Old Before Caesar

We're looking forward to Earth Hour next week. But I can't help feeling that the last couple of years have been a little... well, a little dark, frankly. OK, sitting around with tea lights is very mystical but then we do that every day of the year anyway.

So for this year's Earth Hour we're going to be having a massive firework display, with a laser show and a giant video screen. Young Keith's out there building the tyre-burning generator as we speak.

But Earth Hour brings us to think of all things Earth and Spiritual. And I remember that moment of realisation I had yesterday, standing up on the ridge surrounded by the Rollright landscape and wondering what fool let them build the outskirts of Chipping Norton where you could see them from the Rollrights.

These stones were old before Caesar. The King's Men - the circle - was erected about 4,000 years ago. And when that was built, the place was already hallowed. The Whispering Knights (hidden here behind an ugly railing for no apparent reason) were already old then.

In typically idiosyncratic English style, the King's Stone is the other side of the road. And even more typically English, it's in another county. When the King's Stone went up, the circle was already old.

And when Caesar came, the King's Stone was already old.

It may not seem much, in cosmological or even geological terms. But in the time-scales we normally think in - the Whispering Knights was a tomb before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. About the time that the tomb was as old as Westminster Abbey is today, the circle was built. The time from the building of the circle to Caesar's arrival on our sandy shores, is the same as from Caesar to now. By the time Julius arrived, Rollright and Stonehenge were abandoned already and left to fester - as meaningful to Iron-age life as a Peculiar Baptist Mission Hut is today.

Yet they're still there - not quite as old of the hills, but made out of the same stuff. And the people who were strewing flowers and fruit around the circle a couple of days back really don't have a clue what the original Rollright people did there - it's unlikely they'd have celebrated the Equinox, for starters - but maybe they're drawn by that same Awe that led someone to put that circle there in the first place.

Squelching in a Field

It is of course Bank Holiday weekend. And so we thought we'd kick the weekend off with a trip to that old favourite Beaker vicinity, the Rollright Stones. What would be nicer, we thought, than standing up on the ridge, with the mystical yet strangely worm-eaten stones, and looking out across the valley. Maybe even nip over to the King Stone and see if we can see Long Compton?

What would be nicer, given the three or four inches of rain that fell, could be almost anything. Drenched grass, soaking Beaker People, damp matches with which we totally failed to light any saturated tea lights. Total lack of spiritual feelings. And if you're not going to get any nice spiritual feelings, what's the point of religion at all?

In the event, we had to lose a lot of our planned activities. Rolling downhill in barrels was cancelled. The Beaker Fertility Folk declared there was no way they would be heading off into the long grass. And the planned ceremony of laying on the grass looking up at the sky was seriously compromised. So we huddled in the coach and ate our organic wholemeal probiotic self-affirming sandwiches. Which were damp and horrible.

However, Hnaef claims, in a major geological breakthrough, to have discovered evidence that the ancient Beaker People who erected the Rollright Stones were definitely Anglicans. For reference, see the picture here which is definitely, in Hnaef's opinion, a Neolithic font.

On the way home, we saw a beautiful rainbow. And, unusually, given the light conditions, we saw where the end came to the ground. Where, you may be asking yourself, in our magical trip out to see this ancient monument, would the rainbow have come to earth? In the coffee factory in Banbury, that's where. On the whole, not a great day.

You'll be mist

As fog blankets the Midlands, even unto Nottingham and beyond, I ponder why the old stone circles went out of use.

There are many theories as to why civilisations change. When we had an Empire, it was all about invasion hypothesis - that each race (Beaker People, Celts, Romans, Angles, Vikings) was superseded by the next, better-equipped, conquering people. But in this allegedly gentler age, that has been in its turn superseded by the idea that the people basically stayed where they were, and technologies and habits were acquired by communication and copying rather than conquest - a kind of Iron-Age liberal interventionism, if you will.
But for myself, I reckon that what really tended to happen  was that the menfolk would invade, kill or enslave the pre-existing menfolk, and take the women along with the farms and other possessions. It's not nice, but it seems to fit in with our human condition. And  male behaviour.

But back to the Stone Circles. I reckon it wasn't that a new Celtic belief system that came in, removing the stone circles in a kind of Cornish iconoclasm. Nor that the Celts wiped out the Beaker People. I reckon it was simple. Stone circles have solar alignments - you get together at midsummer or midwinter and watch the sun rise. But imagine if every solstice was overcast or foggy. The "druids" and neo-pagans look miserable enough on our tellies when they get just one. After a century or two of the disappointment of no-shows from the sun, you'd go off and worship in some druidic groves and leave the stones to the bat and the hoopoe. "Coming to the Solstice, Myfanwy?" "Nah, Eileen - I reckon I'll go off to them groves and learn to be Welsh."