environmental aims of Mebyon Kernow and Plaid Cymru see “Mebyon Kernow – Environment” (2007) and “A Sustainable Wales” [consulted 31.3.08]. 46 Soper’s views on the limits of religious and spiritual approaches to ecology can be applied to the cases of Cornish nationalism, in What is Nature?, pp.274-278. 47 Soper, What is Nature?, p.250. 48 Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia, p.5. 49 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007), p.101. 50 Straffon, Daughters of the Earth, p.191. 51 In James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Penguin, 2009).

CHAPTER TEN RIGHT HERE! RIGHT NOW! PREHISTORIC MONUMENTS IN ROCK AND ROLL TIMOTHY DARVILL

Fatboy Slim's late 1990s techno evocation of evolution on planet earth from primeval sludge 350 billion years ago to modern cityscape in just three and a half minutes reminds us very forcefully that the past quite literally only exists in the here and now.1 Millennia of existence are condensed into a moment, both physically and intellectually. What survives in the world as tangible or intangible heritage is a sample of what was, and a fraction of what will be. Paradigms and models unleash the power of our imaginations to create understandings of how things were, but the pictures are different from those of an earlier age and separate from what might be conceived in future. The cultural reception of the past, using themes from it and seeking stimulation from knowledge of it, forms a key element in negotiating identities in the present, and could be seen as one element of what Anthony Giddens refers to as “ontological security”: a confidence that the natural and social worlds are actually what they appear to be.2 Literature, poetry, painting, sculpture and many aspects of what might glibly be called “high culture” reformat strands of the historic environment to create new works with new aesthetic appeals and challenges. And the same applies in what might equally glibly be called “popular culture”. In science fiction, advertising, cartoons, television, radio, films, and computer games we find ancient sites, monuments, legendary heroes and heroines, unexplained phenomena, and familiar myths cropping up time and again. Small wonder that a poll of 3000 people in England carried out in 2000 by MORI on behalf of English Heritage revealed that 87 per cent of the population thought the historic

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environment played an important part in the cultural life of the country, while a similar poll by Harris Interactive in the United States found that 93 per cent of those interviewed thought that sites and objects were valuable parts of a personal heritage.3 Internationally, the largest single cultural industry is the world of pop music, with an annual turn-over running into billions of dollars and a reach that now extends to almost every corner of the planet. The cultural heritage in general, and prehistoric monuments in particular, provide rich seams of inspiration for the names of bands and the titles of albums, themes for the music itself, settings for performances, and ideas from which artwork is created for covers and promotional material.4 Images and names in particular are not random, rather they are calculated to contextualize, intellectually and culturally, the reception of the product visually and aurally, appealing to particular tribes, sub-cultures, and tastes. Band names are designed to be catchy and memorable, but sometimes reveal tensions and misunderstandings: the Queens of the Stone Age have an audible preference for heavy metal yet their tag betrays an affinity with pre-metal-using cultures. Among other bands with archaeologically-tinged names relating to prehistory we find: The Diggers, a Scots four-piece that enjoyed some local success in Fife during the late 1990s; Dolmen, a lively folk-rock band from the Weymouth area during the 1990s; Callenish Circle (sic) who specialized in aggressive melodic death-metal at the end of the 1990s; and the Liverpool-based Goth band Rosetta Stone formed in 1988. In 1996 The Rutles released an album entitled Archaeology as a “collection of songs we've dug up”, a work released in the wake of a reunion following the loss of one member from the original line up parodying of course the progress of The Beatles following John Lennon's death in a way that only former Monty Python's Flying Circus comedian Eric Idle could acceptably pull off.5 Acoustic singers Roots Quartet released a CD of their back-catalogue as Prehistory in 2002, much the same title having been used earlier by Marc Bolan for a compilation of recordings made in 1966-67 but not released until 1995.6 More specialist areas of prehistory can be found in World Party's 1997 release Egyptology, which according to the cover notes was “mixed in a bucket with a big stick”.7 Hidden below the surface of some of these albums there are dedications to archaeologists and their work: Gordon Childe (the excavator of Orkney’s Skara Brae), for example, was acknowledged by Roy Harper on Lifemask in 1994, and Coldplay's first major release Parachutes was dedicated to Sara Champion in 2000, mother of the band's drummer Will Champion.8

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Prehistoric monuments have stimulated music and song for decades. In 1993 veteran prog-rocker Rick Wakeman released Heritage Suite featuring a dozen tracks prompted by elements of the cultural and natural heritage of the Isle of Man.9 Referencing earlier times is Enya's The Celts, and Clannad's Magical Ring explores the mysteries of Newgrange, Co. Meath, Ireland.10 Abbie Lathe includes a celebration of the great stone circle of Avebury in north Wiltshire, based on her first visit there, on the aptly named album Avebury.11 Music alone can also communicate feelings about ancient places and the spaces they occupy. Robin Heath, for example uses acoustic and electronic instrumental tracks to evoke, albeit loosely, the theme of old stones on his album Megalith: Mixing in Strange Circles.12 While exBeatle Paul McCartney's composition Standing Stone, a symphonic poem commissioned to mark the centenary of EMI, was given a world premier by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Lawrence Foster in the Royal Albert Hall on 14 October 1997.13 Making music is not immune from the touch of prehistory either. According to the sleeve-notes, Mike Oldfield played the “Piltdown Man” (the famously fraudulent skull claimed to represent a “missing link”) during Part Two of his quintessentially hippie opus Tubular Bells.14 And from the northern isles comes Out of the Stones, music inspired by the archaeology and history of Orkney featuring sounds from a saddle quern and a clay-pot drum among many other more traditional instruments.15 Ancient sites make fine settings for performances, and more could no doubt be brought into service in this way. Pink Floyd famously used the Roman amphitheatre at Pompeii as the setting for a three-day performance on the 4-7 October 1971. Originally conceived as a movie for European television, director Adrian Maben filmed the assembly of a wall of amplifiers and sound equipment across the middle of the arena, followed by lengthy day-time and night-time sessions where the band's trade-mark pyrotechnics were replaced by images of eruptions on Mount Vesuvius. The film was eventually edited into the surrealistic and highly inventive Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in September 1972 before going on general release two years later.16 More recently, Julian Cope, former lead singer with the Teardrop Explodes and self-styled Modern Antiquarian recorded the track “Paranormal in the West Country” in the rather cramped conditions of the chamber within the West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury in November 1993, released the following year on the CD Autogeddon.17 Perhaps the most visible and most recognizable use of archaeological imagery within the industry is on cover artwork and promotional material.

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The traditional vinyl LP cover approximately 12 inches (305 mm) square provided a wonderful medium for the design of high-impact images that were truly memorable and prompted instant recognition of the artist and their product when displayed in the window or browsing racks of a record store. Even the small scale of the CD cover (5 inches (120 mm) square) and now the digital artwork displayed in the window of iPods and other MP3 players still retains something of the magic of the larger format, and remains some of the most extensively owned and viewed artwork in the world. Juxtaposing diverse images and the creative use of familiar objects and places is a common approach; take two examples. In 1973 progressive rockers Yes released the highly acclaimed album Tales from Topographic Oceans with its folding cover designed by landscape artist Roger Dean showing an underwater-world that acknowledges inspiration from John Michell's book View over Atlantis.18 In Dean's imaginary world (fig. xv) there are representations of natural features such as Brimham Rocks (North Yorkshire), Last Rocks at Land's End (Cornwall), and Logan Rock near Treen (Cornwall). There are also humanly created monuments such as the Mayan ziggurat at Chichen Itza (Mexico) and geoglyphs from the Plain of Nazca (Peru), and natural rocks given special significance through their use at Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire (England). The residual traces of a nature:culture dualism implicit to 1970s New Archaeology is here completely absent in the contemporary New Age imagery of the progressive music scene. And the same applies but with a more postmodern slant on the cover of Kanasutia by French folk rockers Des Jardins released in 2003.19 Here we find an unfinished stone axe tied to a crude haft that itself becomes the exposed roots of a tree in a provocative arrangement that combines culture and nature, artefact and ecofact. Within this shimmering carpet of weird, wonderful, and eclectic references to the historic environment are a number of recurrent motifs that stand out against the background. In the remainder of this paper I would like to explore just three of them for what they tell us about the reception of prehistoric monuments in our own age.

Pyramids and ziggurats Many ancient cultures around the globe constructed vast square or rectangular towers, whether with smooth sides rising to a point (pyramids) or stepped sides with a flat top (ziggurats), mainly as burial places or temples. The great Temple of Kukulcan (El Castillo) at Chichén Itzá, Mexico, built in the early second millennium AD is one image regularly used and instantly recognizable from the New World. Its presence on

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Yes's 1973 album Tales from Topographic Oceans has already been noted, and a year later French experimental psychedelic rockers Gong used it with great impact on the cover of You.20 In the Old World it is the pyramids of Egypt dating back to the third and second millennia BC that persistently attract attention. Psychedelic rockers The Grateful Dead performed three shows beside the Great Pyramid at Giza, built by Cheops, on the 14-16 September 1978.21 Intended as a statement to help end the Arab-Israeli conflict that was raging at the time, proceeds from the concert were shared between the Egyptian Department of Antiquities and the Faith and Hope Society for the Handicapped. In the end, however, only 700 tickets were sold even though the climactic third night of the run coincided with a potentially spectacular lunar eclipse. Risking the curse of the pharaohs, the central chamber in Cheops’ tomb was miked-up to create an echo-effect inside the pyramid. Outside, the band were supported by a team of traditional Nubian drummers, but the overall quality of the performance was regarded by even the most hardened “Deadheads” as mediocre and none of the material was ever put out on general release. More recently, in April 2001, exPolice bass player Sting performed a concert in front of the Sphinx and the Pyramids at Giza to an audience of more than 10,000 fans. While some believed that the human-headed lion moved to the rhythm, others took a less charitable view fearing only for the safety of the remains. Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass is quoted as saying that the event was “an insult to the monument and a disrespect to the pyramid”.22 World Party dipped extensively into the imagery of ancient Egypt for the cover of their album Egyptology released in 1997.23 As well as closeup views of the Great Pyramid at Giza, hieroglyphics have been adapted with the superimposition of guitars where other gifts should be, and the face of Karl Wallinger replaces that of Tutenkhamen on the front of the iconic gold death-mask discovered by Howard Carter and his team in 1923. It is a trick that New York born urban rapper Nas used on the cover of his 1999 release I am.24 Space-rockers Hawkwind used another familiar view of the Giza Pyramids on Disc 2 of their Year 2000: Codename Hawkwind, Volume One, this time with what appear to be planets and images of the band members hovering in the sky above.25 Terrorvision's single Some People Say has a cover depicting eight columns of Egyptian hieroglyphics, Iron Maiden's Powerslave of 1998 shows a fantasy collage involving a pyramid fronted by a temple, and Jefferson Airplane are shown standing in front of a wall covered in hieroglyphs on the cover of their 2005 release of back-catalogue material.26

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Perhaps the most sublime use of pyramid imagery is that by Pink Floyd on the cover of their 1973 release Dark Side of the Moon.27 The cover is by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis and is probably the most instantly recognizable LP cover ever issued. The front is black with a centrally set outline prism / pyramid in profile with a beam of white light entering obliquely from the left before being fractionated by the prism to form the classic red through to violet colour-spectrum to the right. Inside was a wall-poster showing the three northern pyramids at Giza (those of Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus) in strong desert light, uncluttered by the modern intrusions that actually lie nearby. Invitations to the launch of the album had a view of Chephren's Pyramid at Giza against a blue cloudspeckled sky, and other “pyramid” images were used on related publicity materials. Dark Side of the Moon became one the of biggest-selling albums of all time, and for the twentieth anniversary re-issue in 1993 new artwork was commissioned that included a postcard showing the pyramids at Giza from the southwest with the three small Queens’ pyramids of Mycerinus in the foreground. In the accompanying booklet there are images of the band members superimposed on dark views of the pyramids, and the pyramid image became even stronger on the thirtieth anniversary re-issue which also contained a sticker showing one of the Giza pyramids in silhouette with a full moon low in the sky to the right. At one level these images are perhaps appealing to notions of power, permanence, and the longevity of great civilizations and their monuments. We know what these structures were for, and through archaeological research and historical records they can be associated with particular people and events that from the modern perspective have become immortal. The use of these images comes mainly from a time when the “live-for-today” ethos of the 1960s was turning into a more mellow, reflective and cynical world view characteristic of the early 1970s. Speaking specifically of the images used for Dark Side of the Moon, Thorgerson and Powell noted the way that they convey power, emphasizing how the pure light of the pyramidal prism contrasts with the decay of the pyramids themselves. The ancient sites provided symbols of vaulting ambition, greed and megalomania, themes that were touched upon in the lyrics on the album itself.28 In this sense, the reception of the music resonated with the sounds of the past represented through the monuments, but at the same time the meaning of the monuments could be explored through the medium of the music. It was a two-way process.

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Rock art In contrast to pyramids and ziggurats, rock art is a global phenomenon, mainly created not by great civilizations but by societies with far more primitive forms of social organization typically operating within huntergatherer or simple agriculturalist subsistence regimes. Although rock art images have been known and studied since the late nineteenth century, it is only in the last thirty years or so that the scale, distribution, antiquity, and variety of motifs has been recognized, and in some parts of the world it remains an on-going living tradition. Joe Strummer, former front-man of punk-rock legends The Clash, together with his later band the Mescaleros, released an album entitled Rock Art and the X-ray Style in 1999 (see fig. xvi). The cover and sleeve-notes were designed by Damien Hirst and others, and include motifs taken from, or modeled upon, rock art from Australia, although only one is truly in the X-Ray style in the sense of showing the internal skeleton and organs of the animals depicted.29 Created images also characterize the quasi rock-art panels used on the cover of Roy Harper's 1998 release Dream Society.30 Drawn by George Fort, the panels show a dog and a series of anthropomorphs standing, stretching, jumping, dancing, and doing summersaults loosely based on the work of indigenous north American peoples. Harper himself is shown on the back cover dressed in an eclectic mix of north American and Asian attire, possibly in part at least inspired by a vision of Sitting Bull which he cites as being behind the title of the album and its associated title track. The Reindeer Section, an alternative rock band from Glasgow, combine real and imagined rock art motifs on their 2002 album Son of Evil Reindeer.31 Designed by Ross Carmichael and Katie Arup, the front cover shows a pair of disproportionately sized beasts looking rather like reindeer facing one another; on the back is a photograph showing a line of three right facing horned/antlered animals together with smaller sections of other geometric motifs. The exact source is hard to place but they look like extracts from the pecked petroglyphs from the archaic style of north America.32 Linking past and present using rock art imagery is the outside cover artwork on the Moody Blues’ 1969 album To our childrens childrens children.33 The cover artwork by Phil Travers is a folding piece so that when opened there are two hands making “cave paintings”. To the left are prehistoric images of beasts and hunters while to the right are similarly styled figures with modern weapons. Inside the cover is a posed picture of the band gathered around a fire in a darkened cave having a guitaraccompanied sing-around. The ancient:modern dualism is perpetuated by a

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view of an ancient mythical landscape out through the mouth of the cave to the left and a range of modern furniture inside the cave to the right. The all-girl Pagan progressive band Legend released an album entitled Triple Aspect in 1997 which features three possibly fictitious standing stones in different landscapes, two with remarkably well-executed rock-art in the Passage Grave style.34 A rather less convincing decorated slab appears on the cover of Runrig's album The Big Wheel.35 Extending the idea of rock art into a landscape context, Led Zeppelin have the startling image of a crop-circle complex partly eclipsed by the shadow of a Zeppelin airship on the cover of their 1990 album Remasters.36 Ironically, a crop-circle that appeared near Stonehenge was illustrated on the back cover of the official guidebook to Stonehenge issued in 2005, suggesting perhaps that blending the authentic with intentionally mystical hoaxes is a wholly legitimate activity.37 Indeed, can we be sure that some of what we see in the extended record of ancient rock art and geoglyphs does not include deliberately imposed images intended to challenge orthodoxy or mislead the viewer? In contrast to the notions conveyed by pyramids and ziggurats, the use of rock art in works created since the 1990s especially can be linked to the rising interest in two themes. First is the place of World Music and the recognition that so-called primitive peoples often have a richly textured heritage with much to contribute to wider society. The interest here is in humanity, equality of expression, and questioning the misplaced notion of western Christian supremacy. As Hugh Brody has so vividly illustrated, it is hunter-gatherer communities from the world over that represent the success story of humankind on planet earth. They are the sustainable communities and the ones that stay put; the rest of us simply live on the margins of their world in a transitory, mobile, and highly unstable state.38 Second is the renewed interest in mystery and the reappropriation of inaccessible symbolism. By their very nature, rock art motifs are ambiguous and their meanings somehow secretive and multi-layered, known only to the initiates of a particular community. So too with the music that lies behind the images noted here and the wider spread of the material that this sample represents. Progressive, alternative, and indie rock are the staples of groups relating to these images, music that like the rock art itself is out of time with contemporary developments that appeal to other sub-cultures.

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Stonehenge Of all the prehistoric sites that have attracted attention in the world of popular music Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire stands tall and is far and away the most heavily used. Any quick web-search will reveal several bands using the word Stonehenge in their name, and dozens of album titles incorporating the site in one way or another. Amongst the earliest examples of Stonehenge's contribution to cover-art comes the 1968 album Stonedhenge by the rhythm and blues influenced band Ten Years After fronted by Alvin Lee.39 The folding cover shows a painting of the surviving northeast sector of the sarsen circle with a stylized mid-summer rising sun superimposed on a landscape covered in Beardsley-esque beasts and people. The name of the album was later used by Chris Chippindale as the title for his review of events surrounding the 1985 summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge which we shall return to later.40 Richie Havens used an image of the southwestern trilithon (stones 57, 58 and 159) after its re-erection in 1958 with the sun shining through the jagged gap between the uprights on the front of his Stonehenge album in 1970, while Hawkwind make liberal use of the site on their covers, notably on Stonehenge: This is Hawkwind do not Panic released in 1984.41 Also, CD1 in their Year 2000: Codename Hawkwind. Volume One package has a general view of Stonehenge just below centre juxtaposed with a group of four Easter Island moai statues bottom left, and a sky that is dominated by the sun and stella-like images of the band-members’ faces.42 At the other end of the musical spectrum, a compilation of Irish flute and piano music entitled Misty Celtic Morning has Stonehenge on the cover, perhaps reflecting a medieval tradition that the stones for Stonehenge originated in Ireland, while a plan of Stonehenge is used to interesting effect on early copies of flautist/composer Tim Wheater's album Sound Medicine Man released in 2004.43 Heavy-metal rockers Aerosmith have a strangely distorted view of Stonehenge on the front of their 1982 album Rock in a Hard Place, but more conventional pictures elsewhere on the cover.44 A compilation of nearly 80 hard-riffing rock anthems released as Rock of Ages shows three spookily lit trilithons on its cover, while the circles appear on New Dawn by Del Bromham and his band Stray.45 Beyond the main core of heavy rock music, the Los Angelesbased jazz fusion band Spirit used Stonehenge as the backdrop for a series of widely published promotional pictures in the 1970s.46 And it is not only the original Wiltshire Stonehenge that appears: the cover and sleevenotes of Steely Dan's Remastered: The Best of Steely Dan features views of the

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Carhenge sculpture by Jim Reinders, thirty-three cars from the 1960s and 70s placed in a field at Alliance, Nebraska, USA, in 1987.47 Stonehenge's instantly recognizable iconic form and an implied connection with rock and roll has also given it a place in several rockmovies. The Beatles were shown playing on Stonehenge Down, surrounded by tanks and military protection but with the stones clearly visible in the background, in the film Help! premiered on 29 July 1965 at the London Pavilion.48 Produced by Dick Lester, the plot involved finding a suitably remote location for the band to practice in, protected by Scotland Yard from the Kali-worshipers who were trying to capture Ringo because he was wearing a sacred ring traditionally worn by those identified for sacrifice. More recently, it is the heavy metal rockers Hawkwind that have become most closely associated with Stonehenge, not least because they were regular performers at the annual Stonehenge Festival in the late 1970s and early 1980s.49 Their last performance was recorded live and later released as Stonehenge: This is Hawkwind, Do Not Panic.50 Amongst the tracks are “Stonehenge Decoded” after the book of the same title by Gerald S Hawkins, and “Circles” based on the configuration of stone settings at the site. Material recorded at earlier performances was extensively used on the compilation album Welcome to the Future released in 1985.51 Stonehenge also features in more remote locations. Led Zeppelin used a Stonehenge set for a concert at Oakland Coliseum, California, on 23 July 1977 and other dates on their North American tour that year. A few years later Black Sabbath used a similar stage-set on their “Born Again” tour of Europe and North American between August 1983 and March 1984, but the main components of the set were so large that at many venues it was impossible to get them onto the stage. A song entitled “Stonehenge” was included on the album Born Again that accompanied the tour; a single of the track released in October 1983 completely failed to chart.52 By contrast, the satirical rockumentary film This is Spinal Tap directed by Rob Reiner has a wide following and considerable popular acclaim.53 The film portrays heavy metal rockers Spinal Tap as a fictitious British band making an American comeback tour. In the movie they hit on the idea of using a stage-set based on Stonehenge as a way of promoting their popularity when interest in them starts to flag. Potentially a great idea, but what their stage-designers created was a replica trilithon only a couple of feet high. When lowered onto the stage at the climax of their set this model Stonehenge becomes dwarfed by the band-members themselves in their platform shoes and big hair. The original sequence was filmed at the

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Shank Hall in Milwaulkee (Winsconsin, USA) where the image of the prop is still used as their corporate logo. The Mancunian dance-music collective the Happy Mondays used a similar diminutive trilithon on stage during an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in June 1990, a stunt that journalists dubbed “spinal crack” because of the band's reported heavy drug usage at the time.54 The iconic form of Stonehenge and its popularly perceived mysterious existence lies behind many of these uses. Again, much of the associated music is grounded in earlier traditions, survivals from a past that in the case of psychedelic rock is as hard to remember as it is difficult to unravel the meanings of Stonehenge itself. Sub-cultures that relate most closely to such images are also very often interested in (or even consumed by) science fiction, New Age philosophies, alternative existences, flying saucers, ley-lines, Paganism, and supernatural forces. The whole ensemble is combined rather neatly in the artwork of a poster advertising the twoday Sonic Rock festival to be held near Skegness, Lincolnshire, in September 2005 (fig. xvii). Beyond this Stonehenge has other powers as an image, and as a place it has also been used as a backdrop against which to situate, examine, and articulate other issues that may not always have much to do with the monument itself. Various counter-cultures have used Stonehenge as a platform to enhance the cultural reception of bigger problems.55 In recent times this is most dramatically illustrated by events ahead of the midsummer celebrations in 1985 following the decision by English Heritage and the National Trust to ban the free-festival. On 1–2 June 1985 hundreds of police corralled a traveler's convoy in a beanfield near Stonehenge and proceeded to beat them up. About 4500 arrests were made on the day, of which 241 were later charged. The events surrounding the incident have been reported and analyzed from a number of perspectives, and The Levellers included a song entitled “Battle of the Beanfield” on their album Levelling the Land released in 1991.56 Chris Chippindale concluded that most people found the beliefs of neo-Druids and New Age travelling communities more amusing than appalling, and that the festival's dreams were more eccentric than world-threatening.57 But what had been brought to the fore were issues about personal freedoms, access to common heritage, and the right to create alternative narratives about the past.

Conclusion Prehistoric monuments in Britain and abroad have clearly had an impact on the popular music industry, especially the world of rock and

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folk. It is fair to say that, when measured against the colossal scale of the industry, connections with the historic environment can be seen in just a small slice. But equally it has to be said that more people have come to know the Great Pyramid, rock art, or Stonehenge through promotional material for an album than will ever encounter these things in the pages of an academic study. It is also clear that the past is being used to represent the past; monuments are present in these products to create the receptive context of music and musicians that appeals to senses of identity grounded in what was, rather than what might be in future. Certainly images of the past can be dangerous and powerful, but with a few exceptions the music behind these images generally is reflective and focuses on how things should be. It often articulates conceptual struggles of a philosophical kind: power, mortality, decay, equality, and the supernatural. Occasionally, as with the use of Stonehenge, there are political struggles too, but interestingly these are mainly concerned with the perceived diminution of traditional rights rather than the creation of new ones. Looking at the origins of much of the material reviewed here it is notable that peak output was between the mid 1960s and the late 1990s. Much of what has appeared in the early twenty-first century AD has either been confined in its circulation to very discrete sub-cultures (psychedelicrock, folk-rock, indie, world music, etc.) or it is associated with popular movements of a very general kind. The latter is well illustrated by the use of Stonehenge as one element on the poster promoting Jools Holland's winter 2006 tour supported by his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra and guest vocalists Lulu, Ruby Turner, and Louise Marshall.58 Perhaps the past is now too familiar to be used as an instrument to test and promote ontological security. It is no longer dangerous or alternative. Instead it has become safe and secure. Viewed from another direction, the integration of the historic environment with aspects of popular culture provides an important underpinning for the claim that protecting, managing, investigating, and making sites accessible is a socially worthwhile activity deserving of public funds and support through public policy. Tourism is an important aspect of social, economic, and political life today, and cannot be ignored. Embedding an interest in exploring prehistoric sites within the popular imagination involves assaulting every sense possible: whether you like them or not, the sounds of Pink Floyd will for several generations at least be associated with how we view the pyramids, Joe Strummer with rock art, and Hawkwind with Stonehenge.

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Acknowledgements Part of this paper was first presented on the Orange World Stage at The Guardian Hay Festival, Hay on Wye, on the 4 June 2002 under the title “Right Here, Right Now! Archaeology in popular culture” (Festival Session 111); thanks to Border Archaeology and Oxford University Press for sponsoring the Hay Festival presentation and for a delightful sunny summer afternoon in the Welsh Marches. Grateful thanks also to Bob Chapman, Vanessa Constant, Roger Doonan, Chris Gerrard, Neil Mortimer, Ian Ralston, Miles Russell, Yvette Staelens, Paul Stamper, and Alan Saville for information about particular images, artists, composers, and designs, and for searching through their record collections to trace missing details.

Notes 1

Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook), “Right here, right now” on Fatboy Slim, You've Come a Long Way, Baby (BRASSIC, 1998); the video for the track can be found on: Fatboy Slim, The Greatest Hits (Skint, 2006). 2 A. Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p.50. 3 MORI, Attitudes towards the heritage (London: MORI for English Heritage, 2000), p.4. M. Ramos and D. Duganne, Exploring Public Perceptions and Attitudes about Archaeology (Washington DC: Harris Interactive for the Society of American Archaeology, 2000), p.25. 4 For a wider discussion of these issues see: T. Darvill, “Archaeology in rock”, in N. Brodie and C. Hills (eds.), Material Engagements. Studies in Honour of Colin Renfrew. (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monograph, 2004), pp.55–77. 5 The Rutles, Archaeology (Virgin, 1996). 6 Roots Quartet, Prehistory (RQR, 2002). M. Bolan, Prehistoric (Emporio, 1995). 7 World Party, Egyptology (EMI / Chrysalis, 1997). 8 R. Harper, Lifemask (Science Friction, 1973). Coldplay, Parachutes (EMI, 2000). 9 R. Wakeman, Heritage Suite (President Records, 1993). 10 Enya, The Celts (WEA, 1986). Clannad, Magical Ring (RCA, 1983). 11 A. Lathe, Avebury (Park Records, 2003). 12 R. Heath, Megalith - mixing in strange circles (Post Office Records, 2001). 13 P. McCartney, Standing Stone (EMI, 1997). 14 M. Oldfield, Tubular Bells (Virgin, 1973). 15 B. Pegg and B. Taylor, Out of the Stones: Music Inspired by the Archaeology and History of Orkney (Orkney Islands Council, 2005). 16 Pink Floyd, Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii (Universal Films, 1974. Released on DVD as Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii: The Director's Cut, 2003); N. Schaffner, Saucerful of Secrets. The Pink Floyd Odyssey (London: Helter Skelter Publishing, 2003), p.148.

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J. Cope, Autogeddon (Echo, 1994). Yes, Tales from Topographic Oceans (Atlantic Records, 1973). J. Michell, View over Atlantic (London: Garnstone Press, 1969). 19 Des Jardins, Kanasuta (Foukinic, 2004). 20 Yes, Tales from Topographic Oceans (Atlantic Records, 1973). Gong, You (Virgin, 1974). 21 J. Black, “Eyewitness: Grateful Dead play the Great Pyramid”, Q, 153 (1999), 66-7. 22 R.Allison, “Don't Stand so Close to Me: Sting Rocks the Sphinx”, The Guardian (30 March 2001), p.2. 23 World Party, Egyptology (EMI / Chrysalis, 1997). 24 Nas, I am ....(Columbia, 1999). 25 Hawkwind, Year 2000: Codename Hawkwind. Volume One (New Millennium Communications, 1999). 26 Terrorvision, Some People Say (VEGAS, 1995). Iron Maiden, Powerslave (EMI, 1998). Jefferson Airplane, The Essential Jefferson Airplane (RCA, 2005). 27 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon (EMI, 1973). 28 S. Thorgerson and A. Powell, The Stories behind the Sleeves: 100 Best Album Covers (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1999), p.46. 29 J. Strummer, and the Mescaleros, Rock Art and the X-Ray Style (Mercury, 1999). 30 R. Harper, The Dream Society (Science Friction, 1998). 31 The Reindeer Section, Son of Evil Reindeer (Bright Star Recordings, 2002). 32 S. Turpin, “Archaic North America” in D. S. Wheatley (ed.) Handbook of Rock Art Research (Walnut Creek: Altamira, 2001), fig. 13.5. 33 The Moody Blues, To our Childrens Childrens Children (Threshold / Decca, 1969). 34 Legend, Triple Aspect (Pagan Records, 1997). 35 Runrig, The Big Wheel (Chrysalis, 1991). 36 Led Zeppelin, Remasters (Atlantic, 1990). 37 J. Richards, Stonehenge (London: English Heritage, 2005). 38 H. Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-gathers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). 39 Ten Years After, Stonedhenge (Decca, 1968). 40 C. Chippindale, “Stoned-henge: events and issues at the summer solstice, 1985”. World Archaeology, 18.1 (1986), 38-58. 41 R. Havens, Stonehenge (Stormy Forest Productions, 1970). Hawkwind, Stonehenge: This is Hawkwind do not Panic (SHARP, 1984). Re-released in the Official Picture Logbook (Flicknife, 1987) and on CD in Zones / Stonehenge (Flicknife, 1988). 42 Hawkwind, Year 2000: Codename Hawkwind. Volume One (New Millennium Communications, 1999). 43 Various Artists, Misty Celtic Morning (Uni / North Sounds, 2001). T. Wheater, Sound Medicine Man (New World, 2004). 44 Aerosmith, Rock in a Hard Place (Columbia, 1982). 45 Various Artists, Rock of Ages (Sanctuary, 2002). Stray, New Dawn (Mystic 18

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Records, 1998). 46 J. Buckley, Duane, O., Ellingham, M., and Spicer, A. (eds), Rock: The Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1999), p.937. 47 Steely Dan, Remastered: The Best of Steely Dan (MCA, 1993). C. Chippindale, “Stonehenge Observed”. An illustrated essay published for the exhibition Visions of Stonehenge 1350-1987, held at the Southampton City Art Gallery in September 1987 (Southampton: Southampton City Art Gallery, 1987), p.23. 48 The Beatles, Help! (United Artists, 1965). 49 T. Darvill, Stonehenge: The Biography of a Landscape (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 274-5; A. Worthington, “A Brief History of the Summer Solstice at Stonehenge”, 3rd Stone, 42 (2002), 41-7. 50 Hawkwind, Stonehenge. 51 G.S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded (London: Souvenir Press, 1966). Hawkwind, Welcome to the Future (Mausoleum, 1985). 52 Black Sabbath, Born Again (Vertigo, 1983). Black Sabbath, Stonehenge / Thrashed (Vertigo, 1983). 53 Spinal Tap, This is Spinal Tap (Embassy Pictures, 1984). 54 B. Gordon, “Cash for questions: Shaun Ryder”. Q, 176 (2001), 13-16. 55 B. Bender, Stonehenge: Making Spaces (Oxford: Berg, 1998). Darvill, Stonehenge, pp. 273-4. 56 Worthington, “A Brief History of the Summer Solstice”. The Levellers, Levelling the Land (China Records, 1991). 57 Chippindale, “Stoned Henge”, p.55. 58 The poster was also used as the cover for the 2006 album: J. Holland and his Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, Moving out to the Country (Warner, 2006).

CHAPTER ELEVEN CHILDREN OF THE STONES: PREHISTORIC SITES IN BRITISH CHILDREN’S FANTASY, 1965-2005 CHARLES BUTLER

The Uses of Prehistory Henges, standing stones, barrows, ancient trackways and other types of prehistoric site are common features in British children’s fantasy fiction. As reminders of, and sometimes portals to, the past, they are natural subjects for any writer for whom questions of history and belief exercise a fascination. Here we can touch and gaze upon objects that were important to those who came before us. Indeed, we are looking at the work of their hands, which stands as a complex and mute puzzle, an empathetic conundrum of the kind novels seem well suited to explore. Who were these people? Why did they go to so much effort, over such a long period? What was it like to be them? These perennially elusive questions form one major aspect of the monuments’ appeal to writers, as to other people. Another consists simply in the longevity of the monuments themselves, which have stood, relatively unchanged, through so much human history. British children’s fantasies of the 1960s and ‘70s in particular are often characterized by a concern to “connect” with the past; and prehistoric monuments can easily be called to the service of this humanist project. Beyond such general observations, however, we can point to several more specific roles that have been played by prehistoric monuments in fantasy fiction, roles that derive in varying degrees from such external discourses as archaeology, folklore, and New Age theories. In what follows I shall attempt a brief survey of these roles, before considering the ways in which one in particular – the use of prehistoric sites as portals to other worlds – is exploited in Alan Garner’s Elidor (1965) and Catherine

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Fisher’s Darkhenge (2005), two texts which stand as chronological bookends to my discussion. a) Places for Ceremonial and Sacrifice. Most obviously perhaps, large Neolithic and Bronze Age sites are widely portrayed as ceremonial centres, where matters of social or religious importance are proclaimed and enacted. Thus, when the King is to abdicate at the climax of Diana Wynne Jones’s The Merlin Conspiracy (2003), the court is summoned to Stonehenge to watch him do it. Stonehenge in particular, with its concentrated, temple-like design, is an obvious theatre for such events – which may or may not be leavened with an element of human sacrifice. b) Living Beings. The folklore of many stone circles suggests that they were originally people. The Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, for example, were once a king and his men, turned to stone after being cursed by a witch. A more common cause of this misfortune was sabbath-breaking, a trespass which accounts for the Hurlers in Cornwall, the circle at Stanton Drew in Somerset, and many others. Such legends, especially when combined with the equally common tradition that the stones fluctuate in number or cannot be counted, invite fictions in which megaliths are conceived of as sentient and possibly even mobile. In Penelope Lively’s The Whispering Knights (1971), for example, the witch Morgan le Fay is defeated by the power of a ring of stones, based on the Rollrights, which were once knights “who fought a great battle with a bad queen, and… won, and now… sit there to protect the valley”.1 A science-fiction variant appears in BBC television’s 1978 Dr Who adventure Stones of Blood (novelized as Dr Who and the Stones of Blood by Terrance Dicks in 1980), in which the megaliths of a Cornish circle are in reality an alien siliconbased life-form, the Ogri. The Ogri sustain themselves by drinking human blood, an idea that neatly accounts for the association of such sites with blood sacrifice. c) Machines. By the 1960s the significant solar and astronomical alignments of various prehistoric monuments had long been recognized, and following the work of Gerald Hawkins and Alexander Thom in that decade, it became commonplace to talk of Stonehenge especially as a calendar or even a computer – as a machine, in fact, for predicting eclipses and regulating the agricultural year. To some, the sophistication and organization necessary to create such devices seemed to demand explanation, and explanations were soon forthcoming. John Michell in The View over Atlantis (1969; rev. 1972) suggested that the civilization of

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Atlantis had incorporated such sites as Stonehenge and Avebury into “a great scientific instrument… sprawled over the entire surface of the globe”.2 The various elements of this instrument were connected by lines of power, which in Britain Michell identified with the leys described earlier in the century by Alfred Watkins.3 Others suggested that the ancient architects had been not Atlanteans but aliens, a thesis popularized most famously in the many books of Erich von Däniken, beginning with Chariots of the Gods? (1969). Jeremy Burnham and Trevor Ray’s Children of the Stones, written to accompany the 1977 Harlech television series of the same name, conforms well to these traditions. The programme was filmed in Avebury, which in both book and series goes under the nom-de-screen of Milbury. In Children of the Stones, archaeologist Adam Brake and his son Matthew arrive to carry out research, only to find the inhabitants of the village brainwashed into a state of perpetual, stupefied happiness. The reason lies in the leys that converge on Milbury, in the stones themselves, and in the dish-like layer of stone that Adam discovers to lie beneath the village, which act together as a powerful transmitter, through which negative feelings are beamed into space, there to be absorbed by a black hole. Although this is fundamentally a story about the henge-as-machine, like several others under discussion here it is also eclectic, making use of Stukeley’s serpentine drawings of the Avebury complex, the tradition of petrification (in the climactic scene most of the villagers are turned to stone), and even a time loop, in which the book’s events are shown to have been repeated continually since at least Druidic times. d) Portals to Other Times. Since their establishment in the early twentieth century time travel and time slip stories have been amongst the most characteristic genres of British children’s fantasy.4 Time travel typically occurs when one or more protagonists come into contact with either an ancient place, such as Kipling’s Pook’s Hill, or an ancient artefact, such as the amulet in Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet. By the 1970s this was a well-established device: in 1976 alone, for example, it was utilized in Robert Westall’s The Wind Eye (in which the artefact is a boat), Lucy M. Boston’s The Stones of Green Knowe (a pair of stone chairs), Penelope Lively’s The Stained Glass Window (a stained-glass window) and Nancy Bond’s A String in the Harp (a mediaeval harp key). Prehistoric sites, combining the status of ancient artefacts and places, seem particularly suited to this treatment. As early as William Croft Dickinson’s Borrobil (1944) we read of two children, Donald and Jean, who dance in a stone circle at Beltane only to find themselves transported into a world of

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Celtic heroic myth. The mysterious Borrobil, who conducts them through their adventures, is a creature at home in many different ages, and carries something of them all within himself: “although in one way he looked as if he must have lived for hundreds of years, in another way he looked as young as they themselves” (19). Indeed, it is sometimes hinted that prehistoric sites have the power to collapse time, rather than simply provide a means of transport from one period to another. Lively’s Mrs Hepplewhite, the guardian of the eponymous stone circle in The Whispering Knights (1971), exists in every age and shares Borrobil’s temporal versatility: “The face was young, and although it offered sanctuary, it carried with it also a total strangeness, a suggestion of something very old and far away”.5 This sense of simultaneity, of one set of experiences being overlaid on another, is one we shall meet again. e) Portals to Other Worlds. The final function of megalithic sites is again as a portal – not to other times, but to other worlds. In the remainder of this chapter I will consider Elidor and Darkhenge as two texts that use the Avebury complex in this manner.

Elidor Alan Garner habitually uses real-world settings in his novels. Garner is always attentive to the geological, archaeological and cultural history of his settings, and careful to integrate his fiction with the physical reality beyond the page. It is often possible to take his books and explore the territory where they are set. Indeed, his first two novels, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and The Moon of Gomrath (1963), incorporate maps of the area around Alderley Edge, perhaps with the possibility of some such expedition in mind. As this suggests, Garner does not habitually make use of secondary worlds.6 The one exception is the land of Elidor, which appears for a few chapters in the book of that name, although the rest of the story is set in and around Manchester. Even here, Garner draws on real places for his material. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1968, he listed the research tasks he had carried out in preparation for writing the book: I had to read extensively textbooks on physics, Celtic symbolism, unicorns, medieval watermarks, megalithic archaeology; study the writings of Jung; brush up my Plato; visit Avebury, Silbury and Coventry Cathedral; spend a lot of time with demolition gangs on slum clearance sites; and listen to the whole of Britten’s War Requiem nearly every day. 7

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Avebury and Silbury do not figure in Elidor in propria persona. However, they are clearly perceptible in the briefly sketched land of Elidor. There the youngest of Garner’s four sibling protagonists, Roland, following the rest into Elidor in search of a lost ball, soon finds himself in the middle of a huge ring of standing stones. The stones are “unworked and top-heavy; three times bigger than a man”, and the ring itself “easily four hundred yards wide.”8 The similarity to Avebury is quite striking (the outer circle at Avebury is 460 yards in diameter), although this circle also differs from Avebury in that it crowns the top of a hill, and its stones are “smooth as flint”.9 What clinches the resemblance is that Elidor’s stone circle is linked by an avenue of megaliths to what the book describes as an “artificial mound, completely circular, and flat-topped.”10 The echo of Avebury’s own avenue, and the pudding-basin shape of Silbury Hill is unmistakable (see fig. xviii). In Elidor this is the Mound of Vandwy, and in due course Roland learns that it holds his lost brothers and sister. He is enabled to enter it and rescue them only by imagining the front door of his own house set into the mound itself – for Elidor is a land where imagination has the force of physical fact. Unlike his siblings he is strong enough to resist the enticing enchantment of the place, and returns home with them. In this episode Garner echoes the many legends of fairy mounds which can be entered only at certain times, or by certain people. The story of Roland’s rescue is based fairly closely on one such legend, told in the ballad of “Childe Roland and Burd Ellen”. Such legends have of course often been associated with prehistoric burial chambers, and the Mound of Vandwy’s internal construction (in contrast to its Silbury-like external appearance) seems deliberately to echo that of Newgrange in Ireland (see fig. xix). Like Newgrange its entrance is: a square stone dolmen arch made of three slabs—two uprights and a lintel. Below it was a step carved with spiral patterns that seemed to revolve without moving.11

Like Newgrange too the Mound of Vandwy is entered down a long passageway, leading to a central chamber which gives onto three smaller chambers, forming the overall shape of a cross. In Garner’s book the smaller chambers each contain one of the three missing treasures of Elidor, a bowl, a stone, and a sword – which, with the spear Roland already carries, recall the four treasures of the Tuatha de Danann, Newgrange’s mythological founders. Much of the rest of the book concerns the siblings’ attempts to keep these treasures (which they bring home to Manchester) safe, and so preserve the safety of Elidor itself.

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I have introduced this episode in the context of a discussion of the use of prehistoric monuments as portals to other worlds. Roland and the rest do not in fact enter Elidor through the Mound of Vandwy, but (like the siblings in the traditional ballad) through a church. However, in choosing the name Vandwy Garner implicitly identifies this mound as a route to an underworld, and Roland’s exploit as a rescue from the realm of death, Vandwy being one of the mystical underworld fortresses assailed by Arthur in the Welsh poem “The Spoils of Annwn.”12 We shall return to the “Spoils of Annwn” shortly – but first we must visit Darkhenge.

Darkhenge Catherine Fisher is a Welsh poet and children’s novelist whose books have been appearing since the early 1990s. Several of her novels are fantasies set in contemporary Britain, particularly around her native Gwent and the Welsh marches: Darkhenge is unusual in being set as far east as Wiltshire.13 Like Garner, whom she regards as a prime inspiration,14 Fisher combines a background in archaeology with a deep knowledge of Celtic myth and poetry. For Darkhenge, Fisher acknowledges (by way of an Author’s Note) the use of two books in particular: Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and the Celticist John Matthews’ Taliesin: the Last Celtic Shaman.15 From Graves she takes the characterization of the White Goddess as the muse and destroyer of poets, and especially his co-option to this pattern of the story of Ceridwen and Gwion/Taliesin, a fundamental myth for her book. Matthews, using Welsh poetry as a springboard for speculation, makes Taliesin not only a bard (author amongst other things of “The Spoils of Annwn”), but a spirit traveller or shaman, a point crucial to the consideration of Avebury as an otherworld portal. Darkhenge is a complex book, and a brief summary is in order here. Teenage Chloe has grown up in the shadow of her elder brother, Rob. Rob’s artistic talent has made him the favourite of their parents, while her own attempts to become a writer have been ignored or patronized. Over the years, Chloe has grown angry and resentful of Rob, who still sees her as merely his little sister. One day Chloe falls from her horse while riding on the Ridgeway near Falkner’s circle. The book begins some weeks later, with Chloe in a coma, her family finding it hard to cope, and Rob beginning for the first time to understand the depth of her resentment. Meanwhile, Rob finds summer work at an archaeological dig near Avebury, where, under conditions of great secrecy, a discovery has recently been unearthed: an oak tree buried upside down in the centre of a ring of wooden postholes. (Fisher borrowed the form of the monument

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from the so-called Seahenge, discovered in Norfolk in 1998.) Back in Avebury Rob comes across a New Age group known as the Cauldron tribe, and is present when they invoke the presence of a poet-shaman at the Avebury Cove. This figure duly appears, bursting into the Cove apparently from another world, and taking a series of animal forms that echo the transformations of Gwion. He is pursued by a shape-shifting woman whom we must assume to be Ceridwen herself. Befriending the shaman, Vetch, Rob is gradually persuaded that the new archaeological find – which has been named Darkhenge – is the portal to an underworld, and that Chloe is not simply ill but has become lost in, or been abducted to, that world. Rob and Vetch determine to rescue her. They pass through the Darkhenge portal, where they in turn are pursued by Clare, the head of the archaeological dig. Clare is Vetch’s sometime lover and present nemesis. In the mundane world, she is a jealous guardian of the site; but in Darkhenge’s Unworld she stands revealed as none other than Vetch’s shape-shifting pursuer, Ceridwen. Whose story is this? Rob’s – or Chloe’s? At first it appears to be Rob’s. It is told from his point of view. We hear of his adventures with the archaeological dig and the Cauldron tribe, we live through his grief and guilt. Chloe’s thoughts in her coma are distinctly subsidiary. We see them in short, dream-like, first-person sections between the main chapters, or in the extracts from her diary, which Rob discovers. In fact we are allowed at first to read this as a very familiar type of narrative: the prince rescuing Sleeping Beauty, Gerda rescuing Kay, Arthur mounting his assault on Annwn, Roland rescuing his siblings from the Mound of Vandwy. Rob assumes the heroic role of rescuer, as it were by default. But there is another way of reading the story, in which Chloe is not an abductee waiting passively for rescue, but a shamanic traveller. Matthews summarizes the shaman’s experience as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

He [or she!] falls ill/becomes unconscious/ecstatic; He encounters Otherworld personages; He enters the Otherworld itself; He journeys there for some time; He receives teachings; He faces dangers/initiations; He returns “to life” at the moment he left.16

Much of this applies to Chloe. She has fallen ill and become unconscious. She has encountered the King of Unworld, a being made of the leaves and natural energies of the place. She journeys through the Unworld, and learns things and faces dangers there which can reasonably

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be read as initiatory. But she does not await rescue. She is not Kay – rather, she sees herself as a potential Snow Queen.17 Fisher’s Unworld is a complex and multiply-metaphorical space. In one sense it is the Unconscious: the world as it exists in Chloe’s comatose mind, composed of her own knowledge and memories, and the symbols that have meaning and importance for her. However, it is not random or chaotic: the journey through it proceeds by way of a well-defined series of fortresses, each of which gives access to a deeper level of Chloe’s consciousness. In order to structure this series Fisher (like Garner before her) uses the “Spoils of Annwn”, with its seven assailed caers; but also another Talisienic text, the “Battle of the Trees”. In the forest of Unworld the trees are semi-sentient, trying to invade each of the caers in turn. Their tendrils might be the synapses of Chloe’s sleeping brain, struggling between repair and destruction as she attempts to remake herself. The book hints at this in its first scene, where Rob contemplates a tree he is trying to draw and is reminded of the delicate structure of a human brain. Unworld is also the underworld, also Annwn. As well as the Welsh texts I have mentioned, Fisher deliberately echoes Dante’s Inferno, with Vetch assuming the Virgilian role of guide to Rob, and each caer corresponding to a circle of descent - a pattern also suggested by one of Matthews’ diagrams (see fig. xx). However, Chloe does not desire the roles of Beatrice or Eurydice, the quest objects of a male artist’s imagination. She wants to harrow hell. Darkhenge is a book that explores the power of words and imagination, the power that comes from being the person who tells the story. As it progresses the novel’s focus shifts from the story of Rob’s rescue to Chloe herself. When Rob finally finds Chloe he is appalled to discover that she does not wish to be rescued. Instead, she is determined to proceed through the caers and sit in the chair of Ceridwen at their centre, and thus to make herself the ruler of Unworld. In the physical world, however, this choice will mean her death. In his book on Taliesin, John Matthews comments on the nature of Annwn: The Otherworld in British myth is an inscape or overlay upon Middle Earth. It has its specified gateways or crossing-places but it is not conceived of as being “up or out there.” Rather, it is contiguous with every part of life.18

This suggests that the metaphor of the portal, with its sense that as one world is entered another is being left behind, may be inadequate. Instead, portals exist primarily to reveal new aspects of a reality that has always been present – just as time portals may collapse time rather than simply

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replace one period with another. This is important as we consider the multivalent nature of Fisher’s creation, and particularly its relationship with the landscape of Avebury. Because the Unworld is formed from Chloe’s mind, it draws on her experiences for its raw material. Some of these are personal to Chloe, but much of what Chloe knows is Avebury and its surroundings, including such wider features as Silbury Hill, the avenue, the Sanctuary, Swallowhead spring, and West Kennet long barrow. This allows Fisher to use the Avebury geography as an “overlay” for Chloe’s country of the mind. Just as writers like Michael Dames have seen the Avebury landscape as one in which neolithic people inscribed the story of their ritual and agricultural year,19 so Fisher uses it to plot Chloe’s journey and life – “plot” here conflating its narrative and geographic senses. Caer Colur, the castle of gloom in “The Spoils of Annwn,” for example, is recognizably West Kennet Long Barrow,20 a place where a younger Rob and Chloe had played at hide-and-seek, and which Rob now understands as a place of death and psychic entrapment. Silbury Hill, which Garner melded with Newgrange to make the Mound of Vandwy, is for Fisher the caer known as Spiral Castle. Interestingly, Spiral Castle was a name sometimes given to Newgrange, as Graves notes in The White Goddess, in reference to the spiral patterns carved at its entrance.21 But it is appropriate to Silbury too, because of the spiral path that leads to its summit. In the caer of Chloe’s Unworld this outer spiral is echoed by an inner passageway, leading from the summit down into the interior of the hill. The place is filled with seashells, and the hill itself has something of the double helical quality of a conch, or of a human ear. While inside it Chloe can hear both the sea and her father’s voice as he talks at her bedside. The final caer is the Avebury henge itself, where the chair of Ceridwen is formed by a horizontal slab in front of one the megaliths. There, the world of Chloe’s dreams and the physical world finally merge: Vetch/Taliesin is present, but so is Father Mac, the priest who has been her family’s friend and spiritual adviser; so are the Cauldron tribe; and as Rob approaches the place he sees the “ancient hunters with spears’22 who date from the time of the henge’s first creation – for this is yet another portal in which time, as well as worlds, are overlaid. At this point Chloe draws back at last, and Ceridwen/Clare resumes her place as Queen of Unworld. Now, finally, Chloe agrees to return to mortal life, a shaman equipped with powerful words and the power to make them heard. The book concludes with Rob resolving that “He’d leave it to Chloe to tell the story.’23 And, although this is a book written in the third person, we are at liberty to imagine that Darkhenge itself is the result.

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Garner’s and Fisher’s use of Avebury have several things in common. Both draw on the same stock of Celtic myth and poetry, especially as mediated by Robert Graves and his successors. Both create otherworlds where reality is shaped by the power of imagination. Both associate Silbury Hill with the Mound of Vandwy, if on rather different grounds. Yet the differences are also significant, and illustrate the ways that both children’s fantasy and the frames of reference available for understanding prehistoric monuments changed over the forty years between the books. Garner, following the archaeological orthodoxy of his day (in which the propensity of Neolithic and early Bronze Age peoples to practise human sacrifice was more strongly stressed than now) has his character Malebron describe the builders of the henge and Mound in unsympathetic terms: “This Mound and its stones are from an age long past, yet they were built for blood, and were supple to evil”.24 By contrast Fisher’s otherworld, though dangerous, is not one in which the word “evil” sits comfortably. Garner himself did much to wean fantasy from such Manichaean categories, and Elidor is in many ways a transitional work within his own oeuvre, lying somewhere between the moral dualism of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and the psychological complexity of The Owl Service (1967). In Darkhenge, Ceridwen/Clare and Taliesin/Vetch are immortals, locked in the same kind of perennial struggle as Lively’s Morgan le Fay and Mrs Hepplewhite, but they are complementary and mutually dependent rather than simply oppositional, and their hostility is essentially creative. I have suggested that Rob and Chloe compete to tell the story of Darkhenge. In Garner’s and Fisher’s books there is also a competition between different ways of understanding events. In Elidor Roland must argue for the existence of Elidor with his siblings, who at times are inclined to interpret their adventure there as a case of false memory or collective hallucination. Elidor is indeed a country of the mind, in that it is populated by creatures of the imagination – but Roland’s task is to persuade the others that it is none the less real for that. In Darkhenge we witness a battle for the meaning of the Darkhenge site between the archaeologists and the Cauldron tribe. Here Fisher draws on, and to an extent replicates, the real conflicts that arose over Darkhenge’s immediate model, Seahenge, in the late 1990s.25 At Seahenge, protesters demanded that the monument be left undisturbed even if it meant its destruction by the elements, while the authorities insisted on its being excavated and removed to a place where it could be studied. In Fisher’s book too the interests of the scientific and the spiritual seem diametrically opposed, if driven by comparable passions. Each party considers Darkhenge a site consecrated to its own values and each wants its integrity and meaning to

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be respected – although what this entails depends on whether that meaning be religiously or scientifically defined. As readers, we have access to the interpretative practices of both groups, neither of them singly sufficient to the full complexity of the situation. The archaeologist Clare is pursuing the scientific endeavour as she understands it by preventing public access to Darkhenge; but she is also Ceridwen, forbidding young Gwion to sup from the cauldron of knowledge. This double-aspect tells us something about Fisher’s and Garner’s eclecticism. As will have become apparent, these writers regularly combine physical features, archaeology, folk beliefs, poetry, and much else in their work. But they are not indiscriminate plunderers: they lay a positive value on the ability to translate between different ways of seeing and understanding – or rather (to borrow Matthews’ word once more) to overlay them in order to build up a cumulative complex of interrelated meaning. In this sense, as in others, both Elidor and Darkhenge are textual sites of great sophistication and interest, and both repay careful excavation.

Notes 1

Penelope Lively, The Whispering Knights (Harmondsworth: Puffin, 1987), 74. John Michell, The View over Atlantis [Revised Edition.] (London: The Garnstone Press, 1972), 69. 3 Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track (London: Methuen and Co., 1925). 4 Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Edith Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, the foundational texts in this genre, were both published in 1906. 5 Lively, Whispering Knights, 141. 6 On Garner’s distaste for secondary world fantasy, see Charles Butler, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press/ChLA, 2006), 25-27. 7 Alan Garner, “A Bit More Practice,” Times Literary Supplement (6 June 1968), 577. 8 Alan Garner, Elidor (London: Fontana Lions, 1974), 25-26. 9 Garner, Elidor, 26. 10 Garner, Elidor, 32. 11 Garner, Elidor, 41. 12 Garner had already drawn on this poem, probably as he found it in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, in his previous book, The Moon of Gomrath, which makes use of another of the caers, Caer Rigor, as a realm of the blessed dead. See Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth [Amended and enlarged edition.] (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 107-108; Alan Garner, The Moon of Gomrath (London: Fontana Lions, 1972), 65-66. 2

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For example: The Candleman (1994), Belin’s Hill (1998) and Corbenic (2002). See Val Williamson, “Interview with an Author: Catherine Fisher,” in Nickianne Moody and Clare Horrocks, Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty First Century (Liverpool: Association for Research in Popular Fictions, 2005), 251-66: 260. 15 To complete the circle, Matthews has also written on Garner’s work, in “Threading the Maze: The Killing Ground,” in Grahame Barrasford Young and John Matthews, eds. Labrys 7: Alan Garner (Frome: Hunting Raven, 1981), 5-7. 16 John Matthews, Taliesin: the Last Celtic Shaman. Revised edition. (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2001), 41. 17 Catherine Fisher, Darkhenge (London: The Bodley Head, 2005), 287. 18 Matthews, Taliesin, 250-51. 19 See Michael Dames, The Avebury Cycle (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 20 Fisher, Darkhenge, 254. 21 Graves, The White Goddess, 103. 22 Fisher, Darkhenge, 295. 23 Fisher, Darkhenge, 314. 24 Garner, Elidor, 34. 25 For a detailed account of these disputes, see Matthew Champion, Seahenge: A Contemporary Chronicle (Aylsham: Barnwell’s Timescape Publishing, 2000), especially 42-65. 14

CHAPTER TWELVE PROCESSES AND METAPHORS: CONSTRUCTING PERCEPTIONS OF PREHISTORY BOB TRUBSHAW

In The Myths of Reality, Simon Danser offers an innovative overview of the social construction of reality thesis first proposed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in 1966 and substantially revised by John R. Searle as the construction of social reality in 1995.1 Danser’s main contribution is recognising that there is a discernible process (or, more accurately, a vast number of interwoven processes) which enables this construction. The most obvious and prevalent aspect of this process is the way “mythic fragments” are produced by the mass media. These fragments relate to much more substantial myths about reality which are rarely, if ever, encountered in their entirety. These fragments are exceptionally powerful ways of communicating “implicit” underlying beliefs. As Danser notes: Intriguingly, because we usually remain unaware of the “complete” myth to which the fragments allude, we remain unaware of the full extent of the ideologies which the fragments suggest, making the fragments especially effective at transmitting these ideologies unnoticed.2

In the modern world myths are almost always encountered in fragmentary form. In the realm of politics they can be evoked by slogans (“the war on terror”, “economic growth”, “free trade”) and allusions (“9–11”). Even single words such as “communism” or “democracy” shoulder an immense range of ideological associations. In the realm of archaeology words such as “Neolithic” are shorthand for a complex set of cultural and material concepts; furthermore the meaning of the word “Neolithic” changes over the decades so, for example, a 1950s

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archaeologist writing about the Neolithic is alluding to a different set of concepts than one writing recently. The less immediately obvious parts of the processes of social construction, but equally prevalent, are the conversations – one-to-one and one-to-many – which take place face-to-face and, increasingly, over the Internet. Such conversations are not mediated and may (although not always) reflect oppositional readings to the generally hegemonic myths of the media. For convenience Danser terms these “unmediated” face-to-face and Internet exchanges “folkloric transmission”, although it is important to emphasise that the content of such transmissions need not relate to anything that might be deemed “folklore”. Danser’s approach provides a stimulus to look at the processes of constructing and reconstructing our ideas about the past. As has long been recognised these are emphatically not a simplistic dualism where academics and heritage managers produce with “the public” merely consuming.3 Increasingly consumption is interwoven with production. Indeed, some “consumer groups” are capable of considerable production of meaning in their “consumption” and appropriation of prehistory, as Ronald Hutton has shown is the case with modern pagans.4 More recently, Robert Wallis and Jenny Blain have looked in detail at the way various contemporary paganisms are increasingly engaging with archaeological sites and constructing their own narratives and knowledge of such places. Pagans' narratives sometimes derive from academic interpretations and sometimes from concepts alien to academe, such as spirit beings, prehistoric goddesses and “Neolithic shamans”. Pagans may also introduce practices largely alien to academe, such as dowsing and seasonal rituals. As Wallis and Blain are fully aware, such pagan interpretations are a form of modern folklore – one which “appears to be eclipsing the old ‘folklore’ – dare we say it! – of traditional archaeology.”5 Wallis and Blain conclude that “sacredness” of prehistoric places is not defined by modern pagans but instead the sacredness is made evident by narratives which have meaning within the mythologies (which might also be thought of as meta-narratives) by which different groups construct their identity. The considerable plurality of meanings of “sacredness” which result from these narratives means that simple sacred:profane dualisms have been superseded by multiple pagan “folklores” – or meta-narratives – of “sacred sites”.6 I think it is fair to say that pagans interact less with the physical “prehistory” of a site than with their ideas about the site. A prehistoric site – restored or conserved to its present day existence – is used to signify specific cultural reconstructions of the past (perhaps better thought of as

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“simulations”). This is not something restricted to modern pagans. The heritage industry has long been creating such nostalgic simulations of the past. This is as true of prehistoric sites as it is for stately homes or decommissioned Cold War nuclear bunkers. Sacred places are best thought of as having purely mythological references to the past. Their physical presence is far less important than what the places signify. Their “true” age and the changes that led to their present day physical presence are rarely grasped in any meaningful way, instead they signify a vaguely defined past era, a soft focus blur of “oldness”, and the sacred sites are meaningful simply because a person feels “empowered” in some way by relating to that “oldness”. Such ideas lead to the well-rehearsed opinion that the consumption of ideas has become more important than our interaction with the natural and physical environment. This opinion can be traced back to Jean Baudrillard’s writings of the early 1980s.7 And we do not have to think of Disneyworld to see how consumption of the past becomes a major aspect of the production of how “the public” thinks about the past. Visitor centres and museums at major archaeological sites – such as Newgrange in Ireland and Avebury in Wiltshire – can also be regarded as influential producers of the ideas that “consumers” are encouraged to adopt about the past. Recreations of the past are differentiated from the present by a range of notions that broadly come together as “nostalgia”. Unlike more academic approaches to the past, where production and consumption of such recreations can be more clearly differentiated, the consumption of nostalgia is all but inseparable from its production. So popular ideas about prehistoric sacred places arise from neither the “pure production” of academe or the more blatant consumption of, say, Disneyland or visitors to National Trust stately homes. Everyone likes to think of visitors' centres, museum displays, guide books, interpretation boards and the like as essentially factual accounts, very much part of the production of “orthodox” ideas about the past, suitably enlivened for popular consumption. But there are enormous underlying ideologies inherent in the typical chronological account. Almost without exception interpretation proceeds from “earliest known” information about a place, then proceeds to an indeterminate cut-off date. For many prehistoric sites there may be little reference to the last 2,000 years, apart from any major activities by archaeologists. Even for medieval sites, such as castles, their post-medieval usage may be given scant attention. So the whole process of survival, partial restoration,

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consolidation of ruins, and the like – i.e. all the activities, intentional and accidental, that have determined the physical form of what the visitor is actually seeing – are usually swept aside. Even the act of writing historical accounts along a time line of “oldest first” is a fictional approach. To borrow the title of Tim Darvill’s contribution to this edition, the past is “right here, right now.” Selfevidently, the most recent changes at a site are the most conspicuous and, in the case of buried archaeology, the past is usually revealed in reverse chronology. Imposing narratives based on “and then” and “after that” is so ubiquitous, so “transparent”, that we forget that this is a narrative device inherent in human cognitive processes (and based on cultural presuppositions about causality) and the social construction of reality, and not something inherent in the nature of “right here, right now” reality. When such narratives are most fully developed they flower as myths. Among these are the orthodox myth of progress – and its antithesis and “excluded other”, alternative archaeologies’ myths of lost wisdom or a lost golden age. A closely associated myth is the romance of “discovery”. In these myths the past becomes something that in some way is distinct from the present moment, rather than the past existing only as it is recreated in the present, which means that past is essentially a reflection of current concerns, often in a process of mutual construction. Indeed, the more one looks at the way authors of guide books, interpretation panels and museum captions present their ideas, the more one sees affinities to historical novels and Hollywood epics – it is all mythmaking. Archaeological narratives (the more popular ones especially) emphasise the “romance of the past”, discovery and – if appropriate – spectacle. There is a spectrum of genres that overlap without any clear boundaries between excavation reports, academic overviews, tourist guides, quests for “lost wisdom”, adventure stories, historical novels and fantasy fiction. And the “romance” and sense of discovery and spectacle are present – explicitly or otherwise – in all these genres. More academic writing is especially devious as its mythmaking is subtly disguised by the impersonal idiom. However academics are undoubtedly “mythmakers”. As Adam Stout has argued in relation to Maiden Castle, even such committed proponents of materialistic and scientific archaeology as Sir Mortimer Wheeler could also construct sophisticated myths about the past based on 1930s concerns.8 The key idea of this paper is to show that this mythmaking about the past is a process. However, as with all abstract ideas, to discuss such processes we need to resort to metaphors borrowed from more established

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discourses I would like to explore a number of metaphors for how we construct our perceptions of prehistory. One of the more imaginative is Michael Shanks’ suggestion that the metaphor underlying the production of archaeological narratives is judicial. In other words, finds and other evidence enable the past to be “accused”, even though the accusations are Kafkaesque in their ambiguity, and the past never knows what charges the present day is pressing. Shanks then observes that a plethora of self-appointed judges arbitrate and pass sentence, only for the processes of appeal to review all such decisions.9 Another metaphor would be to think of a constant “conversation” between the past and the present. By “conversation” I mean the type of discussions where ideas are exchanged in a manner that results in what might be regarded as the “whole” at the end being greater than the “sum of the parts” at the beginning. This conversational interaction with the past changes the emphasis from clearly defined producers and consumers to an ongoing interaction where all consumers are also producers (albeit in some cases unwittingly quite naïve and ill-informed) and those who might be traditionally considered as producers could more usefully be thought of as more informed consumers. These metaphors about the processes of constructing meaning and significance about the past might lead to the well-known metaphor that the past is akin to a book that has no author but only readers. But I prefer to think that the past is less like a book than a game, so the past has not so much readers as players – but no referee. Even the rules are the same as those created by the cartoonist Bill Watterson for the “Calvin Ball” game in the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip: First rule: The only rule is there are no rules. Second rule: Each game has its own rules.

May I suggest that these two rules might be excellent rules for the game called “the cultural reception of prehistory”. Whichever metaphor we prefer for the processes of constructing our perceptions of prehistory, the key issue is recognising that these processes are fundamental to the construction of the past, not some sort of secondary epiphenomenona. We are accustomed to thinking of archaeology as materialistic, with the emphasis on objects and places. But the processes by which we produce and consume our understanding of prehistory are essentially idealistic approaches to the past – how we think about the past, how we intentionally or otherwise recreate the past based on present day concepts and concerns. And this means that what we know about the past

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is of far less significance than what we believe about the past. And that applies just as much to academics as it does to, say, pagans; clear evidence for this statement can be found in the analyses of nineteenth century and early twentieth century archaeology made in other contributions to this volume At the risk of using one metaphor too many, may I conclude by suggesting that our beliefs about the past – and our beliefs about appropriate approaches – might best be thought of as akin to a toolbox. Just as different tools help us achieve different tasks, so a “toolbox” of different beliefs allows us to access different pasts. A mix-and-match attitude to beliefs (and, indeed, entire belief systems) enables one person to recreate the past in a greater variety of different ways. Some of these ways will be more relevant than others, depending on what objectives the person has at the time. So just as a hammer is not the best tool for putting in screws, so the belief systems of an excavation team are not the best for celebrating seasonal festivals inspired by any solar alignments at the site – and vice versa. However seductive these metaphors may – or may not – be, they are ways of thinking about the complex processes by which myths about the past (usually encountered as mythic fragments) engage with face-to-face and Internet exchanges of ideas (which Danser calls “folkloric transmission”). From these processes we construct – indeed, continually reconstruct – an ever-increasing variety of perceptions of prehistory. These perceptions are fragmentary views of underlying belief systems, whether academic, pagan or whatever. Who is producing and who is consuming is often difficult to discern and often irrelevant. Instead, these different beliefs offer different “tools” which access different perceptions of prehistory (or, at least, significantly different emphases about the past). Any one “snapshot” of this vigorous process is rather like taking a whirlpool home in bucket – the dynamic process is replaced by stasis. In Sacred Places: Prehistory and Popular Imagination, I show how different “tools” have been applied to a variety of sacred places in the British Isles.10 As an example, these include my own relationship with Avebury, which began in the late 1970s with the ideas of Michael Dames, then progressed in the mid-1990s to evaluating Chris Tilley’s suggestions about intentionally-obscured visibility when approaching along the Avenue, and acting as occasional “tour guide” attempting to assimilate and impart both orthodox and less orthodox interpretations about the monuments, and taking part in seasonal Druidic rituals.11 Furthermore, ever since my first visit, in addition to the ideas which can be expressed verbally, a life-long involvement with photography means I have actively

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sought visual “metaphors” for the many different meanings and significances which Avebury evokes. These are the main strands of my thirty-year “conversation” with Avebury or, if you prefer, the main “players” in my game of the cultural perception of this prehistoric monument, or the most-used “implements” in my personal tool box of belief systems about the past. As I continue to visit Avebury, and other prehistoric sites, I am sure this process will continue to adapt, enabling further meanings and significances to be constructed. However I am just one among the many people with equally varied perceptions of the prehistory of Avebury who continually contribute to the construction and re-construction of our perceptions of this prehistoric site and many other such places. The processes by which all these different perceptions interact so far lack a clear identity of their own and in consequence attempts to conceptualise the processes are metaphorical rather than literal descriptions. One aspect of these processes is selfconsciously thinking about constructing perceptions of prehistory as processes and the metaphors employed to conceptualise them. The “mythical fragments” examined by other contributors to this edition and the “folkloric transmission” between those authors, which took place during the conference that preceded publication, are a microcosm of the wider processes of constructing perceptions of prehistory.

Notes 1

Simon Danser, The Myths of Reality (Wymeswold: Alternative Albion, 2005); Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Simon and Schuster, 1995). 2 Danser, 2004, p.13. 3 See, for instance, Michael Shanks, Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology, (London: Routledge, 1992). 4 See Ronald Hutton, The Prehistoric Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 5 Robert J. Wallis and Jenny Blain, “Sites, Sacredness and Stories: Interactions of Archaeology and Contemporary Paganism”, Folklore 114:3 (2003), 307–322, p. 314. 6 Wallis and Blain, p. 318. 7 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Semiotext(e) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal (London: Pluto, 1999); Baudrillard, Simulacra

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and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 8 In a paper at the conference “The Cultural Reception of Prehistoric Monuments”, University of Bristol, 2006. 9 Shanks, 1992, p. 54. 10 Bob Trubshaw, Sacred Places: Prehistory and Popular Imagination (Wymeswold: Heart of Albion, 2004). 11 Michael Dames, Silbury Treasure (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976); Dames, The Avebury Cycle (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape (Oxford: Berg, 1994).

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CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Butler is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of the West of England. Since 2000, his research has focused on children’s fiction. He is also the author of six novels for children. His current research is focused on the uses of history in children’s literature. Timothy Darvill is Professor of Archaeology in the School of Conservation Sciences at Bournemouth University. He is the author of over a dozen books on prehistory, has served as Chairman of the Institute of Field Archaeologists, and has directed recent excavations at Stonehenge. Jeremy Harte is an author and historian whose research is focused on folklore and archaeology. His publications include Cuckoo Pounds and Singing Barrows, The Green Man, and Explore Fairy Traditions, which won the Folklore Society’s 2005 Katharine Briggs award for best book on folklore. He is also curator of Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey. Ronald Hutton is Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs. He is also the leading historian of the ritual year in Britain and of modern paganism. Mark Gillings is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. The author of several books, he is an expert on the uses of Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology, and was involved in a major programme of fieldwork at Avebury between 1997 and 2004. his current research is focused on the megalithic settings of Exmoor. David Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Landscape and Englishness (1998), and his recent work includes 'Properties of Ancient Landscape: The Present Prehistoric in Twentieth-Century Breckland', in the Journal of Historical Geography (2008).

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Contributors

Neil Mortimer is a Managing Editor of Time & Mind: the Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. He recently co-edited (with Aubrey Burl) Stukeley's Stonehenge: An Unpublished Manuscript, 17211724, published by Yale University Press, and is the former Editor of archaeology and folklore magazine 3rd Stone. Joanne Parker is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, and a regular journalist/reviewer for the popular press. Her first book, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great, is published by Manchester University Press. Joshua Pollard is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Bristol. His research is focused on the British and North-West European Neolithic, and in recent years he has been particularly involved in fieldwork around Avebury and Stonehenge. He has authored/co-authored seven books on British prehistory. Sam Smiles is Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth. His research concentrates on British art, especially in the period 1750-1850 but also including aspects of the modern movement. He has published widely on Turner, and has curated five exhibitions in the UK. He is currently researching the ‘late work’ of artists. Shelley Trower is a post-doctoral research assistant at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus, working on the AHRC funded ‘Mysticism, Myth and “Celtic” Nationalism’ project. She is also an associate lecturer at the University of Plymouth and part of the committee of the Oral History Society. Recent publications include a special issue of The Senses and Society, 'Vibratory Movements' (2008), for which she is guest editor. Bob Trubshaw’s interests in archaeology, folklore, mythology and cultural studies over the last thirty years have resulted in a number of articles and books, most of which attempt to popularise current academic thinking. His main activity is running Heart of Albion Press (www.hoap.co.uk). Andy Worthington is a freelance historian. He is the author of Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and the editor of The Battle of the Beanfield. His latest book, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, was published by Pluto Press in October 2007.