Two books bestrode my childhood, and made me the man I am: The Magic Bridle, a collection of British and Irish myths retold by the folklorist Forbes Stuart, which ignited my six-year-old imagination in 1974, and Mysterious Britain by Janet and Colin Bord, published two years earlier, and part of a then burgeoning bookseller phenomenon of often unreliable Earth mysteries compendiums. Nonetheless, they set this particular boy off, seeking out ancient sites whenever possible. Now everything has wilted but I still have calves of iron, and I can identify the outline of a hilltop earthwork from a moving car on a motorway as surely as a falcon seeing a field mouse 500 feet below.
Through childhood and adolescence I worked towards my targets, assembling my own apostolic archive of similar but unrelated 70s texts, light on detail and heavy on conjecture. Where were these places of power? I would see them! “You and your old ruins!” my gran would cluck dismissively, as I politely requested we broke our Morris Marina journey southwest to the caravan site, at Stanton Drew or Glastonbury. And when I stumbled in my cub-scout shorts to find the Longstone Barrow, which I had only seen in a blurred pamphlet picture, my divorcee dad waited patiently in a car at the bottom of Challacombe Common, counting down the functional alcoholic hours to opening time. God bless him! Today I feel his pain. But we were all weird walking blind back then, confused men with their hands on the shoulders of the equally confused man in front, seeking silhouettes of standing stones in the mists of imaginary moors. Continue reading...
