REVIEW: Stone Circles

Stonehenge is not alone

Stone Circles: A Field Guide by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings. Yale University Press, 2024. 520 pp., $40.00

In the fourth century BC, the navigator Pytheas of Massilia (Marseille) undertook an intrepid voyage that first recorded the landscape of Britain and the northern lands. Among the wonders he saw in Britain was “a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape.” This is probably the first written reference to the site of Stonehenge, which by that point already had two-and-a -half millennia of history behind it. It has continued to fascinate observers ever since. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth attributed the site to Merlin, noting that the stones had been brought from the far west—from Ireland. That far-fetched piece of silly medieval speculation was alarmingly close to the truth: The bluestone circle had actually been brought from west Wales. 

Later generations connected the site to the ancient Druids, and thus with their famous practice of human sacrifice. That (spurious) linkage spawned countless fictions and horror tales about the bloody contexts of Stonehenge and its lesser counterparts. The finale of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Durbervilles (1891-92) is set at Stonehenge, where the doomed heroine is portrayed as a modern-day living sacrifice to hypocritical moral codes. The thriving modern genre of folk horror can be traced back to such nightmares rooted in the primitive landscape. Every age gets the Stonehenge it wants and needs.

The fascination that Stonehenge has inspired for so long also extends to the many other circles that were so commonplace a feature of British landscapes. The (arguably) even more impressive site of Avebury was the focus of attention in the seventeenth century, when John Aubrey claimed that it 

“doth as much exceed in greatness the so-renowned Stonehenge, as a cathedral doth a parish church.” Victorian antiquaries reported or excavated hundreds of other circles large and small. Beyond mere description, such accounts tried to imagine the purposes for which they had been constructed, and the rituals that had been carried out there. After the Second World War, the brilliant Scottish engineer Alexander Thom undertook his systematic survey and taxonomy of known sites and argued that most or all reflected astronomical alignments. Such theories, in which Stonehenge itself became an ancient hybrid of digital supercomputer and observatory, thrilled the emerging New Age movement. It ushered in what we might call a henge rush of tourists and pilgrims. 

The boom launched a torrent of books both wise and loopy. Very much in the former category was the impeccable scholarship of Aubrey Burl, whose 1976 classic The Stone Circles of the British Isles (Yale, 1976) was only the first of a long sequence of studies marked by immense learning and admirable sanity. Notably, he popularized the use of ethnographic studies to understand what the circle builders might have intended by their constructions, and Native American analogies proved very fruitful. In 1995 he published his Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany, to which the present book supplies an expansion and update.

Burl, above all, created the indispensable foundation for all later scholarship on the circles, which is now a very flourishing field. We now know much more about the origins, typologies, and distribution of the circles, which continue to attract countless visitors. The present book, Stone Circles: A Field Guide, is firmly aimed at that market, covering no fewer than 424 sites in both Britain and Ireland. Both authors are highly respected scholars, with distinguished publications on the Neolithic and Bronze Age eras that created those monuments, and their debt to Aubrey Burl is evident throughout. The one caveat is that this book makes no attempt to offer any kind of comprehensive survey of the rich current scholarship. Plenty of other easily available texts serve that need. Rather, this is definitively a field guide for strictly practical use, a Wanderers’ Guide to Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. Sadly, unlike other such previous guides, its cover does not include such helpful instructions (in large, friendly letters) as “Don’t panic—and even better, don’t make unfounded speculations.” 

Even so, the book still offers some very striking observations. One is the sheer size of the great sites, which must in their day have been very widely celebrated. Apart from Stonehenge and Avebury, we look for instance at the Rollright Stones, Arbor Low, or Long Meg and her Daughters.

Other incredible monuments are the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness, on the main island of the Orkneys, located beyond the far northern tip of Scotland. That location conjures a whole narrative that has only become apparent in recent years. When we look at bygone societies, we tend to project back familiar assumptions about geography: Surely, southern England must have played a central role in that Neolithic world. Why else would Stonehenge stand where it does? Increasingly, in recent years, we see the enormous proliferation of truly ancient monuments of great sophistication in Scotland’s far North, and in Orkney. However bizarre this would once have appeared, it seems as if Orkney and nearby regions might have been a cultural center for the whole British Isles. Scotland, in fact, makes up a large proportion of the entries in the current book, as does Ireland. On the Isle of Lewis, the multiple interconnected sites of Calanais (formerly known as Callanish) occupy a substantial section of the book

Very recently—this year, in fact—new research established that the Stonehenge altar stone (which featured so grimly in Tess of the Durbervilles) must have been transported from that extreme northern territory, if not from Orkney itself. You are wholly free to add your own speculations as to why anyone would undertake such a daunting prospect, not to mention the similar movement of the Welsh bluestone circle. Was some emerging proto empire seeking to seize all the greatest monuments of neighboring peoples for its own purposes, to unite them in a central national shrine at Stonehenge? Did several powerful tribes agree to such a move to celebrate a new island-wide confederation of peoples, a first United Kingdom? Or did a shaman say that the gods insisted on the relocations? We simply don’t know, at this stage.

Richards and Cummings have a strongly practical orientation throughout. As they remark, “Visiting stone circles is one of the most pleasant of pastimes, and these magnificent monuments arguably capture the imagination to a greater extent than many other prehistoric sites.” The specific instructions are often quite funny. Sites are graded from Easy to Hard, and the wise traveler takes “hard” very seriously indeed. Typical is the instruction to follow “a single-track graveled road. . . . After c. 1 ¼ miles there are plenty of small pull-ins where you can leave the car before you reach the ‘Private Road No Vehicles’ sign. . . . There are multiple burns to cross, so following sheep trails can be useful. When the wall splits east/ south, the stone circle is c. 300m to the east, but to the south of the burn. A large stone cairn a few meters to the north-west of the stone circle will help guide you.” You will need boots and a compass. Laudably, tourists and travelers are reminded throughout that they should look not just at any particular collection of stones, but should rather try to situate them in the widest context: Which peaks or rivers are visible from the site? Just what might those views have signified for the builders?

The book amply repays dipping, not least for the extensive material about how different sites were interpreted in bygone eras. “Druidic” references abound in the theorizing of early antiquaries, as do hints of long-past human sacrifice rituals. The history of the process of discovery involves heroic explorers who tried to catalog remains, alongside local farmers and squires who wanted them destroyed as eyesores, or else reused as building materials. Fortunately, a sizable folklore tells of the fate that befell such villains: “There is a cautionary tale of a stone being taken from the circle to be employed within a nearby building where ‘uncanny signs and omens began to manifest themselves’ and a decision was made to return the stone to the ring. On the way back the carthorse would not ascend a steep bank and ‘the fearful stone was carefully buried there out of sight.’ People never seem to learn to leave stone circles alone.”

We never know quite what to make of such folklore manifestations, and whether they are pure modern invention, or if they might indeed recall truly ancient memories. In support of the latter, we think of the long-preserved tradition that parts of Stonehenge really had traveled from the far west. Many circles bear a name suggesting that they were the preserved remains of dancers who had irritated the Christian God by some such crime as breaching the Sabbath. Others are named for the pipers who played for such dancers. It is perfectly possible that piping and dancing really was what occurred at such places four thousand years ago, but again, how would we know for sure? Still, we can dream.

Richards and Cummings have written a splendid and very informative book. Gravely lacking in imagination is the reader who can finish it and not follow William Blake in exclaiming that “All Things Begin and End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.”

Philip Jenkins is a Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University, where he serves in the Institute for Studies of Religion. He has published 36 sole-authored books, including most recently Kingdoms of this World: How Empires Have Made and Remade Religions (Baylor University Press, 2024).