Welcome to my virtual photo album of big rocks!
I have been fascinated by the idea of magical stones ever since seeing the film The Sword in the Stone as a kid. In college I read Mary Stewart’s books about King Arthur and was thunderstruck by the scene where young Merlin arrives in Carnac. There he sees ranks of ancient stones like ghostly soldiers frozen in time, marching across the snowy, moon-bright fields.
I never dreamed I’d get the chance to see these myself. But during the 1990s I was able to spend some time in Ireland, England, and Brittany, where I chased down many fantastic megalithic monuments. Here are some of them.
About me
In 1990, my employer sent me to our Dublin office for 4 months to fill in for a woman on maternity leave. I knew next to nothing about Ireland, but was elated at the prospect of such an adventure. Little did I know how it would change my life. The job part was interesting, but there was so much more. I made treasured, lifelong friends, I had so much fun, and I learned how much I didn’t know about so many things.
Lucky for me, work sent me back to Ireland regularly many times over the ensuing decade, and I was able to hook on vacation time and prowl around the countryside some more. I also squeezed in some wonderful trips to England too, along with a side trip to France.
The best part were the friends who shared this passionate interest and wanted to climb up hills, look under rocks, and fall into bogs with me. I did the research, mapped out our plans, and bossed around the driver, but they made it fun.
I’ve always been interested in archeology and anthropology. I’d seen Stonehenge in 1979 when I went to the UK with a college friend, and it had bowled me over. But I never knew that Stonehenge is only one of many. There are tons of these sites all over the damn place over there. Little ones, big ones, elaborate ones, plain ones — but all absolutely fascinating to me.
About these places
Most were constructed during the Neolithic era, which stretches in the British Isles from roughly 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE. These people somehow developed the know-how to build these incredible monuments with no metal. Only stone tools, the bones of animals, dirt, and elbow grease. Plus an incredible reverence for the sky and stars, and obviously some deeply held beliefs about life and death. It’s impossible to visit these places without feeling these were symbolic portals to another plane of existence.
They’ve left us no other clues, apart from symbols carved into the rock. But these images are not animals or man or gods or even stars. The stones are decorated with spirals, chevrons, cup and ring marks, labyrinths, hash marks, squiggles, and other geometric shapes.
Later on, Bronze Age immigrants started moving to the islands around 2800 BCE. They found these Neolithic sites and in some cases repurposed them for their own use. Again, we can only speculate.
By the time Iron Age people (Celts) started filtering into the islands (around the 7th century BCE), most of these places were long abandoned and their purpose forgotten. Some had collapsed or were covered over, but a remarkable number survived under a layer of topsoil and foliage. Whatever the builders did, it has lasted.
That is what stays with me: the fact that these people worked together to plan and carry out the creation of these enormous monuments. Some of them took many, many years to construct. The work would have stretched over many generations.
Unfortunately, the stones have suffered plenty at the hands of silly “modern” people who did their best to tip them over, knock them down, break them off, and otherwise maim them. They thought they were the work of the devil. In some places, parts of stones have been used to repair local fences.
Alongside these Stone Age monuments are other fascinating historical sites, sometimes piled on top of one another (see the Hill of Tara), for example, the original Celtic civilization that predated the Romans. You don’t have to look hard to find the remains of the ringforts and hillforts where people lived before they had towns. For thousands of years, people clustered into safe places and found ways to defend themselves.
And then there are the early Christian sites. Ireland had a lot to do with the spread of Christianity in western Europe. This was before Christianity was standardized. Ireland promoted a version which some call Celtic Christianity. Over time it was assimilated into the Borg — oops, I mean the Roman version. But Irish Christianity retained a lot of pre-Christian/Celtic traditions, imagery, and themes. It persisted in many places for centuries.
And the other stories: the ubiquitous round towers, the skeletons of monasteries and abbeys, the Martello Towers, the burnt-out shells of manor houses. It reaches right into the present day. I’m focusing on the Neolithic monuments here, but that is only the oldest of the layers of history you find everywhere you turn there.
I hope you enjoy my old, outdated, faded, and fuzzy pictures!
About Harbison
Guide to the National Monuments in the Republic of Ireland
by Peter Harbison
To give credit where credit is due: Carole brought this book along on our first trip and we’d have been lost without it. (We were lost with it half the time, but that’s not the book’s fault!) I bought my own copy and marked it all up with notes and diagrams. We referred to it affectionately as Harbie.
With our Ordinance Survey maps and Harbie, we were all set!