Arctic henge

Thanks to the diligent and hard work of Clonehenge, we have a really good understanding of Stonehenge replicas and pastiches from across the world. There are a surprisingly large number of these, over 100 (!!), from complete and partial replications of the original monument itself, to installations and structures inspired by those (in)famous trilithons in a range of different materials. “Clonehenge covers replicas and models of Stonehenge from the sublime to the ridiculous” is the very fair claim made on the blog site that curates all of this information. I’ve been thinking about Stonehenge replicas in the past few years with Rebecca Younger, and others have been researching the phenomenon, such as cultural geographer Tim Edensor who has written about the controversial Achill Henge in Ireland (Edensor and Smith 2020). So when I was holidaying in northern Iceland in the summer of 2023, I just had to take the opportunity to visit the most northerly franchise of Stonehenge – Arctic Henge!

OK, as Clonehenge notes, this is not an actual replica of Stonehenge. “Not in the sense we’ve been using for that term until now, but at winter solstice the resemblance comes to the fore. Like Stonehenge they seem to forge a bond between us as entities of the landscape and the dance of the bodies in the dome above us”. So this megalithic structure takes inspiration from aspects of that weird stone circle in Wiltshire, has trilithons of a sort and uses the -henge suffix.

By way of digression before we get into the detail of Arctic Henge, this reminds me that in the summer of 2009 Jan and I visited Stonehenge Aoteroa, a replica of Stonehenge to the north of Wellington in New Zealand.

Rather like the Sighthill stone circle in Glasgow, this monument is very much astronomically focused, although there are also embedded within its architecture the presentation of Māori stories about the skies and constellations.

This makes me wonder if Jan and I are two of the few people in the world who have achieved the hat-trick of visiting the most northerly and the most southerly Stonehenge replicas in the world as well as the original Stonehenge. This should become a thing except for the appalling carbon footprint of doing it. Bad me.

Anyway, back to Arctic Henge, a remarkable work in progress that appears to be a valiant attempt to get more people to visit a rather remote corner of Iceland, the small town of Raufarhöfn, the most northerly town and within 8km of the actual Arctic circle.

The monument – also known as Heimskautsgerðið – was the vision of the late Erlingur Thoroddsen, working with artist Haukur Halldórsson, with the idea emerging in the 1990s and construction beginning in 2004. The monument is tied up in complex Icelandic dwarf symbology and mythology, as well as having solstice alignments built into its form. The whole story can be found here, and so I won’t go into huge amounts of detail here, as the vision and plans for this monument are a bit bamboozling.

The monument is connected to 72 dwarves, each allocated a different five days of the year, with “the four cardinal dwarves of Norse mythology, Austri, Norðri, Suðri and Vestri … befittingly face their namesake, east, north, south and west”. There are a whole host of other dwarves, none of them called Sneezy, and the website for the monument leaves it ambiguous as to what this all actually means although everyone should be able to work out who their dwarf is based on birthdate I think, a nice gimmick that deserves merch. There are also allusions to ‘endless horizons’ (true although it was foggy all of the time we were there), the midnight sun, and solstices – the circle being characterised as a ‘sun dial’.

The 72 dwarves, I can’t find the source so if this is yours please let me know!

The monument is some 50m in diameter, and is dominated by four enormous pairs of pillars which form ‘gates’ with an even bigger central setting. I assume they are made of blocks of lava. These are the most recognisable elements of Arctic Henge, often shown in photos with the Northern Lights playing in the background.

(c) Hotel Northern Lights

The biggest of these sits in the centre of the circle, formed of four angular arches. This facilitates the four site lines across the monuments so that the monument can be used to view solstice events through the legs of the gates as it were. It also has a wee tiny hole in the middle in the top.

As noted already, this is a work in progress. Money seems to have dried up and crowdfunding is being used to try and move things along. You can donate here, apparently the project only needs 1.3 million dollars to be completed. There is no doubt that a lot of work needs to be done when one sees the final vision for this place.

Central structure being erected (Arctic Henge website)

During our visit we stayed at the nearby Hotel Northern Lights (Hótel Norðurljós), and in the lobby there were plans and even a model of the Henge which hinted at Thoroddsen’s vision.

In fact he owned the hotel and so in part I suppose this was to drum up business for this rather austere property – and perhaps to provide entertainment as THERE ARE NO TELEVISIONS IN THE ROOMS!! He told Meet the North in an interview not long before he passed away that he wanted to reverse the fortunes of this small town that has been in steady decline since the collapse of the herring industry in the 1960s. I love people like this – visionaries who ignore conventional logic to make their dream happen. The replica Stonehenge world has a lot of folk like this.

Erlingur B. Thoroddsen (source: Meet the North)

Images online confirm the scale of what this monument might one day look like, such as this one from the Iceland Dream website (original source unknown but it is clearly based on the model pictured above).

When (if, rather than when works better I fear) finished it will include a circle of 68 small standing stone – the non-cardinal dwarves with weird names – and the official website for the project suggests that the whole 10m high central edifice would one day be topped with a “cut prism-glass that splits up the sunlight unto the primary colors [sic]”. I guess that explains the wee hole.

It is all very tantalising! Here’s another visualisation from Bensozia blog, again artist unknown.

And this image, reproduced by Clonehenge, was once on the official website (no more) and shows other proposed weird internal features:

This, then, is an epic project in a crazy place and I suppose a parallel might be the never-ending construction of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, although Thoroddsen himself saw a closer parallel – Stonehenge itself. He told Meet the North that, “It took 1,500 years to finish Stonehenge,” and in this sense, he is correct. Because Stonehenge was always a work in progress. It was never finished in the conventional sense of what we mean by that word, and a series of eccentric and impractical visionaries probably drove the project on crowdsourcing labour and big standing stones. But in all likelihood whatever the final, final vision might have been was unachievable.

Visiting the site is in itself a powerful experience regardless of the weather. The huge gate structures dwarf (no pun intended) and overlook the village as you drive towards it from the south.

As noted already, when we visited, there was a lot of low cloud and that sort of unpleasant cold rain slapped our faces as we left the car to inspect a frankly glorious information panel in a lay by near the site.

From there we walked up to the site, a few hundred metres away up a gentle slope, some of it with a path. The first thing that struck me was the massive car park that has been constructed here, which literally is visible from space if you count google earth as space. This seems to me the very definition of a white elephant, but perhaps aspirational would be a better expression. There is no harm, I suppose, in planning for some future problem parking scenario. It is difficult to see this ever being full. We visited in the middle of summer and there was no-one else there.

And yes, the site is a work in progress, and there was evidence for quite recent activity around the boardwalk that takes one from the massive car park up to the monument itself. Some elements seemed fairly freshly worked on, and there were a lot of blue pipes knocking about.

Once up on the site, it proved to be endlessly photogenic as one might imagine. There were stunning views and juxtapositions in almost all directions, the dramatic megaliths working perfectly in harmony with the grey sky and the Fargo-esque town next door. The lack of visitors in contrast to actual Stonehenge was refreshing.

We were also able to appreciate some of the less commonly photographed elements of the monument, such as a rickle of stones that ran around its circumference, and random piles of stone. There is a wonderful organic emergent quality to this place, and despites its final form being pre-destined like the movement of the sun, when you are in this place anything seems possible.

And there is no doubt that Arctic Henge is working hard to put Raufarhöfn on the map. The images of the gates (sometimes with northern lights) are well on the way to becoming iconic, a synecdoche for the monument as a whole (as with the Stonehenge trilithons). They appear in advertising for instance such as the cover of this brochure I picked up in Akureyri. And entry is free – I wonder if there are any plans to change this in the future?

And of course the monument features heavily in travel books and guides, such as the Atlas Obscura, and below there is an extract from a glossy but rather content-light guide book called Hidden Iceland (Michael Chapman, 2022); the description suggests the author did not actually visit. Then there is TripAdvisor (‘#1 of 7 things to do in Raufarhöfn’) with 45 reviews at the time of writing (27-01-23), only five of them Poor (“Bizarre pile of rocks” which is very similar to a few reviews I’ve read of actual Stonehenge!). This is a monument that is only going to get more visits in the future with the north coastal route of Iceland (Arctic Coast Way) now being marketed as an off-the-beaten track version of the more familiar A1 ring road route. It might even be reachable from cruise ships, which brings mixed blessings to megaliths in places like Orkney. The downside is that it is challenging to get to without a car.

Some folk will make the trek, and there they will find a relatively new megalithic monument in harmony with its environment and its community. This lovely A3 poster advertising the facilities of Raufarhöfn was freely available from the hotel reception and suggests, like many megalithic monuments, that it can add to a sense of pride in a place.

It reframes the view that I shared earlier, with the stone structures lying behind the town. Here, we have the town viewed almost through a megalithic prism, with the promise of an actual prism to come in the future.

It is not Stonehenge. It doesn’t look like Stonehenge. But it uses the -henge brand both for marketing but also to give a sense of what this place might be about. Some visitors might be left disappointed by the lack of Stonehengeiness of this place, while others will see it for what it is – a magical vision in stone.

It is not easy to get here, but by goodness it is worth it!

NB This is my third Iceland blog post – here are the others if you are interested:

Nothing BC (UP blog post 62)

An archaeology of artificial geysers (UP blog post 161)

Sources and acknowledgements: I would firstly like to state my admiration of Clonehenge as a project and concept, such a valuable and amazing resource! I would also like to thank Rebecca Younger, we have had a lot of henge conversations over the years. Sorry I got to Arctic Henge before you!! Photos with no credits were taken by Jan Brophy and I.

Source mentioned: Edensor, T & Smith, TSJ 2020 Commemorating economic crisis at a liminal site: memory, creativity and dissent at Achill Henge, Ireland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38.3, 567-84 (if you want a pdf of this paper, email me! kenny.brophy@glasgow.ac.uk – as it is not open access).

Incandescence

The Sighthill stone circle is back in business. Glasgow’s newest megalith, constructed in AD2019 from stones that recently formed a slightly different stone circle that lasted from 1979 to 2016, is now open to the public and available for whatever Glaswegians want to do inside it. The fences have come down, the bridge connection to the city centre has been re-made, and the relationship between standing stone and the sky can now resume.

Spring 2023 – new bridge, M8, stone circle encircled in red (after ReGlasgow)

This stunning image from ReGlasgow shows the emergent urban edgeland landscape that the stone circle now finds itself within, no longer in a park but rather in a landscaped corner of a new housing development. Embedded within the community, ready and willing to be put to use. This is a huge opportunity to see how a stone circle can benefit a new urban community (albeit it a very different community to the one that was moved out to allow this new development to happen), and I am curious to follow its journey in the coming years.

Still from a 3D model of Sighthill stone circle 2.0 (University of Glasgow / Tessa Poller)

One of the uses of the stone circle – hard-wired into the monument by the creator of both incarnations, Duncan Lunan – is as an astronomical observatory (listen to much more about the circles’s history on the Stone Me podcast), and so when Duncan asked me (and some others) to take some photos at the circle on or around the 2023 solstices, it was the first chance to test and document Duncan’s arrangement of the monument without having to ask permission or climb through a gap in a fence. Aside from the summer solstice being horribly early in the morning, this seemed like an easy task.

It was also a great opportunity to visit the stone circle to document another key skyscape event, having been at the earlier incarnation of the circle for a partial eclipse of the sun on 20th March 2015 and Spring Equinox on 20th March 2016.

Archaeologist Gavin MacGregor preparing for the eclipse at Sighthill stone circle 1.0

Spring Equinox, 2016, me being interviewed by Grahame Gardner (photo: Jan Brophy)

For the summer solstice, we were given helpful instructions by Duncan, namely to stand with my back to the centre stone (serving as a backsight) and look to the horizon eastwards. The sun should rise soon after 4.30am right over a small standing stone within a setting of three, the marker stone. Make the foreground darker, ensure the globe of the sun is clear, and get snappy.

Coincidentally this marker stone was numbered Stone 001 during a baseline photography survey of the circle I did in September 2021 before I had worked out its actual job title.

Jan and I visited the stone circle on the Saturday before the solstice to get our heads around the horizon views and where to stand for photos. This was the first time we had been since the fence came down and it was a joyful experience.

The three urban prehistorians (photo: Jan Brophy)

I was further prepared for the early morning task by preparatory photographs sent to me by Duncan and a plot showing the route of the sun prepared by Grahame Gardner aka Western Geomancy.

Summer solstice sunrise at the old stone circle (c) Duncan Lunan

Midsummer sunset during construction of circle 2.0 (c) Gerry Cassidy

(c) Duncan Lunan

(c) Grahame Gardner

All that could stop me now was the weather and so it proved with a mediocre cloudy misty forecast for the actual solstice itself, 22nd June 2023. The next morning looked a lot more promising so we set the alarm for 330am and had an earlyish night. We arrived about ten past 4 and Grahame was already there with a timelapse camera set-up.

There followed a period of time that was profoundly exciting and frustrating, waiting for the sun, hoping that clouds would not obscure the view, becoming curiously annoyed at the dawn for not breaking, almost as if its being late meant that it might never happen.

Cameras were fiddled with. Mobile phones consulted. Diagrams and photos of solstice events in the past were checked and double-checked. Just in case. Killing time waiting for some magic to happen.

(c) Jan Brophy

Waiting in the orange glow of anticipation.

(c) Jan Brophy

The day got impossibly bright for a sky with no sun in it. The allotted time had passed. Maybe the sun had come up and we just couldn’t see it? A guy in lycra riding a bike arrived and he got his camera out too. Fiddling and waiting, waiting and fiddling. Fiddling while the sky burned.

Then something special started to happen.

(c) Grahame Gardner

Seconds of relief that an entirely predictable event that could not fail to happen was now happening. Giving over quickly to emotion, joy, awe, magic, an overwhelming sense that this was truly special and that this was a perfect moment in the perfect place to experience this moment. A moment that all three of us were able to record although this was not a time for staring at screens or through viewfinders any more than necessary.

(c) Grahame Gardner

(c) Jan Brophy

The guy who had come on his bike casually leaned on a standing stone, almost as if it has been designed for this purpose, and took in the awesome sight.

As the sun painstakingly climbed in the sky, what most struck me was the curious way that it was both moving unbelievably slowly, but at the same time going very fast. Relative to the centre of the galaxy, the sun is moving at 200km per second. Here on earth we orbit around the sun at 107,000 km per hour (source). None of these dizzying speeds was apparent of course, our minds and eyes unable to comprehend such space mechanics. On the horizon it looked like a bright orange bug climbing up a blueish window, a casually tossed smartie in slow motion about to describe a parabola in the sky.

The orb’s brightness has an incredible intensity, although we could still look at it. The orange-ness was remarkable, quite unlike the yellow of a summer day sun. It was only getting warmed up, but already the sky was on fire.

The virginal sun cast almost no shadows, something that surprised us. This is because Duncan had asked for us to document some other effects that had been built into the stone circle: “A shot of the shadow of the marker stone on the central stone, and one of the central stone’s shadow on the southeast solar stone, would also be good”. Sorry Duncan, no can do!

Midsummer sunrise 1992, southeast quadrant shadow (c) Duncan Lunan

I’ve often wondered about the relationship between shadows and standing stones, and how this might have been exploited, and understood in prehistory. So it is interesting that this phenomenon has been built into the monument as well. Pity it was not apparent that morning.

So – Sighthill stone circle works. Not that we needed to get up before 4am to prove that. The effect that we saw that summer morning was of course pure science and mathematics masquerading as theatre. What we saw was built into the monument, which was designed to work this way and it was not possible that any other outcome could have happened. The prefigured nature of all of this is humbling, a level of reliability that we rarely find these days.

(c) Duncan Lunan

The nature of stone circles and the sun is that they never stop interacting and so this will all happen again and again for centuries (here’s an account from 2010), but also in different ways during the solar cycle. However, the sky does not always play ball.

Mission 2 (which I chose not to accept because I missed the email!) was for the equinox sunrise on 23rd September at 7.04am. This time the sun would rise above a car showroom to the east of the stone circle. Duncan hoped that we could go along in case he could not make it.

(c) Duncan Lunan

In the end only Grahame was there, and it was cloudy.

The same fate befell us on the second solstice day of the year – winter solstice in December 22nd 2023. This time the opportunity arose for both sunrise and sunset solstices without this being too long a day as it was not a long day, the going up of the sun and the setting of the same being only around 7 hours apart.

As before, Duncan had primed us with some visual aids.

Winter solstice sunrise primer (c) Duncan Lunan

Winter solstice sunset primer (c) Duncan Lunan

Plan of version 1 of the circle with solstices highlighted (Dave McClymont)

But the weather forecast was not promising for a week either side of the solstice and so my visit on the morning of 22/12/23 was dark, drizzly and disappointing. Except visiting this stone circle is never really a disappointment despite the dreary weather and the motorway noise. I was right there on the border between day and night, prehistory and the present.

A recently worn desire line, probably left by a cyclist passing through the circle (maybe lycra guy from the summer solstice), pointed the way towards reflected early daylight on residential windows, the circle overlooked by Christmas trees and faintly illuminated by urban electric lighting. But the sun did not make an appearance at dawn or dusk that day.

Such is the fate of heavenly bodies, not always observable for very human, or meteorological reasons. But Sighthill is a stone circle for all seasons, and many archaeoastronomical observations. It works and I would encourage anyone who has not done so before to get out of bed early, get to the circle, and wait for the sun. This stone circle might be urban, and it might be less than five years old, but when megaliths and the sun get together, age and location no longer matter.

Acknowledgements – I would like to thank Duncan Lunan for his advice and help, and for trusting me to do some of this recording for him. He also provided many of the images used in this blog, reproduced with permission and relevant picture credits in captions. Thanks also to Jan and Grahame for being there!

Worth noting that one of my pictures of the summer solstice was used in this Glasgow Live story uncredited, not the first time they have done this to me…

Contemporary pagans

On Saturday 25th November 2023, I took part in a fascinating day-long workshop called Sacred Dichotomies. This was organised by Dr Yael Dansac, Centre for Interdisciplinary Study of Religions and Secularism, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Prof Scott Spurlock, Professor of Scottish and Early Modern Christianities, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow. The theme of this event was, to simplify somewhat, contemporary pagans, as expressed in the call for papers, reproduced in full below – so the words in italics are not mine!

Sacred Dichotomies: Time and Space in Contemporary Pagan Rituals

In Western societies, the term Contemporary Paganism encompasses a large variety of religious and spiritual practices that value animistic and pantheistic worldviews, promote interactions with other-than human beings, emphasize ecological consciousness, stress inter-connectedness of all things, and are inspired by pre-Christian religions. Applying creativity and reflexivity, adherents of this heterogeneous and globalized phenomenon design and perform ritual practices to experience their spirituality. Pagan rituals comprise acts of sacralization, which according to Veikko Antonnen (2005) “make distinctions between spaces, mark them for specific uses, create visible and invisible boundaries, and establish cultural conventions of behaviour to deal with those boundaries”. Additionally, to design a Pagan ceremony is generally to invoke a sacred/profane dichotomy where specific spaces and dates are considered quintessential for engaging in ritual actions and communicating with the divine. Paradoxically, this binary construct seems to run up against Pagan holistic worldviews. This workshop seeks to address temporal and spatial dimensions of contemporary Pagan rituals, as well as to explore the dichotomies and paradoxes of their social construction. We invite you to propose a paper that deals with these issues using various theoretical and methodological approaches: from ritual theory, cognitive theory, and phenomenology to historiography and ethnography. We want to place particular emphasis on the relations between sacred space materiality and immateriality, ritual improvisation and prescription, and sacralisation of time.

The organisers very kindly invited me to give a talk as part of this workshop and I was – never wanting to miss a chance to hear my own voice for 25 minutes – happy to accept.

The programme for the day was really strong, with a nice range of experienced and early career researchers, and a good balance of topics thematically arranged. The format was simple – each hour two papers were given, and a discussant followed up with thoughts to stimulate discussion. There was also a keynote paper to start the day.

I don’t want to review the whole day here in much detail, suffice it to say that it was stimulating, interesting and nicely inter-disciplinary. I was especially fascinated by talks on aspects of digital paganism by Edinburgh PhD researchers Joe Sedgwick and Katie Lawrence. Joe introduced me to the book Cyberhenge (Robert Cowan, 2005) which I had somehow never heard of before! It also struck me as very interesting that some of the participants self-identified as a pagan or a druid. Even as I listened to the morning session, I mentally re-wrote parts of my paper to the extent that I had to disappear at lunchtime to find a keyboard and a printer.

In the afternoon a theme continued that had been evident in the morning too – archaeological sites, especially megaliths, came up all of the time! (Read my thoughts on this below.) Stone circles, standing stones, dolmen, passage graves, all that jazz. In the afternoon Dr Jenny Butler (University College Cork) gave a really nice talk about Fairy Places, Power Centres and Otherworldly Time in Contemporary Irish Pagan Rituals and there was a lot of prehistory in there.

My largely incoherent notes from Dr Butler’s lecture

Yael Dansac presented a frankly fantastic ethnographic study of Crawick Multiverse, Charles Jencks’ monumental art-complex in SW Scotland that I have blogged about before. Yael’s research should be better known amongst archaeologists!

For the remainder of this post, I reproduce my notes from the day, and I have included some links to the case study sites rather than write even more words in this post. These are very much – largely unedited – my initial thoughts on this matter, which were somewhat chaotically arranged over several pieces of paper, and through time I hope to refine my argument. I have made some minor edits to the text due to grammatical or egregious errors, adding notes in parenthesis for clarity in places [italicised], and the conclusion is transcribed loosely from my written notes made just before I spoke. I’ve included a few of my slides as well but not all of them.

Pagan interactions with modern and urban standing stones (presented at Sacred Dichotomies, 25-11-2023 in Glasgow; note change in title from the programme)

Introduction

It is really interesting being here today as an archaeologist! Many of the speakers today have been talking about places I think of an ‘archaeological sites’ and prehistoric monuments – stone circles, standing stones etc. And the interesting thing is that the kinds of information that archaeologists know and surmise about these monuments has relatively little or indeed nothing to do with the ‘big tent’ (as it was put earlier) of pagan or pagan-esque practices. There is a complete disconnect between our prehistoric narratives and the layers of spiritual meaning that different individuals and groups afford to megalithic monuments today. This is healthy and I am pleased that there has been no real sense that the prehistoric uses and meanings of these monuments represents a continuity of practice with druid and pagan groups today.

Archaeologists have a good deal of expertise in terms of prehistoric monuments, although we don’t have all the answers. But this does not mean that we shut down other forms of knowledge, or control contemporary practices that don’t align with standard heritage discourse except where there is a chance of damage being done to a site or the more general heavy handed control of totemic sites like Stonehenge. So I’m not here today to suggest pagans are wrong! [I’m not sure how clear this point is but I’ll let it stand]

Rather, I want to come at this from my own research into the contemporary archaeology of prehistory – my contention being that prehistoric sites, monuments and things are resilient and retain a relevance and visibility today. 

I want to explore some of the issues raised by the organisers in relation to my experience of contemporary pagan practices at a range of megalithic prehistoric sites – stone circles, standing stones, passage graves and so. Here, I am taking a broad view of what might be considered pagan practice, from big P formal rituals and ceremonies, through to the much more common small p sets of practices that align in some way with emotional or spiritual engagements with standing stones.

I also don’t care if the standing stone was erected in 2500BC or 10 years ago – we heard this morning about the Gorsedd stones [from discussant Prof Andrew Prescott, who made the point that the late 19th century adoption of this tradition does not nullify its druidical significance].

What I want to do is present some examples of what we might term a contemporary archaeology of pagan-esque practices at stone circles and standing stones. This draws on methodologies such as psychogeography, archival research, interviews, repeat visits, collecting found objects, and sometimes even actual archaeological fieldwork.

 I will argue, from my own fieldwork and experiences, that actions that we might interpret as being pagan, or pagan-adjacent, are carried out for a variety of different motivations, in some cases genuinely spiritual in nature, in other cases cosplaying paganism [and here I don’t mean to cause offence, I see this as a positive], or having nothing to do with paganism at all.

This is perhaps all the more unusual as one might imagine that activities that have a pagan character might focus on rural locations

Not ‘fake stone circles. Not standing stones in towns. So my examples will include ancient and modern megaliths.

General observations from my own experiences

I guess I should start with some general observations about a range of contemporary pagan-esque practices that I have witnessed or documented evidence for at a wide range of stone circles and standing stones.

For me this often seems to involve acting out tropes associated with pagan practices and rites at places and monuments that have a popular association with paganism – these are likely to involve actions that are assumed to be pagan in nature and might even be believed to have happened at these places in the past despite archaeological evidence sometimes to the contrary

This might include deposition of offerings, flowers, objects, written notes and could be accompanied by dressing up, performance, music and / or ceremony / rites – or other actions such as hugging or climbing stones, or using monuments to monitor the annual cycle and skyscape events

So such actions as these might happen at specific times of the year that could be regarded as spiritually significant or have some resonance in folklore – solstices, equinoxes, Samhain, litha, beltane

Or could relate to formalised ceremonies related to rites of passage and the life cycle such as marriages, hand-fasting, cremation scattering.

And they may involve interactions with heavenly bodies – solstice sun rises and sunsets, eclipses, full moons, unusual moon phenomenon e.g. harvest moons, constellations, planets, northern lights

Evidence for these activities can be found at many stone circles, passage graves, and stone circles today – in the form of deposited objects such a coins and shells, candles, incense sticks, wear patterns but also evidence of more invasive forms of activity

Some of these can and do damage prehistoric monuments, such as fire-setting, lit candles, jamming coins in cracks in tombs and standing stones, graffiti, removal of objects and fragments [Jenny Butler also reminded me on the day that practices such as pouring liquids from alcohol to milk onto ancient sites might also be damaging]

[Also worth noting that some of these acts are heritage crimes, not to get all serious]

Archaeologists have not done a huge amount of research into these types of contemporary engagements with ‘our’ monuments although they are in some cases ongoing management concerns. In this sense archaeologists can be gate-keepers – managing access, deciding what is and what is not permissible, controlling narratives about how these monuments might have been used in the past

There has been limited research into phenomenon such as deposition. Bradley included a nice two page study based on his experiences at Balnuaran of Clava during his excavations there in late 1990s recording placement of coins in cracks, gemstones laid at the base of standing stones, and noting seemingly meaningful assemblages e.g. “a coin and a dowsing rod placed beside a glacial erratic in line with the entrance passage” / wing of a pigeon laid out in a chamber. [This monument has more recently become a focus for Outlander pilgrimages]

Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey has, so I have been told, to be regularly clearer out of all manner of offerings that are associated with druid activity and the solstice connections that this site has [for examples see this Howard Williams’ blog post]

On a visit to West Kennet a few years ago I found candles and incense sticks, but what are the motivations to leave this stuff behind? In that case it was because some random guy had been sleeping in the tomb – it was his source of light.

Blain and Wallis (2004, 240) [citation in acknowledgements] argue that motivations for such acts are complex and they are often improvised: “pagans are constructing their own forms of worship or engagement with sites and spirits”.

Motivations for pagan-esque activity at stone circles and standing stones

It is clear that not all of this is truly the outcome of contemporary paganism – there are other communities who carry out these kinds of activities for a host of other reasons and it is not always easy to detect the motivations of those who carry out such actions from the material remains alone – this requires additional research such as participant observation, interviews and monitoring social media

Astronomical events are documented at stone circles and tombs for astronomical study and archaeoastronomy

Offerings can be left at stone circles, standing stones and tombs to memorialise and remember deceased relatives and loved ones, or may be left for some specific reason e.g. to memorialise persecuted witches – and there are also examples of ‘time capsules’ buried at modern stone circles – and deposition can also have political motivations (such as Aye Stones left at Sighthill stone circle recently, or deposition on the Auld Acquaintance cairn, Gretna]

Such offerings might also relate to TV shows and films that have been shot at these sites or associated with them, from the Rollright stones and Dr Who, to random associations with Outlander as noted above at Clava

Or relate to acts of vandalism and anti-social behaviour around such monuments – candles in long cairns such as West Kennet are as likely to relate to someone sleeping in the tomb overnight as pagan practices and I quite commonly find broken beer bottles at the base of standing stones, perhaps thrown at the stone. Some people are just arseholes

Ceremonies, dressing up, and music might be related to more creative practices and this perhaps coincides with an increasing public interest in the last few years in standing stones and stone circles as places of enchantment – this has elements of both the esoteric and occult, but also has a hobbyist nature – the rise of Stone Club, the entanglement of prehistoric sites into folk horror narratives via zines such as Hellebore, stone circles and haunted generation narratives drawing on 1970s TV shows, and a slew of new films and TV shows featuring standing stones – Enys Men, A year in a field, Dr Who (again). In other words visiting stone circles and standing stones and doing things at them has become fashionable again – and some of this activity very much draws on the same tropes of rites, deposition, performance, ceremony – often in a highly stylised and creative form, a sort of hyper-paganism that is not pagan at all.

It should also be noted that there is some evidence that dressing up, rites and performances at some megaliths are motivated by blood and soil nationalism and neo-norse beliefs, which can be twisted versions of paganism

In other words there are pagan adjacent actions carried out at stone circles and standing stones that are not spiritual, but derived from a series of other motivations; however they can use the trappings of, or cliches derived from, paganism

In many cases from my experience a lot of this type of activity might be regarded as cosplaying paganism – leaving things like coins, shells, flowers, notes – not as part of a formal spiritual practice but rather because this is the kind of thing one is supposed to do at a stone circle or standing stone – or because others have done so – this is done not so much with the aim of a religious practice but rather as a performative act

So we should be cautious about assuming the motivations of a whole series of contemporary practices that we find evidence for, and even witness, at stone circles, around standing stones, and inside prehistoric tombs.

Case studies

You can read more about my case studies at these blog posts and further sources of reading – I’m happy to provide pdfs of the papers / chapters on application (ask me via the comments at the end of the post!).

Sighthill stone circle – Thatcher’s Petrified Children – Heathen Stones – The last days of a stone circle part 2 – Great crown of stone

Brophy, K 2019 Urban prehistoric enclosures: empty spaces / busy places, in C Campbell, A Giovine & J Keating (eds) Empty Spaces: confronting emptiness in national, cultural and urban history. IHR Conference Series, London. Pages 181-203. Book is online here

Science facilitating paganism (from the Duncan Lunan archive)

Brophy, K, Green, H & Welfare, H 2014 The last days of the Sighthill stones, British Archaeology July-August 2014, 44-49.

The Kempock Stone – Shadow of the stone – Galoshans

Edensor, T & Brophy, K 2023 The potent urban prehistory of an ancient megalith: the Kempock Stone, Gourock, Scotland. International Journal of Heritage Studies 29, 81-96.

The Galoshans street festival in 2022, with Granny Kempock figure (my photo)

Conclusion(s)

There is space for better working relationships between archaeologists and the pagan community

There might be for instance some mileage in exploring the entanglements between those who document the astronomy of stone circles and those who gather at those places to watch the skies

And there is a need for archaeologists to take more interest in practices and the material outcomes of activities that happen in and around archaeological sites such as stone circles and tombs. This is not just rubbish and it is not always a problem. But it could be and it might be.

Contemporary pagan activities should be regarded as part of the ongoing biography, resilience, reinvention, and living history of prehistoric places.

Sources and acknowledgements: I would like to thank Yael and Scott for organising, and inviting me to speak, at this event. My thanks also to the other speakers and discussants for what was a stimulating Saturday. Many images used in my presentation were from the archive of Duncan and Linda Lunan, used with appreciation and fully credited.

Blain, J., and R. Wallis. 2004. “Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights: Contemporary Pagan Engagements with the Past.” Journal of Material Culture 9 (3): 237–261.

Padlocked prehistory

There is little that can be more frustrating than being denied access to your destination at the last possible moment – that arriving at closing time, unexpected locked door, security guards, not open on a Sunday feeling.

I had just that feeling on a recent visit to an extremely rare extant (potentially) prehistoric monument in central London, the Hampstead Heath tumulus aka Boudica’s Grave. During an epic day visiting all of the mythical mounds of London as written about by EO Gordon in 1914 (of more below) I went off piste to have a look at a much less mythical actual mound and was met with a padlocked gate!

This earthwork monument is located in the southern half of Hampstead Heath, a large park north of the Thames with expansive views over the city to the south from Parliament Hill. On the day I visited it was a rather dreich and muddy affair, but the weather conditions did add a certain autumnal majesty to the tree-crowned barrow from afar.

What of the archaeology and history of this urban barrow? The monument is Scheduled by Historic England, and the most succinct summary account is to be found in their listing of the monument (here):

“The monument includes a bell barrow situated near the summit of Parliament Hill, south of Highgate Ponds at Hampstead Heath. It survives as a roughly circular-shaped mound, 36m in diameter and up to 3m high. Around the barrow is a berm or platform varying between 3.5m and 4.5m wide. Surrounding this is a quarry ditch, varying between 4.8m and 6m wide, from which material to construct the barrow was derived. The barrow was partially excavated by Charles Read in 1894 but only pieces of charcoal were recovered. Read concluded that the burial may have completely decomposed given the acidity of the soil. The barrow is shown in a drawing of 1725 by the antiquarian William Stukeley. The name of the barrow is derived from a local tradition stating it was the site of Boadicea’s (or Boudica’s) grave. Boadicea was the queen of the Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying Roman forces in about AD 60. The monument excludes the modern path which impinges on the monument, all marker posts, modern fences and fence posts, gates and gate posts but the ground beneath all these features is included”.

There is no evidence at all that this has anything to do with Boudica and I could find no reference to this local myth in Duncan Mackay’s excellent 2023 book Echolands: a journey in search of Boudica, suggesting that his journey did not take him to the Heath. Nor is there much concrete (as it were) to confirm a prehistoric origin either although the morphology and location of the mound are suggestive. There is also some confirmatory context in the shape of later prehistoric materials found on nearby Parliament Hill during excavations in 2017, including the by now obligatory prehistory BBQ spin.

Much earlier excavations of the tumulus itself in the 1890s carried out by Charles Hercules Read were inconclusive in any one direction, despite there being a plan – apparently – to install a huge statue of the Iron Age warrior queen should this work confirm that this was indeed Boudica’s final resting place. The charcoal that was recovered by Reid may well have been vital pieces of evidence although they would not have been recognised as such back then, and no longer exist.

The official Hampstead Heath website is more circumspect about the ancient origins of this monument, noting: “…maps from the 16th Century show the area covered in dense woodland – any older burial mound would have been destroyed by tree roots. The explanation considered most likely is that the mound was made in the 17th Century, possibly for a windmill after the woodland was cleared, and the trees planted later (though there are no paintings of that windmill, and lots of paintings of the trees).” They also include a lovely painting of the mound from 1820 pre-fence and pre-padlock.

I visited with no pre-conceptions, other than that the park would probably not look like the reconstruction drawing included in Nick Merriman’s 1990 book Prehistoric London. Here we have the Heath as Mesolithic hunting zone, supported by the discovery of many thousands of lithics and evidence for a ‘hunting camp’ in the park back in the 1970s. These were not barrow-building folk, but this does indicate some epic deep time in central London.

I was on a mission to visit – as stated earlier – the location of the four ancient mounds of London as documented by EO Gordon is the eccentric 1914 book Prehistoric London: It’s mounds and circles, for a book chapter I am writing. Gordon has very little to say about ‘Boudicea’s Grave’, being much more fixated on nearby Parliament Hill as being a mythical Silbury Hill-like foundational London mound. (I suppose the discovery of Bronze Age BBQ waste here in 2017 is interesting in this respect.)

After taking in the dreary and damp view from Parliament Hill, I walked to the barrow site via several of the many desire lines that criss-cross this part of the park, eventually emerging into a broad grassy vista with the tree-topped mound ahead. As I walked over to the site across damp grass with fewer desire lines the outline of the barrow began to describe itself to me, shrouded in trees and shrubs. It was surrounded by an austere black iron fence with spikes atop each upright which dissuaded me from climbing over, even although they were not that high, as I had visions of having to be air-lifted from the Heath with a spike through my thigh. Fresh from a First Aid course the week before I didn’t want to experience arterial spurting up close. The mound is also surrounded by a setting of park benches, some with dedications carved into them, all looking outwards for the views, not inwards for the tumulus.

I circumnavigated the barrow, noting that no clues were evident as to the age, origin or function of the monument. There was not even an information board that might help the visitor to make sense of things, and the only QR code I could see – on a stumpy low post inside the fence line – took one to the general Hampstead Heath website. Just beyond the fence on the north-west side of the mound was a small hedgehog house, suggesting another type of spike altogether.

And then I reached the padlocked gate, a full 310 degrees from my starting point, having walked around the mound in a counter-clockwise direction. I was surprised that access was not allowed onto the mound itself, and found myself wondering who had the key for the padlock.

This person has the power to come up here and night, let themselves into the fenced compound, and enjoy the freedom of the mound – and perhaps they do. This kind of control reflects the ways that access to the dead may have been mediated by certain members of society 4000 years ago, but sits less comfortably in our era of transparency. I noticed also at the bottom of the gate was an abandoned pair of glasses, perhaps discarded in an aborted attempt to get over the gate or pick the lock.

We should leave the last words on this matter to Caroline White, in her 1900 book Sweet Hampstead and its Associations.

Tumulus. From Sweet Hampstead, possibly by a Mr. P. Forbes

“But whatever its origin, the mound adds materially to the visual enjoyment of the visitor; and the sight of London from its height, especially at the early dawn of a clear summer’s day, is said to be worth a midnight pilgrimage to obtain. The air blows over its summit ‘most sweetly,’ especially in June, blending the scent of the lime blossoms from the sister villages with the aroma of the hayfields and hedgerows, where the honeysuckle and wild-rose bloom unmolested”.

Rain or shine, Bronze Age or post-medieval folly, padlock or no padlock, this is a fine earthwork in a fine location. I just wish that we could be trusted to be allowed in.

The V word

Graffiti has been on my mind a lot recently, prompted by a visit to Machrie Moor on the island of Arran in the summer where we noticed that one of the standing stones at circle 3 had been horribly defaced with a variety of very recent scrapings and markings.

The markings are a combination of scraped words including the F word, sketchy lines, and a hand-shaped zone where lichen seems to have been removed from the stone, perhaps using some sort of solvent or cleaning fluid.

This is as egregious an act of vandalism as I have seen at an ancient monument for some time, and literally a crime. It was also upsetting to see. This is now being investigated by Historic Environment Scotland, and a team have been at the site recently to undertake remediation work.

The tweet above shows recent graffiti at another site in Arran, the King’s Cave, a special place on the west coast of the island that is, ironically, defined by its carvings and graffiti from different eras.

This is not even the first time this has happened recently, with another example at Machrie documented and investigated in 2022. This may have been repaired but was the culprit ever caught? I doubt it or at least I have not heard of this happening.

2022 graffiti (HES / BBC)

A HES blog about heritage crime was in part prompted by an earlier incident at Machrie, and the carving of graffiti on one of the standing stones at the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney.

Archaeologist Joss Durnan at Machrie Moor (c) HES

Repairs are all very well, but as HES stated in 2022, “Heritage crime can cause damage that can never be repaired and forces us to spend less resources on important conservation work.” In the aforementioned blog, they make the stark point: “Once the act is complete, the historic fabric is altered. In the case of incised graffiti, it will never be the same again”.

That was very much the case in a shocking prosecution in August 2023 prompted by permanent damage done to a Neolithic rock art panel on Eglwysilan Mountain in Caerphilly, South Wales. In this quite remarkable case, 52 year old Julian Baker had filmed himself for Facebook carrying out a crude excavation of this rock art site, which included damaging the site permanently.

The scene of the heritage crime (c) BBC / Wales News Service

The presence of the white and red ranging rod for scale here (and in other crime scene photo in this blog), so familiar from excavations, is used here to help to document a crime. In this case the rock art section of the panel was detached from the main outcrop. A CADW spokesperson said, “Significant archaeological information has been lost forever, and although some evidence may remain, the significance and value of the part of the monument damaged has been significantly diminished”. Mr Sands received a suspended jail sentence and was ordered to pay £4,400 in damages.

This had slightly uncomfortable echoes of some kind of unofficial excavation that had happened at Stronach Woods rock art panel on Arran when I visited with the Neolithic Studies Group in May 2023. I have no idea if this caused damage or not, but it could have. I reported this to HES and they are investigating.

Vandalism need not be in the form of carvings or crude excavations – take this spray painted standing stone, Maen Llia, in the Brecon Beacons from 2013. There are other examples if you have a google that are less amusing.

So many examples of what we must call the V word – vandalism – coming so close together has made me reflect on my own view of how we value and judge graffiti on prehistoric sites and monuments. Ironically, some of the most recent Machrie Moor graffiti overlies some rather more established carvings, date unknown but not recent. These have become part of the fabric of the monument and have not been erased. In fact, there are lots of examples of (neater) boilerplate Victorian writing on standing stones and megalithic tombs which have become part of the official story of the site e.g. Cuween chambered cairn on Orkney, Blackpark stone circle on Bute.

Graffiti of many types is a surprisingly common part of the fabric of prehistoric sites and monuments. The Ring of Brodgar and Maeshowe on Orkney were both covered in Viking scratchings, and indeed these are celebrated at the latter as a rare insight into informal Norse insults and ephemera. There are cases of modern vandalism of a standing stone carved with Viking Runes at Brodgar, in 2014 and 2015. At time of the latter, local media reported that, “An Orkney tour guide has spoken of his disgust at discovering one of the stones at the Ring of Brodgar has been vandalised this week, by someone scratching initials and a date on one of the stones, in an area close to where Viking runes are engraved”.

Disgust for the 2015 graffiti, celebration and preservation of graffiti carved on the same stones over 1000 years ago. This is not surprising. These Viking runes are significant heritage assets and have been and will continue to be studied; they are part of the historic significance of these Neolithic places, rich evidence of re-use, part of the monumental biography. They were not criminal acts at the time they were carved, although we have no sense of what social conventions were or were not followed at such megalithic sites in Norse times. Taking the act itself, they may have been illicit, taboo, or perhaps no-one cared or noticed.

On the other hand the carvings from last week or five years ago have no particular cultural or social value to us, and as such are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are the outcome of illegal and illicit acts. I suppose were this to be 500 years in the future, then the initials of some drunk toe-rag carved onto a standing stone might provoke a different response although the long-term cultural significance of HFCH or FUCK is not clear to me.

Recent acts of vandalism at heritage sites can be complex. The repeated repainting of the Cofiwch Dryweryn (‘Remember Tryweryn’) on the wall of a ruined cottage is a case in point. This memorial was first painted in the 1960s to mark the flooding of a village by a reservoir in the Tryweryn valley in north Wales. The wall has been repainted many times, but also defaced, and has become a contested place that some want to preserve and others want to change. In recent years this mural has been defaced with Elvis (in 2019) and a swastika and white power symbol in 2020 amongst other things.

(c) Jez Broughton

(c) Archaeodeath

This is a serious business and here graffiti has become entangled with various different iterations of nationalisms, acts of subversion, and abuse. You can read more about this from archaeologists such as David Howell (chapter in this book) and Howard Williams.

Just this very morning as I write this post, I have been following twitter reaction to the illicit painting of a huge saltire flag on a wall on Cramond Island, near Edinburgh. As archaeologist Gordon Barclay has rightly pointed out, this is a heritage crime.

Many of the responses to this have been couched in nationalist terms downplaying the historic significance of the building that has been defaced. But as Gordon has argued, to what extent does the type of flag painted here cause some to excuse this crime or downplay the heritage value of this place? The V word is very much in the eye of the beholder.

This is illustrated by ongoing discourse about graffiti and damage to ULEZ cameras in London too – vandalism or a legitimate reaction to a political decision? How would the same fringe politicians and right-wing commentators who champion such costly actions react to the carved FUCK on a standing stone? We know how they respond to orange paint being thrown on the window of a bank headquarters. It is clear that the label vandalism is applied to any damage where you disapprove or disagree with the motivation of the perpetrator, which it not necessarily aligned with the law of the land.

Perhaps where all of this hits home hardest for me is in relation to my own research into the Cochno Stone. In public lectures on this huge rock art panel in West Dunbartonshire I have called this site ‘the most vandalised prehistoric monument in Europe’.

The story may be familiar to some readers. This Neolithic site became something of a tourist attraction after Ludovic McLellan Mann painted the surface of the stone with oil paints in 1937. The prehistoric symbols (and natural marks) were painted white and green, and Mann covered the stone with an elaborate yellow, blue and red grid based on megalithic measurements and cosmological tales of his own devising. This led to the site being scheduled — given legal protection — immediately. However, as more and more visitors came to the site, and urbanisation brought big populations to the area, so the Cochno Stone became an increasing focus for new markings – graffiti – with names, initials and dates scraped onto the surface of the stone. After decades of trying to manage the site, finally it was decided to bury the stone for its protection without any consultation or warning in Spring 1965 on the order of the Ancient Monuments Board (these are my words but taken from this source, yes I am plagiarising myself!).

So this is a site that in the 20th century was covered in oil paints by Mann in 1937 and some 100 piece of graffiti that only ended in 1965 with the burial of the stone. What Mann did was deeply eccentric and probably rooted in his own campaign for respectability. But it was not illegal even if he should have know better. However after the monument was scheduled in 1937 each act of graffiti was a heritage crime in the true legal sense even although my research suggests that many of the culprits were children, and the community had little sense of how significant or old this site was.

Motifs (which themselves may be 19th C additions) pained by Mann (c) HES

Graffiti record from the 2016 excavation

Graffiti and Mann paint from the 2016 excavation

Alison Douglas’s research into the graffiti shows it to be a mixture of initials, names and occasional doodles, of a type that I am comfortable as being viewed as engagements with a place that had a special meaning for a local community. Yet is is also true that we found evidence of other less excusable damage such as remnants of a plastic bag or bucket that was been burned and melted onto the stone, and scuffs from folk walking across the stone constantly.

From my 2015 pilot dig – melted plastic and graffiti

And during the 2016 excavation, one new piece of graffiti was added to the stone. Another heritage crime but one that I did not report or think much about at the time. Would I act differently now? Possibly.

What is the material difference between the 2016 graffiti and a similar set of initials from 1964? Why do I treat the graffiti and paint across the Cochno Stone differently from more recent examples that I have found upsetting? Rock art and the making of marks on stone seems to be especially vulnerable to such modern additions. It is a human desire but is it wrong? In some cases, legally and morally, yes. But not all.

Paint on Craigstone Wood 1 rock art panel, Glasgow (Ian Marshall / ACFA)

Graffiti beside rock art panel at Ballochmyle, Ayrshire in 2014

Chacefield Woods near Falkirk – red paint

I have been treating the Cochno Stone graffiti as if it were Viking Runes in Maeshowe. A cultural tradition that tells us something about a human engagement with an ancient megalith in a very specific place and time that is not now. The motivations for carving on these Neolithic stones were not especially noble – names, dates, doodles, indicative of casual interactions and not grand statements. But unlike the vandalism that this blog post was prompted by, my sense is that the carvers of initials and runes did not have the same motivations as the person who scraped the F word into a Machrie Moor stone.

I had something of as revelation as the graffiti was revealed – I wasn’t angry or upset Rather I was curious. HES historic graffiti expert Alex Hale has captured this feeling well:

“at some point graffiti emerged as a suitable subject to most of us and we realised that this unknown, potentially unruly, or even feral phenomena could open up new research possibilities—including those beyond the academy” (Hale 2022).

So when I started to try to make sense of the graffiti at Cochno, I was careful never to call if vandalism, instead using the term ‘historic graffiti’. I have never been judgemental and have spoken to some adults who carved their initials onto the stone when they were kids. I have tried to be playful about this such as the poster above (something that never saw the light of day as far as I can recall). But I accept that not everyone will see it like that.

There is no temporal cut-off point for when vandalism becomes historic graffiti. Nor should there be. Creative interventions and subversions can be legitimate and illegal at the same time. But we also have to acknowledge that graffiti and the like can be used by bad actors for political, nationalistic and sinister reasons. Some of this might be called ‘mindless’ as is likely how we would characterise damage at Machrie, but this is not always the case. For some, the motivation does matter. Rather amusingly Ludovic Mann went to the media in the late 1930s to complain about vandals throwing red paint over a cup-marked outcrop neat the Cochno Stone; this could charitably be described as mental gymnastics.

Proactively having a motivation to damage a prehistoric monument is not a get out of jail free card. Think about this Extinction Rebellion logo sprayed onto an interior orthostat at West Kennet long barrow in 2019. The world is burning so does anything go? The local ER Group coordinator Bill Janson does not think so: “We heard from the police that someone had sprayed our symbol on the stones, we were horrified and concerned. This act is completely against our principles”.

Photo from Swindon Advertiser

Graffiti and the vandalism of heritage sites is a can or worms because sometimes graffiti can be the heritage, but sometimes it is a heritage crime. This is not always as clear-cut as one might imagine. My own research at Cochno straddles this boundary and so it does no harm to reflect on the words I use and consider alternative views. The F word is almost certainly the V word – but beyond that things can become complicated.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Alison Douglas for her work on the Cochno Stone graffiti and community members I spoke to and thanks also to Alex Hale for many conversations about historic graffiti over the years.

The Hale quote comes from a conference presentation he gave in 2022 entitled Graffiti Some Times: Archaeology, Artefacts and Archives – download.

To find out about Mann’s paintjob at Cochno 1937 see K Brophy 2000 The Ludovic technique: the painting of the Cochno Stone, West Dunbartonshire. Scottish Archaeological Journal 42 [contact me if you want a pdf of this article]

Little Britain

Yes, it’s me writing about Stonehenge again, another white man of a certain age focusing on this iconic monument that one would think does not need any more light shone upon it, trending as it does on twitter or appearing in the pages of The Guardian more often than not. Yet the problematic nature of this monument and the structural injustices that it does to our prehistory – our past – means that I keep coming back to it because shining a light means that less can hide in the shadows. And what shadows they are.

Stonehenge has always been a political monument belonging to the establishment, from those who sanctioned and organised construction of various incarnations of the stone circle in the Neolithic period, to those who decided where to pour concrete in the 20th century, to archaeologists, planners and politicians today. Yet it has also always (probably) been a stone circle that has been used to subvert and satirise power structures. In that sense it was created and continues to exist so that individual and social beliefs and convictions can be projected onto it and from which legitimacy can be sought.

This post has been a long time in the writing and so as it happens I wrote that last sentence before a nationalist fantasy was literally projected onto the stones of Stonehenge in the days before the Platinum Jubilee in June 2022. Statements from English Heritage to accompany this officially sanctioned hagiography in stone included:  “We’ve brought two British icons together to mark the #PlatinumJubilee” and “From the 2012 Summer Olympics to commemorating the centenary of the First World War, Stonehenge has played a part in marking important moments in this country’s recent history, including — now — the Platinum Jubilee”. You can read more thoughts on this from Gordon Barclay and I on Sapiens.

(c) English Heritage

In an article I wrote for BBC History Extra website at around the same time, I argued that Stonehenge had transcended the genre of megalith and is now a celebrity stone circle. This opinion piece coincided with the much lauded (and rightly so) The World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. However, not all of the opinion piece I wrote was actually published, with a contentious couple of sentences on the contemporary politics of Stonehenge censored / not included due to a perceived lack of balance and an anti-Brexit tone (in other words too much for the BBC). This is the text that was removed in what I guess could be called a world exclusive:

Stonehenge also has a disturbing history as an icon for English and British nationalists, and has increasingly become a political plaything for right-leaning newspapers in recent years, a symbol of Brexit Britain. The exploitation of archaeological research results in the media and amongst alt-right groups is troubling and should worry us all. Feeding the news cycle, and indulging some aspects of Stonehenge celebrity, have very real risks.

I had in mind as I wrote this, the now infamous headline from the Daily Telegraph from March 2019.

Daily Telegraph 14th March 2019

I might also have been thinking of this front cover from The Sun from June 2018 where Stonehenge takes its place in a montage of images representing Great Britain with a threatening headline.

I don’t want to rehearse arguments here about inappropriate Brexit analogies in archaeology and connections that might be made here with a certain set of standing stones on Salisbury Plain. I have written plenty of this elsewhere, from The Conversation to two papers written with with Gordon Barclay. And this is not really about an association being made with Brexit. My complaint here is with Stonehenge and Stonehenge research being used to make inappropriate comparisons and underpin contemporary political arguments across the political spectrum.

I made this point in a blog post about party political broadcasts from stone circles: this is also about narratives that focus on the ‘immigrant nature’ of the Stonehenge workforce drawing the conclusion that immigration has always been happening on our islands and is a good thing. I think that immigration is a good thing, and Brexit is not, but I also believe that Stonehenge and the Neolithic should not be used to underpin any of these positions.

This has become all the more urgent with a summer 2023 promo film by the Far Right party Britain First, a grotesque celebration of indigenous megalithic ingenuity, with repeated views of Stonehenge (and other prehistoric sites mostly from Wiltshire), a poisonous film that I will not link to here or anywhere else or give further oxygen of publicity.

Jeremy Deller

Despite my mis-givings about artworks such as that shown above by the wonderful Jeremy Deller, there is, however, something compelling about artists satirising the use of Stonehenge as a symbol of Britishness and Brexit Britain. This takes me to the work of artist Simon Roberts who in 2020 released several posters that used notable British landmarks in a satirical campaign.

I was delighted to spot some of his Welcome to Little Britain posters in the wild in Glasgow during a lockdown walk in 2021. These were located on Cowcaddens Road on the north side of Buchanan Bus station.

The poster shows a image of Stonehenge from a slight distance, the stones partially obscured by visitors to the monument standing at the edge of the exclusion zone passively looking at the standing stones. A NO ENTRY sign is located in the foreground. Above the image is the slogan WELCOME TO LITTLE BRITAIN. Towards the bottom are these words:

Visit the wonders of Stonehenge and experience a post-Brexit Britain, cut off from Europe and enamoured in its own insularity.

This is a parody of British Government adverts of the type one often sees in airports notably this one:

Here the preposterous claim that Stonehenge is more prehistoric than other monuments is made with no sense or irony as if prehistory could me measured or this were a competition. It could be argued that draping Stonehenge in the Union Flag is only one stepped removed from the sinister excesses of the alt-right, Britain First and their like who celebrate such great standing stones as great achievements of ‘indigenous’ Britons (the white ones obviously, not that Cheddar Man character which is just ‘woke science’). We live at a time when prehistoric heritage is increasingly being co-opted into Little Britain / Little England fantasies about the past that are not so much Victorian as positively Stone Age. Blood and soil are evoked as are claims of pan-British identity that cannot possibly be justified by anything that we know about the 3rd millennium BC, even if some have made claims like this even dating back to the Mesolithic.

What part do archaeologists play in these insidious processes? I’ve already included above a troubling headline from the Daily Telegraph that was inspired by press releases and an interview with an archaeologist involved in the project that started this whole thing. This highlights the unintentional enabling role that prehistorians can have in allowing journalists to spin stories in a certain direction. The pathway from archaeological claim to journalistic spin can be contested, but surely should be embarked upon with cynicism and diligence. Research on mobility, migration, ancient DNA, mythical origins, folk memory, and identity all have the potential to be exploited by those with a sinister agenda and those who publish and promote research in these areas need to be hyper cautious about the words they use to make it clear what the research might mean but also what it definitely does not mean. If we give any fuel to fires being set by the likes of Britain First, as a discipline we should be ashamed of ourselves. Let’s not enable these evil people.

Simon Roberts kindly answered a few questions I had about his Stonehenge poster during the lockdown in Spring 2021 not long after these posters started to appear across Britain (not just Glasgow). These are the edited highlights of our email exchange, reproduced with permission. I was interested in particular in the role archaeological research played in his creative process.

Me: Why did you associate Stonehenge with ‘Little Britain’ and Brexit?

SR: The choice of Stonehenge was a direct, albeit ironic, reference to one of the Visit Britain poster campaigns [see above] where I wanted to present the work as an alternative advertising campaign, that could mark this important date in our recent political history (1st January 2021)….I did try other designs but they didn’t feel as relevant for use outside in public spaces. By subverting a Government campaign poster and putting it up on the street I was hoping to create an unexpected, thought-provoking contributions to our urban spaces, turning the street into a platform to challenge ideas and attitudes towards our unfolding relationship with Europe.

Me: What other iconic British sites / places have a similar feel to Stonehenge for you? Could you have done this poster with another icon?

SR:  Other landscapes I could have used for the poster, whilst staying true to the original advertising campaign, were the Suspension Bridge in Bristol, Glenfinnan viaduct in Scotland,or  Glastonbury Tor, however, I didn’t feel any of these were as instantly recognisable and so interwoven with a national story in the same way Stonehenge is. Moreover, the no-entry sign in the Stonehenge photograph adds an element of tension, in that it breaks the normal picturesque view of the monument. I felt it played on the narrative of fear used by Brexiteers that the country was being overrun by immigrants (80 million Turks coming to live in their village, for instance) and seemed to chime in an interesting/ironic way when considering Mike [Parker] Pearson’s theory of the location as one of ‘political unification’, given the Brexit process has been one of division, and the fact that Stonehenge was built by descendants of Neolithic migrants from Turkey. I should also say that I’m a big fan of Jeremy Deller and there’s a nod here to both his ‘Built by immigrants’ work and his Stonehenge bouncy castle.  I’m interested in the fact that throughout recent history, Stonehenge has been a contested landscape, in terms of debates about its origin, its purpose and its future – note the seemingly endless planning disputes and arguments over traffic (I believe it’s nearly three decades since a tunnel was first suggested). My use of the term ‘Little’ Britain wasn’t intended as a direct reference to Stonehenge, rather a play on the Visit Britain campaign title ‘Heritage is Great…Britain’.

Me: Do you regard Stonehenge as a Brexiteer stone circle?

SR: I do feel that Stonehenge, like Flatford Mill and the White Cliffs of Dover are landscapes whose representation was appropriated by Brexiteers as a way of promoting ideas of nostalgia and Britishness that became basic tenets in their fight for independence from Europe.

I find it very interesting that one of the roots of this powerful urban satirical campaign is archaeological research and public statements by archaeologists about Stonehenge and its social role in the Neolithic period. The concept of prehistoric ‘political unification’ so beloved of the Telegraph, and a Neolithic Brexit promoted by some researchers, would seem to me worthy of satire – indeed demanding to be satirised.

Stonehenge is a multifarious monument, upon which political campaigns can be hung from the distinctive lintels. This was recognised by Jacquetta Hawkes and Barbara Bender, both of whom saw this stone circle as malleable to the political needs and whims of their days. Simon Roberts told me about another poster he designed called Between the Acts (2018) that focused on another all purpose political icon, the White Cliffs of Dover. He told me:  “the White Cliffs of Dover, or more specifically the Seven Sisters in East Sussex, a symbol of home and of our war time defences, … was embraced by Brexiteers and Remainers as an image used to promote both causes, a blank canvas on which competing narratives were projected.”

And what a canvas.

Stonehenge can be used for any cause precisely because it means so much to so many, but also it means nothing, surrounded by a constant churn of ideas, mostly bad, even the good ones being replaced on rotation, awaiting another English Heritage press release, another story in The Guardian, another hashtag. It is in the interests of too many people that Stonehenge remains a mystery even although it is not, because once the mystery is lost, it becomes just another stone circle.

As a footnote to this already rather lengthy polemic, I recently visited Stonehenge, curious to see how this icon of Britishness is presented to visitors and tourists. Yes that really is me! It is very clear that the Stonehenge experience – the real Stonehenge – is a long way removed from the idealised Stonehenge we keep getting told about. If this monument is a jewel in the crown, it’s a fake.

The reality is sadly many miles removed from the glossy airport adverts – make no mistake, visiting Stonehenge in the summer these days is a tawdry, tacky experience. On the day I visited 6000 folk had booked to visit, many of them I am sure on the groups of coach passengers that trooped from car park to bus to stone circle and back again via the shop. The gift shop was almost impossible to navigate, the café mobbed and over-priced. None of this should be a surprise and I visited in July because I wanted to see Stonehenge in the raw.

The presentation of the monument and the tackiness that surrounds it diminishes the monument, making it seem small. Walking around the monument itself was an exercise in navigating selfie-takers, but there were also noticeably many people there whose heart was not in it. Stonehenge is on many bucket lists to be sure, but also on cruise ship itineraries, a destination for the sake of it rather than an end in itself, another hotspot to be ticked off before returning to the boat or London. It was tough when I was there to find evidence of genuine engagements that were derived from the perceived significant status of this place. This place is the ultimate megalithic bubble, ‘enamoured with its own insularity’, where visitors merely act out the role of engrossed tourists for an audience of drivers and passengers stuck in cars and lorries on the A303.

As the crowds leave with their Stonehenge hats, Stonehenge t-shirts, Stonehenge Christmas decorations, Stonehenge beer and gin, they are taking with them pieces of this place, just as surely as Victorian tourists literally chipped chunks off for their mantlepieces. Chipping away at the soul of this place, a soul long since sold to the capitalist requirements of a mass visitor attraction.

TripAdvisor – check out the one star reviews!

Stonehenge is not the place to ask difficult question (except what sort of rock cakes do you have?). By asking difficult questions about Stonehenge, I have got a ‘reputation’, and along with Gordon Barclay, have been accused of being motivated by Scottish nationalism (amongst other things). But Stonehenge cannot be above critique, and we need to be very cautious that the carefully honed Stonehenge Mythos is not brought crashing down by tacky consumerism, political tokenism, anti-wokism, tunnel hating obsessives, or fascism.

The exclusion of a paragraph of text from my History Extra article was a product of BBC neutrality, but maybe also a misunderstanding of the powerful role that symbols such as Stonehenge retain today. The very existence of Stonehenge is political, created in many phases of activity that were designed to empower and boost certain individuals and interest groups. Medieval stories about the stones were political too, origin myths to support claims of power and the status quo. These stones have been and continue to be used to peddle myths about the past while conserving power and control today – academic power, political power, power over access, an essential celebrity and politician photo opportunity, a place that one has to be associated with. I almost feel sorry for the ageless trilithons, with nothing by concrete to support them, a monument that is so important to some people that it was not allowed to fall into ruination for fear of losing its power-giving qualities.

Welcome to Little Britain.

Babbacombe Model Village Stonehenge

Sources and acknowledgements: I would like to thank Gordon Barclay for many many hours of Stonehenge chat and clarifying some of the thoughts contained in this long-gestated blog post. Thanks also to Simon Roberts for agreeing to be interviewed and allowing me to use his works and images. Jan Brophy came to Stonehenge with me and took some of the photos on the visit.

Neolithic Arran: an essay

I wrote a short introductory essay on the Neolithic of the Firth of Clyde island of Arran for the handbook to accompany the Neolithic Studies Group fieldtrip there in May 2023. While this is not an urban prehistory topic, I thought there might be some value in reproducing this short essay here on my blog. I have made a few minor amendments to re-focus the text as a standalone essay where necessary.

The island of Arran is often known as ‘Scotland in miniature’, and this makes sense with respect for the rich Neolithic traces across the island. An intriguing mixture of different monument styles, decent evidence for farming and settlement, an important lithic source, and a key position within the Clyde Estuary, combine to make Arran one of the most significant Neolithic centres in Britain. However, it remains in the shadow of more famous Neolithic islands, and more supposedly ‘luminous centres’.

Arran location map (from Haggarty 1991)

A few years ago, Gavin MacGregor and I tried to start a campaign to rebrand Arran the prehistoric island:

There is an island off the coast of Scotland which contains some of the most spectacular standing stones in northern Europe, a fine collection of megalithic tombs and rich evidence for farming going back almost 6,000 years. It is the source of one of the most magical materials of prehistoric Britain and, for the past few years, it has even had its own fire festival. But this island is not in Orkney, Shetland, nor any of the Hebrides (Brophy & MacGregor 2018).

Arran’s rich Neolithic legacy has made it an attractive place to research and work from time to time, and so it has a deep history of antiquarian study; they documented, as recent Masters research by University of Glasgow student Paul Burns has shown, even more megaliths than can be found on the island nowadays, since removed in the name of progress. A recurring theme of the history of the prehistoric remains on the island of Arran is an entanglement with farmers, ancient and modern, something evident in rewilding initiatives on the island such as at Drumadoon, whose Neolithic will come up later.

The island became part of the fabric of the development of theoretical approaches to the period with its inclusion in Renfrew’s Before Civilization (1973). My copy of the book falls open at the page that shows a map of the island, its topography overlain with dots representing chambered cairns, and lines drawn (awkwardly in some cases) between these dots representing notional tribal territories. Or at Renfrew captioned it, ‘the distribution of megalithic tombs in relation to modern farming land’: that farming relationship again.

Renfrew 1973 map with some nifty line drawing

Here we have 18 megalithic chambered tombs (inventoried of course by Audrey Henshall) apparently arranged in such a way as to indicate a farming society split into small communities, with an overall island population of no more than 1,200 people according to Lord Colin. The chambered cairns are one of the defining monument types on the island, conspicuously distributed only around the south of the island. This is another recurring theme – the geology and the landscape both constraining and inspiring people in prehistory. Andy Jones (1999) has written about the close relationship between stone used to build chambered cairns, a combination of sandstone from the south and granite from the north. In this sense, sites like Machrie Moor and the Giant’s Graves are Arran in miniature.

Giant’s Graves during the NSG fieldtrip

Machrie Moor is a natural place to go next. This remarkable landscape – almost WHS quality – dominates tourist literature for the island and adorns whisky and beer bottles.

At least six stone circles in a loose line east-west across a moorland beguile visitors, and it is true that the iconic sandstone monoliths of Machrie Moors 2 and 3 make them amongst the finest monuments of its type in Europe. Yet there is much hidden depth to this landscape stretching from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, with cairns, cists, roundhouses, field boundaries, and clearance cairns across a rather raised island in what was a waterlogged Shiskine valley in prehistory.

Machrie Moor: Courtesy of Gavin MacGregor

Perhaps most intriguing of all are the complex timber settings that preceded Machrie Moor 1 and 11, explored by Aubrey Burl and then fully excavated by Alison Haggerty (1991) in the mid-1980s. Concentric rings of timber posts, and a four-post or square in circle Grooved Ware building, connect this site to broader timber monument traditions of lowland mainland Scotland and beyond.

(c) Historic Scotland / HES

The hidden timber Neolithic of this island has been reinforced by the recent (as yet unpublished) discovery of a 100m diameter circle of timber posts ahead of a housing development in Blackwaterfoot by Rathmell Archaeology. This large enclosure, near the harbour, probably dates to the late Neolithic and was associated with Grooved Ware pits (https://canmore.org.uk/site/348596/arran-blackwaterfoot-doonhill).

Machrie Moor 1 and 11 also revealed a complex and dense arrangement of ard marks, the land being broken and ploughed between the timber and stone circle phases here. Arran has the distinction of having more evidence for probable Neolithic ard marks than anywhere else in northern Britain (Brophy & Wright 2021), with other examples found during (unpublished) GUARD Archaeology Ltd excavations along the String Road (the road that connects Brodick with Blackwaterfoot eg Baker 1999). The huge potential for finding and researching Neolithic farming landscapes, soils and associated features is only now being realised. Environmental studies and excavations at Torbeg, Tormore and Machrie North in the 1980s (see Barber 1997; Ray and Chamberlain 1985) are now being followed up by work on the Drumadoon landscape; all are within easy walk of Machrie Moor.

Prof Keith Ray shares his memories of survey work at Machrie Moor in the 1980s

The potential for Neolithic settlement is also clear, from a possible house structure on the aforementioned String Road work, to Neolithic settlement traces found since 2018 in advance of the expansion of Kilbride Chapel cemetery in Lamlash (Hunter Blair 2021).

Monuments, farming, living on the land – all connected. The probable cursus monument at Drumadoon, found by HES lidar survey, and excavated at a very modest scale in 2021-22, is a huge earthwork that would have required the clearing of extensive zones of topsoil, turf and rock to construct, and almost certainly seals a Neolithic land surface. The cursus offers another connection to broader monument traditions across Britain, being one of only a few such earthwork enclosures in western Scotland, and the only island cursus known in Britain. It is a weird place for a cursus.

Drumadoon cursus plan from HES Lidar and field survey data (c) HES

Excavations at Drumadoon have recovered a nice assemblage of worked pitchstone, and it is for this lithic material that the island is also known. Pitchstone is essentially a Scottish equivalent of obsidian, “a glassy, usually silica rich, igneous rock with a characteristic lustre resembling that of broken pitch” (Ballin & Faithful 2009, 5). Pitchstone outcrops and sources are found across the island although not as much work has been done on sourcing and quarries as one might expect. (Same goes for the Machrie Moor standing stones.) Nonetheless, we know that this material – which makes fine tools with sharp cutting edges – was found across much of Scotland in the Neolithic, with evidence for Mesolithic use too. Tools made from pitchstone have been found in Ireland, England and Orkney. As Gabriel Cooney noted two decades ago, Arran is a well-connected island (200, 226).

NSG stalwart Phil examines objects, including worked pitchstone, from the Arran Heritage Museum collection

The Neolithic of Arran is desperately in need of a review and some serious investment of time, labour and intellect. It is ill-served by in-depth synthesis, with the only book on the subject that one can purchase today being Horace Fairhurst’s charming and locally published 1981 book Exploring Arran’s Past. It was outdated even as it was published, but it offers a pseudo-antiquarian description of Arran’s first settlers and farmers, through to ‘the recent past’. Its attractive mix of excitable description and simple line drawings by Jean Forbes make it a great place to start in terms of getting to grips with Arran’s past, but no equivalent or better publication has appeared since its first edition was published. Contemporary Neolithic thinking has largely passed the island by too, like the Ardrossan to Campbeltown Ferry – aside from fleeting mentions in syntheses, and work by Andy Jones. A fascinating consideration of metaphor, performance and bodily engagement with the island’s Clyde Cairns written by Shannon Fraser (2004) has never received the attention it deserves.

The combination of megalithic and timber traditions, the potential for valuable insights into Neolithic farming practice, the pivotal location on journeys from Ireland to the heart of Scotland, and the source of pitchstone, all indicate the significance of this island in the Neolithic. Yet I am torn as to how we might think about this place in prehistory. Was Arran a magical, mystical island, dominated by the magic mountain of Goat Fell, a place where people collected dark glassy stones during pilgrimages? Or was it a bustling trading and meeting placed, densely occupied and farmed? Perhaps it was both. I am pleased to report that during the NSG fieldtrip conversations were had on how we might conceptualise this prehistoric island.

NSG fieldtrip participants at Torrylinn chambered cairn having read my essay, hence facial expressions

Acknowledgements and further reading: I would like to thank Angela Gannon and Gavin MacGregor for helping organise and lead the NSG fieldtrip to Arran, and Paul Burns for giving a talk on the opening evening. Thanks also to Corinna at the Brodick Rangers Centre, and the team at Arran Heritage Museum. I would also like to acknowledge the support of David Bennett in allowing access to Drumadoon cursus, Tom Rees for info about the Blackwaterfoot discovery, Warren Bailie for a heads up about the Lamlash site and my colleague Nicki Whitehouse for expanding my horizons of what we might be able to say about Arran’s Neolithic environment. Finally, many thanks to everyone who came along on the fieldtrip, all of whom expanded my thinking on Arran.

Here’s some essential reading and the sources used in writing the essay:

Barnatt, J and Pierpoint, SJ 1981 Field monuments on Machrie Moor, Arran, Glasgow Archaeological Journal 8, 29-31.

Ballin, T.B. 2009 Archaeological pitchstone in northern Britain: characterization and interpretation of an important prehistoric source. BAR British 476. Archaeopress, Oxford.

Ballin, T.B. & Faithfull, J. 2009 Gazetteer of Arran Pitchstone Sources. Presentation of exposed pitchstone dykes and sills across the Isle of Arran, and discussion of the possible archaeological relevance of these outcrops. Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports Vol. 38

Barber, J 1997 The archaeological investigation of a prehistoric landscape: excavations on Arran 1978-1981. Edinburgh: Star Monograph.

Bradley, R 1988 The significance of monuments. London: Routledge.

Brophy, K & MacGregor, G 2018 Prehistoric Island – let’s rebrand Arran! https://voiceforarran.com/issue-86/prehistoric-island-lets-rebrand-arran/

Brophy, K., & Wright, D. 2021 Possible Neolithic ard marks and field boundaries at Wellhill and Cranberry, Perth and Kinross, and an evaluation of current physical evidence for Neolithic farming in Scotland. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 150, 23-47.

Bryce, J 1863 Account of excavations within the stone circle of Arran. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 4, 499-524.

Bryce, TH 1903 On the cairns of Arran: a record of further explorations during the season of 1902, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 37, 36-67.

Cooney, G 2000 Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland. London: Routledge.

Fairhurst, H 1981 Exploring Arran’s Past. Kilbrannan Publishing Ltd.

Fraser, SM 2004 Metaphorical journeys: landscape, monuments and the body in a Scottish Neolithic, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 70, 129–52.

Haggarty, A et al 1991, Machrie Moor, Arran: recent excavations at two stone circles. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 121, 51-94.

Henshall, AS 1972 The chambered tombs of Scotland. EUP: Edinburgh.

Hunter Blair, A 2021 Lamlash Cemetery, Arran, Monitored topsoil strip and excavation, Discovery and Excavation in Scotland New Series 21, 95.

Jones, A 1999 Local colour: megalithic architecture and colour symbolism in Neolithic Arran. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18.4, 339-50.

McArthur, J. 1861 Antiquities of Arran

McLellan, R 1977 Ancient monuments of Arran: official guide. HMSO.

Ray, K & Chamberlain, A 1985 Peat depth variability at Machrie North, Arran, and its implications for archaeological survey and conservation in British uplands. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 115, 75-87.

Renfrew, C 1973 Before Civilization. Penguin.

Williams-Thorpe, O. & Thorpe, R.S. 1984, The distribution and sources of archaeological pitchstone in Britain. Journal of Archaeological Science, 11(1): 1-34.

The memorial that never was

I have blogged in the past about the use of standing stones and megaliths as war memorials, and Howard Williams has also blogged and written about this phenomenon. Standing stones, dolmen and other forms of megalith are redolent with deep time, reliability, a solidness of form that brings reassurance, and can have ancient connections with land and even national identity (for good but for largely ill), all characteristics that make them ideal memorials.

A while back I was pointed in the direction of what might have – had it been realised – become the most elaborate example of this phenomenon – a war memorial in Campbeltown, Argyll and Bute.

This remarkable vision was the work of Glasgow architect James Salmon (1873 -1924) and was an entry in a competition to design a war memorial for the Argyll town that was held in in the years immediately after the First World War ended. Salmon’s vision did not come to pass however, and in the end a very different winning entry was unveiled to the public in 1923 – it stands in the town to this day. Incidentally, the winning design includes a Celtic cross element, another connection to a mythical past. The architect of the winning entry was by Alexander Nisbet Patterson (1862-1947).

The memorial today – image source

James Salmon was an architect active in Glasgow at the end of the 19th, and early part of the 20th, centuries, and he worked in various different styles – art nouveau, modernism, romantic, mock tudor – being influenced by his education at Glasgow School of Art.

He worked in partnership with John Gaff Gillespie (1870–1926) and his most famous building is known as the ‘Hatrack’ building, located at 142a-144 St Vincent Street in Glasgow. Together, they “embarked on one of the most astonishing and innovative periods of architectural design the city had yet seen, with the introduction of Art Nouveau, Glasgow Style and Modernist elements in their buildings” (source).

(c) Glasgow City Heritage Trust

A closer look at the plans for Salmon’s ‘Celtic circle’ and mound concept shows that this was very much an amalgam of various ideas and architectural forms from British prehistory.

The plan of the monument, above, shows it to have been a circle of standing stones, with a grass interior area divided into four quarters. The centre of the monument was a tower with large boat sculpture atop it.

This was envisaged as a communal, even crowd-sourced, construction project. The plan above included the notes:

This reminds me of the Gretna Auld Acquaintance cairn, constructed during the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 from stones brought by visitors from across the UK.

This also suggests that not only was there to be a stone circle, but also earthen mound and stone dyke elements to the monument. These are only hinted at in this sketch:

This drawing does show however that several of the standing stones were in fact intended to be trilithon arrangements, including an elaborate triple setting facing towards the sea.

The date of this drawing is given by the holder of the Salmon archive, HES, as between November 1918 and September 1923, but it is likely that the competition entry was submitted in 2019 (source). Salmon himself died of cancer within a year of the rival war memorial plan being completed but not before submitting an entry for another competition – the Chicago Tribune Tower – in 1922.

Salmon’s vision for a monument to mark the sacrifices of the Great War is inherently romantic and fantastical, drawing on a mythical pagan past, and shaped by the collective efforts of society during the War. One can only imagine what this would have looked like had it been the prize-winner and been constructed. No doubt today we would look on the imagery included by Salmon as much more problematic than it would have been regarded in the 1920s.

The memorial that never was …. probably no bad thing.

Acknowledgements – thanks to Peter McKeague of HES for making me aware of this war memorial design. Image sources are given in the captions above.

The original drawing is now held by HES in their archives – here.

Bear broch

A broch built for bears does not sound the most obvious of architectural concepts, but nonetheless such a structure exists on the north side of Dundee.

This building – Bear Broch – is a functional art installation from the artist Mark Dion which sits beside the bear compound in Camperdown Country Park, a rather tired looking zoo. (In the news at the time of writing as it happens for a controversial story involving its wolf pack.) It was developed in 2005 in collaboration with wildlife centre staff Kevin Gosling and Aileen Whitelaw from the Wildlife Centre and Duncan Myers, an architect. The work was commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts around the time that a new compound was being created for a pair of European brown bears.

Situated beside the current residence of these fully institutionalised brown bears, Dion saw this as a chance to make deep time connections with these animals whilst creating a new space for visitors.

My interest is primarily in the conceptualisation of the human element of the project—not bear space but people space. In exploring architectural models, I am interested in looking at structural forms that existed when brown bears were still native in Scotland, sometime in the tenth century. The circular dry-stone broch of ancient Scotland offers a remarkably adaptable platform for a viewing experience of the bears as well as a site to investigate the natural history and ever-changing cultural meaning of brown bears. 

The Bear Broch was constructed to act not just as a viewing area to watch the bears, but also as a repository of information. As a plaque beside the broch suggests, it ‘provides a record of the hopes, fears and fantasies projected by human society onto Ursus Actos‘. So exhibited inside the structure was standard bear information through to curated bear-associated things. Dion told MAP magazine, ‘Within the broch installation, sculptures, collections and images will replace the standard didactic zoological text panels’.

(c) Dundee Public Art

In plan, this is very much an archaeological monument, and Dion’s archaeological sensibilities come to the fore in this wonderful image.

(c) Mark Dion and MAP Magazine

This shows the internal arrangement of the Bear Broch and some of the exhibits on show such as a lurking small bear skeleton inside what looks like a fireplace, the sort of space within the wall that one would expect to see inside a broch. The walling is not drystone, but evokes that style: thick, and in places hollow, walls are classic broch.

(c) Public Art Dundee

You can see a great range of photos of the interior of this broch – perhaps how it was rather than how it now is as we shall see – at the Public Art Dundee website.

Jan and I paid a visit to the Bear Broch in January 2023 during a visit to the city to see the Plastic: Remaking our World exhibition being held at the V&A. Going on rather vague location information found online, we headed to the zoo, having no conception that there was a zoo in Dundee. We parked and asked a staff member where the Bear Broch might be found. After some confusion about what we were even talking about, we were given directions, paid an entrance fee, and went to find the tower – number 40 on this abstract location map.

We wandered around the perimeter pathway on the southside of the wildlife park, pausing from time to time to peer through the window of a hut to see sleeping creature of some kind or other, as most of the animals did not seem to be keen to be seen outside on a Sunday morning in January in Dundee, a sentiment I could understand. The pack of wolves swaggered around their compound, unaware of their impending sad fate, while in some other large caged areas, assorted birds sat on branches and feeding platforms, peering pensively at the grey skies, and jealously at wild birds taunting them from the other side of the mesh fence.

We passed through a gap in one of the old estate walls dotted around the park, this ghostly grandeur at odds with the shabby and far from chic set-up for the docile wildlife now residing here, a sad parody of the comfortable vibrancy that must have occupied these spaces in the past.

Then ahead of us we say, being at that very moment started towards by a large European brown bear, the Bear Broch.

The bear was squatting with violent intensity, looking from the broch, to a couple of park visitors gawking at this mighty creature from behind layers of green fence.

There is no doubt that this construction, despite being a scaled down version of the Iron Age original prototypes, was superficially a very brochy looking building.

However, to my great disappointment, the broch was locked up, and there was no way of accessing the interior which had been so lovingly curated by Mark Dion. The rather drab and weather-beaten wooden door was barred and locked shut, it’s girder runner red with rust. A green bin sat beside the entrance open-mouthed. Some rudimentary investigation of the doorway suggested it had not been open for quite some time.

This was confirmed by images captured when I stuck my phone through a narrow gap in the door to have a peek inside. There was not much inside there except some leaves, a blue bin, and a rather brutal looking piece of wood. The interior arrangement was hinted at, with an unpadlocked door to the left, which in the Iron Age would have led to a so-called ‘guard chamber’. Ahead was the viewing window to get a better view of the sad bears, but it seemed most of the contents had been removed.

In many ways, this replicated visits I have made to ruinous brochs in northern Scotland and the Western Isles – there is a recognisable geometry and architecture to what remains, and hints of rubbish deposition, but none of the good stuff has been left lying about.

I am intrigued by the choice of broch for this small building, something that Dion explicitly connected to a version of Scotland where bears once roamed the earth. Research by Hannah O’Regan has suggested that brown bears may not have become extinct in the wild in places like Yorkshire until 425 to 594 AD and so it is feasible that Iron Age folk may have come across these hairy beasts although their numbers would have been low at that time. O’Regan’s research shows that direct evidence for bears in Scotland during the Iron Age was vanishingly rare, but (from the caption for the map below), the ‘specimen from Bear Cave, Inchnadamph, Sutherland, Scotland, which is dated to the cusp of the Bronze Age and Iron Age, is included in the Bronze Age’. And absence of evidence need not be evidence of absence.

Map from O’Regan 2018, Figure 1, see caption for details

Bears continued to live in Britain beyond these dates but in states of forced domesticity, and more recently, in zoos and safari parks. The two brown bears that reside in this corner of Dundee fit that bill and looked suitably miserable about the experience.

A plaque to accompany the broch, which I somehow missed and so did not photograph, adds some rather unhelpful chronological information: ‘….when brown bears last roamed the Scottish countryside, sometime in the tenth century’. Regardless of whether this is meant to be AD or BC, this is not the Iron Age – first century AD would work though.

(c) Public Art Dundee

There are some misunderstandings here, and perhaps a mis-alignment with the data and the reality. However, by evoking prehistory, so Dion and the wildlife park have drawn attention to the lengthy but contested relationship we have with animals that sit on the cusp of domestic and wild. This was starkly illustrated after our visit, with the recent sad euthanising of the Camperdown wolf pack reminding me of the old (mythical?) story that the last wild wolf in Scotland was shot in AD 1680. Bears and wolves still live amongst us, but like prehistory, their freedom is a thing of the past.

Sources and references: firstly I would like to thank Gavin MacGregor who drew my attention to the broch in the first place, and the helpful staff at Camperdown.

Hannah O’Regan 2018 The presence of the brown bear Ursus arctos in Holocene Britain: a review of the evidence. Mammal Review 48.4, 229-44.

Tapes of stones

I had many questions and I got some answers. About cinematic standing stones. Tropes of horror, folk horror, rural horror, the uncanny. The entanglement of film and megalith: tapes of stones, and stone tapes. Urban prehistory in the big screen in the city – London, Edinburgh.

Q&A. Call out and response. Panels and chairs, chairs and panels. Tapes of stones and stone tapes.

During January 2023 I had the good fortune to attend two cinematic events that presented films that all combined elements of rurality, unsettlement, and standing stones. In both cases, films were followed by Q&A and panel sessions with film makers and artists.

First up was a showing of Enys Men, directed by Mark Jenkin. This Cornwall-set movie has been branded in marketing as being folk horror and includes many of the key elements – a remote rural setting (in this case an island), a lonely protagonist, local legends turned to song, a hint of menace, and a standing stone.

The director was happy enough during the Q&A at the end to suggest that the marketing for this film perhaps over-egged the horror element, but there is no doubt that despite there being little blood shed or physical violence shown on screen, nonetheless a horror-scape was evident through a fragmented temporality and the wonderful use of sound. The recurring roar of a generator reminded me of some of the more visceral sounds one finds on Italian horror movie soundtracks.

The film was wonderful and the Q&A fascinating, with Mark Jenkin being generous both with his time and his insights into the creative process. For more of the same, here is an extended discussion about Enys Men with Mark Kermode and central actor Mary Woodvine.

But we’re here for the standing stone! Sadly my raised hand did not get my question asked on the night, and a tweet the following day remains unanswered at least by Mr Jenkin.

Still from Enys Men

In fact, it is both a real – and a fake – standing stone. The actual Boswens menhir was used for some scenes.

Modern Antiquarian (source)

But in an article about the film by Tanya Gold in The Spectator, she suggests that a fake standing stone was used in some scenes, and this makes sense, as it comes and goes, and is to an extent altered during the film.

Landscape has agency in Enys Men. I walk to Boswens Menhir after watching it: it’s the stone in Enys Men, though they made a replica, which I found in the rafters at the reclamation yard Shiver Me Timbers a few days later because the owner is also the prop master. It’s middle Bronze Age, about 4,000 years old, a haunted object.

The two incarnations of the standing stone – real and fake, mirror images of one another – nonetheless have a powerful agency in this film, and probably deserve second billing in the cast list. It / they fulfil(s) the role that megaliths often do in folk and rural horror, in that the standing stone acts as a focal point for our fears and anxieties, a mute and timeless observer that just might become a participant in the right set of circumstances. “Presiding over this time-slipping strangeness is a giant standing stone” (Mark Kermode) and Jenkin himself has noted that of standing stones in the Cornish landscape:

I was really haunted by the Pipers. I’d look through the gateway and I’d think they’d moved slightly. I like the idea of a sentient stone.

And this is a sentient stone with anthropomorphised traits: reviewers use phrases like ‘keeping her company’, and note that the stone seems to have the ‘power to move’, and even that it ‘moves around the island …. changing position and size’. I’ve also read phrases like ‘stands sentinel’, and ‘presiding over’ (reference perhaps also to the fact that it seems to be located in the highest point in the internal island landscape of the film).

Writing about the film, Adam Scovell (sort of the godfather of critical Folk Horror writing) is also drawn to the recurring standing stone imagery, an evocation of what might be called ‘Cornish eerieness’. This is also suggested by the other heritage landmark shown in the film, an abandoned tin mine, which reminded me of earlier Cornish horrors – Hammer’s The Plague of the Zombies (1966) and Crucible of Terror (1971). These heritage horrors play on time depth and mystery, a vein mined with much success by MR James. Mark Kermode has suggested that Enys Men could be viewed as “the cult 70s TV frightener The Stone Tape reconfigured” – if only past lives, rites, and voices played out beside standing stones could be recovered now, but what if we were to find that blood had been spilled or the living petrified?

Enys Men is a thought-provoking megalith movie that happens to have people in it, orbiting around a standing stone, an eternal entanglement.

A couple of weeks later I was back for more, this time an event organised by The Stone Club, part of London Short Film Festival, and called Figures in the landscape – see this page. Over a couple of hours, five short films were shown followed by a panel discussion.

Stone Club traverse Britain and Ireland’s ancient landscapes via the medium of shorts. From mysterious apparitions in Cymru, sculptural monoliths on the misty moors of Kernow, and a bouncy Stonehenge travelling across the UK, Stone Club offer visions that attempt to thin the veil, inviting us to re-enchant the landscapes we inhabit on a daily basis.

The five films shown were:

Figures in the landscape is a short documentary about the artist Barbara Hepworth at work in and around St Ives, with an evocative narration and soundtrack, and featuring standing stones (of course) and artworks that perfectly align with the Cornish landscape. This included the juxtaposition of standing stones and sculpture as this selection of stills demonstrates, such as the 1938 piece Forms in Echelon.

Filming ongoing (source: BFI and here)

Forms in Echelon (Tulipwood on elm base): Tate

The narration intones: Stones for dancing and stones for dying…death and rebirth, in and out

You can watch this free on the BFI player here.

This was followed by Tresor, a film directed, written and produced by the Cornish singer, composer and artist Gwenno, to accompany her recent album of the same name. Claire Marie Bailey, a Cornish-based film-maker and photographer, collaborated closely with Gwenno on videos for this album and the short film I saw in London. (Mark Jenkin worked with her on a video from a previous album, and one song by Gwenno appears on the Enys Men soundtrack.) This film is joyous and playful, and features Bryn Celli Ddu Neolithic barrow, upon which Gwenno did a DJ set in 2022. (The hat worn below by Gwenno was designed by the Stone Club’s Lally MacBeth.)

Gwenno at BCD solstic 2022 (Pic: Megalithic Portal by dodomad)

Also obligatory draping over and hugging the ubiquitous Mên-an-Tol!

Like Enys Men, Tresor includes the use of Cornish, and was made during a Covid lockdown.

Third up was Jeremy Deller’s film English Magic, made and first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The centrepiece of this work was scenes of children playing on Deller’s bouncy castle Stonehenge, Sacrilege (2012). Again, this was joyous and fascinating, and it was fantastic to hear at the end during the Q&A how much Deller admires the creative thinking and creativity of archaeologists.

The exhibition for the British Pavilion at Venice included this film and other pieces. Deller’s website notes,

The exhibition reflects the roots of much of Deller’s work, focusing on British society – its people, icons, myths, folklore and its cultural and political history. He weaves together high and low, popular and rarefied to create unique and thought provoking work. English Magic addresses events from the past, present and an imagined future.

Source: Deller website (link above)

Sacrilege is a famous artwork, megalithic in form, but green and plastic in execution, a playful inflatable that toured the UK during Olympic year of 2012 including a stint in Glasgow Green park.

Sacrilege (Deller website)

In Deller’s film, we see bouncy Stonehenge blown up (not Transformers 5 style!), enjoyed via the process of uncontrollable bouncing, and then deflated like a giant air bed (but more dignified than National Lampoon’s European Vacation style!). I’ve been to Stonehenge a few times and I’ve never seen anyone have much fun there, so this was always a refreshing installation, and it was nice to see its use documented.

The penultimate film was HforSpirit and Nick Hadfield’s 2021 short ‘pagan rave film’ UnTyMe, “… a short fly on the wall film about a group of friends that flee the city on a rave escape to the hills”. I must confess this was less engaging and joyful than the other films. I can’t like everything! But there was some cool dancing around Castlerigg stone circle with a typical foreboding big sky. You can watch an extract here.

Finally, there was a rather depressing Irish documentary from 1974, called Stones will Speak, directed by Terrence McDonald. This was an evocative and poetic exploration of, I suppose, elements of misplaced nostalgia, for a rural way of life that was neither sustainable nor equitable. “…voices of residents of the west coast tell the stories of their lives – dispelling romantic notions of rural life with tales of immigration, loneliness and hard work….[the film] has an air of truth, bearing witness to the changeless beauty of the Irish countryside but equally the harsh reality that a man cannot live on beauty or support his family on folklore”.

You can watch the film here. I suppose it speaks of a universal human melancholy related to landscape change. “I doubt there is anything in the city to match the sunshine on the mountains”.

The evening was concluded with the panel discussion featuring artist Jeremy Deller, the Stone Club’s Lally MacBeth & Matthew Shaw, artist and archivist Victoria Jenkins, and musician and producer Richard Norris. This was a free-flowing discussion on the films that covered a lot of ground although didn’t quite bottom out the enduring fascination for stone, and standing stones, suggested across the films. There was much discussion about ‘re-enchantment’ which I confess is a concept that I am not sure how to respond to as a prehistorian. It was all, with one exception, very English.

The chance to watch these films on the big screen was too good to miss, coupled with the opportunity to hear film-makers, artists and musicians discuss them. It was also an opportunity for me to explore the increasing interest there is today in Britain with standing stones and megalithic rites, a trend that transcends Folk Horror, despite what this recent Guardian article suggests.

There is something in the wind – perhaps this was even said by a panel member in London – that has so far largely escaped archaeologists. Looking back at my notes from that evening event, perhaps a better way of putting it is that there is a ‘yearning for something’ – and this seems dripping with nostalgia which is entangled with childhood TV memories, some kind of slower paced past, and played out through a rather retro and analogue sensibility. There are dangers of course with such nostalgia, especially were recollection falls to a sort of pagan past that never was. But I get the sense that all of those who were involved in making and curating the films discussed in this blog post are well aware of these dangers, and indeed would actively work against them.

Panels and chairs, chairs and panels. Tapes of stones and stone tapes. Standing stones in the cinema.

PS I still have many questions. One of them was answered via twitter by Mark Jenkin, a belated but welcome answer to my question as set out above about the Enys Men standing stone.

Sources and acknowledgements: I’m very grateful to all of those who organised and participated in the events that are discussed in this blog post, and I’m appreciative of the creative talent involved. I paid to attend both events, this was no junket! My companions on these evenings – Bam and Jan – both helped me think through some of the issues discussed above.

Special thanks to Gwenno for correcting information on the first version of this post in terms of collaborations for Tresor videos and film, and for the kind words!

I hope I have cited all sources for images and so on correctly and clearly above, let me know if you see any problems.

My visit to London was supported by a grant from the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow.