The Ancients - Stone Circles

Episode Date: August 2, 2020

From Cornwall to Orkney, stone circles are scattered throughout the length and breadth of the British Isles. Their history stretches more than 2 millennia, varying from the earlier huge stone circles such as Castlerigg, Avebury and the Ring of Brodgar to the smaller and more regional circles that emerged after c.2,000 BC. Their remains continue to attract great amounts of visitors right up to the present day.To learn more about these extraordinary prehistoric structures, I'm chatting with Timothy Darvill OBE, a professor from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University and the author of Prehistoric Britain.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Welcome to The Ancients, a new podcast dedicated to all things, well, ancient. I'm Tristan Hughes, and in each episode I'll be chatting with a world's leading historian or archaeologist about our distant past. The art, the architecture, the battles,

the larger-than-life personalities, events that have helped shape the world we live in today. From Neolithic Britain to the fall of Rome, from the Assyrians to Alexander the Great. Today we are going way back. Forget ancient Rome, forget ancient Greece, forget the Mediterranean. We are going to Neolithic Britain. And in particular, we're going to be talking about stone circles. And for this chat, I thought who better to get on the show than a leading authority in stone circles in Neolithic Britain, in prehistoric Britain, Timothy Darville. He has written a book called Prehistoric Britain.

He has appeared on numerous television shows and radio shows. He has excavated at Stonehenge and he is a fantastic communicator. This was a lot of fun. Enjoy. Tim, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Now, stone circles, this is a fascinating topic as these amazing prehistoric monuments, they seem to stretch the whole length and breadth of the British Isles. They certainly do. We find them from Orkney all the way down here to Dorset. And we find them in Ireland, of course,

and all the way across into the east of England too. They're extraordinary things. And of course, people are very familiar with them. And people go and visit them. And in a sense, they're probably more popular now than they ever were in prehistory. But the extraordinary thing is they are quite a British phenomena. There are a few in northern France, in western France, in Brittany, that sort of area.

And there are a few perhaps up in Scandinavia too. But these you can count on one hand. The majority of them, and there's about a thousand or so altogether, are scattered through the British Isles. Phenomenal. Does this suggest that the communities in prehistoric Britain had these cultural links, but also that they may have had these cultural links with places on the continent, such as you mentioned Brittany or Scandinavia? Yes, certainly. They're certainly linked in at this time. The period we're talking about now is from about 3000 BC, what would be

often termed the later Neolithic, through to about 1500 BC, which we'd refer to as the Middle Bronze Age. So they span at least 1500 years or more, which is a long old time to be building these things. And they come in different types. We'll talk about that in just a moment. But as a phenomena, they are closely connected with all sorts of communities across the British Isles. And one thing we've got to feed into it is that we see the stone examples now, but in prehistoric times, they also built them in wood. Now, of course, the timber ones have all disappeared. We can't see those.

We only find them in excavations. But the stone ones, well, they're still there. We still know and love them and can go and visit. So we've got to just balance up, if you like, our interpretation of these sites by adding in the timber examples alongside the stone examples. And you won't be surprised to know that, of course, the timber examples occur in the east of England where stone is pretty rare and the stone examples tend to occur in the west of Britain where stone is very common. There seems to be a large amount of stone circles in Western England compared to Eastern England and Western England and Wales. But this seems to be

the reason why. It's because it's not that there weren't circles in Eastern England. It was because they were primarily made of wood that doesn't survive. Yes, exactly right. And one has turned up just recently, beautifully survived. It's a wooden example. It's in a place called Holmby Sea, which is on the Norfolk coast. And the timbers are still there. They're split oak logs. And they've made this beautiful circle. And we know a lot about it. It's made out of oak. It's got an upturned tree trunk in the middle. It was built around about 2100 BC. It's a beautiful example. And so many of these must exist in the east of England we just don't see them so it's one of the reasons why of course the excavation of sites ahead of development is so interesting and so important and this is where we find the timber circles. Before dating these

prehistoric sites obviously it's before written records and all that is archaeology and scientific developments absolutely central to the amount of knowledge we know today? Yes, I mean stone circles and timber circles could really only be explored through archaeological investigations. The stone ones are very, very difficult to date because you can't date stone and unless somebody's constructed something else with it or put a special deposit with it, that's very difficult. But timber, if you can get some of the wood or if it's burnt, if you can get some of the charcoal from it, it is possible to get a very precise date. And so the timber circles are actually more easy to understand than the

stone circles. And so we have to translate across from one thing to another. Now, that big span of dates I mentioned takes us from farming communities who didn't use metal at around 3000 BC, all the way through to metal using communities, Bronze Age communities, who were BC in Britain. So stone circles and timber circles span that transition to metal-using communities. And I think that's what makes them quite fascinating. If we go back to the start, to the earliest communities that we know as stone circles, whereabouts in the British Isles do we think that the first stone circles start to appear?

Well, we can break the tradition into two parts. The earliest part, which starts about 3000 and lasts for about 1000 years, is what we often refer to as the great stone circles. So things like Castle Rigg up in the Lake District, for example, would be one. Calanish on Lewis in the Hebrides would be another one. For example, Ring of Broga, Stones of Stenness up in Orkney would be another one for example Ring of Broga stones of Stenness up in Orkney would be examples Avebury of course is the biggest of them all down in southern England

Stonehenge which we'll no doubt come back to in a moment would count too there's about 100 or so of these across Britain few in Ireland too and these are the early ones they're generally huge the stones are often very widely spaced and they very often go and get the stones from all sorts of interesting places. It's as if the origin of the stone is as important as the construction that they make at the end of it, the circle itself. And when we look at the timber ones, we rather suspect that they're selecting particular species of wood to use in their timber circles as well. Oak is certainly the most common that we can see at the moment. But the stones and the wood probably have special meanings to these people.

Were they about the origins of the world? Were they, for example, the great pillar that holds up the sky or something of this sort? The stories we can't know, of course, but we can suspect that they were strong and they were really interesting. So those are the early ones and they come to an end somewhere about 2000 BC, a little bit before and then we get the later circles which are completely different. They're much smaller, they're much more numerous, there's eight or nine hundred of them, they're very much more scattered, they're usually less than about 30 meters across, they don't have very many stones in them, some of them are absolutely minute, some of them are just a matter of five or six metres across and the stones are absolutely tiny. So you can sort of tell the late tradition, the small tradition circles from

these big giant ones, which are probably the ones we often think of, to be honest, when we think of Avebury and Stonehenge and places like that. I love that. So actually the start of the tradition seems to be when they're at their biggest size. Yeah, this is quite unusual. So many things in prehistory start small and get big, whereas circles seem to start big and get small. It's almost as if we don't need these massive great circles anymore. Let's just build little intimate ones that we can be part of. You mentioned the distance for collecting of these stones for these stone circles. Has the science been able to tell us that these stones were not usually from the place that the actual circle was constructed? Yes, we used geology of course to help us with this. Stonehenge was the first one to be recognised as being something unusual. Back in the 1920s, geologists realised

that the stones in the centre of Stone Circle, not the big ones around the outside, but the ones in the centre, come from the Preseli Hills of southwest Wales, which is 250 kilometres or so away. But now people are beginning to look at other stones and other circles, and we see that although the distances are much less, nonetheless, they are building stone circles with stones brought in from 20 30 miles away that seems fairly typical you just kind of wonder why they chose those stones was it the color was it the texture of them why were those stones really important and that's one of the questions which in one sense we can't answer but that's the nice thing about archaeology we can

find good questions and then we can probe and probe and think about, you know, what's going on here. It's free roam for theories, isn't it? It's fantastic. Yeah, well, there's lots of ideas. I mean, could those stones and posts be representations of people, for example? Could they be, if you like, the fossilised remains, the fossilised versions of the gods, of the deities, of the ancestors, of special people in the world, maybe. We could personify the stones themselves. And I think one of the really interesting things is that the legends which are associated with these circles often refer to the petrification of people dancing or people singing or people playing their instruments or armies on the move this kind of

thing there's some folk memory booming through i think from prehistory which says these stones are people out there in the landscape so just imagine a ring of a hundred people at avebury which become stones who are those people are they the ancestors are they the deities? Who exactly are they? From an outsider's perspective like myself, I'm sure as an archaeologist you can see the differences. But when you see the huge standing stones at somewhere like Avebury or you see it all the way up in Orkney at the Ring of Brodgar, are there evident similarities in the construction of these huge stone circles between those like in South England and those up off the northern coast of Scotland? Yes they're constructed in exactly the same sort of way they just use local stones but the way they put them together the way they put them up the way they lay them out this seems to be all the same. How do they put them up? Well the big

ones are a big job of course although strange enough it's a game we often play with students when we're doing our field work and several, quarries have very generously given us big stones that we can play with. And to my mind, the extraordinary thing is once you get them on some rollers and start moving them around the field on some sledges on the rollers and so on, you can move massive great big stones with a gang of 20 or 30 students with no problem at all. And in fact, they bob about like a cork on water sometimes. I find it amazing. The first time I did it, I thought, oh, this is going to take a long time to put this stone up. And it happened in about 90 seconds. And I still don't know how it happened.

We started off 100 and 150 meters away and suddenly the stone was in the hole. And I have no idea. We even had to take it out and rerun it for the cameras that were trying to film it. So it is a big job and we shouldn't underestimate it. But I think these guys really knew about lifting stones. And I think they could do it pretty easily, pretty quickly. And in a way, it's the business of doing it. It's the process of putting it up as much as the, if you like, the structure at the end. It's the business of doing stone circles of making stone

circles of getting the stone bringing it to site probably lots of ceremonies going on at that point and then slotting it up in its holes and it stands beautifully as we see them today and there's something about those standing stones which i find it very hard to capture. As I say, I've put up several myself with students helpers and they look okay. They look okay, but they're not as good as the prehistoric ones and I don't know how they do it. Somehow they managed to make an aesthetic in the way those stones are standing.

Today we just see the finished piece of how these stone circles or those that survived look now. But you would argue actually in prehistoric Britain, the long arduous process of building this monument could have been just as important. Yes, I think the process was important. And where we can glimpse it a little bit, there's much more work to do on this, it does appear that they put them up not necessarily all at once, but over a time, we could imagine them putting up, let's just say for sake of argument, one a year. And they make that circle over a period of time. And the big event, I don't know which day it was, let's call it Midsummer's Day, they go and get the stone and they bring it and they put it as the next stone on the circle. And so whether this happened over weeks or months or years or decades, we don't know.

But it does seem that it gradually grows. And the growing of the circle and the building of it, I think, was a much more festive kind of occasion than perhaps we think. You know, we can turn that around and look back. In our modern world, we say, oh, it's Wednesday, it's five o'clock, we've got to do something. And, you know, by seven o'clock, it's finished and we're done. five o'clock, we've got to do something. And, you know, by seven o'clock, it's finished and we're done. But if you've got to travel for, let's say, two weeks, walking to get to the place, you don't spend a couple of hours and then go home again. You spend a couple of weeks and then go home again. You know, the festival that prehistoric people, I think, would have enjoyed is a much more

extensive thing. And nowadays, we think of things like Glastonbury and big pop festivals, we make the journey, we make the pilgrimage, if you like, we spend a few days in the sun, enjoying the music and the festival and all the rest of it, and then we go home again. I think a lot of things connected with Stay in Circles will be more like that. I'm not saying the Glastonbury, but I think that sort of process of journeying, arriving, enjoying, soaking it up, becoming part of it, and then the return journey home. That's the sort of thing we have to think about when we're talking about how stone circles worked. Definitely want to go into the possible functions and theories of stone circles in a

second. But just before that, I think it'd be a miss not to mention Stonehenge and talking about the amazing process of making the henge. First of all, forgive my ignorance, can we call Stonehenge a stone circle? Well, I think we should. It very nicely stands right on this boundary between the great circles and the small later circles. Its construction around about 2300-2400 BC accords very nicely with what we know about that. We have to remember though that Stonehenge is a very very long-lived site. It starts before 3000 BC. It's a cemetery. It's a cremation cemetery at first. It has a big earthwork enclosure around it and there may even be a few stones and posts and things at that time. But what we know as Stonehenge, that wonderful setting in the centre with those great big trilithons in the middle and the circle of starsons with their lintels on the top around the outside, that starts being built about 2500

or so BC. They put the trilithons in the middle first, of course, and then they add the stones around the outside. Those are all local stones. And then they go to the Brucelles and they bring the so-called blue stones, these sort of magic stones, if you like, and put those in the central area and they move them about all sorts of times. So in Stonehenge we've got several nice things. One is this sort of interface between the great circles that have come before and the smaller circles which are going to come in the next phase. That's one thing. The second though is that although it's made out of stone it's basically a timber structure so they've made Stonehenge in the same way that a carpenter might make a timber circle. So it's actually put together with mortise and tenon joints for example the stones are faced as if

you would face a timber and so it's a stone version of something which we only find slight traces of when we're finding the timber version. So it sits nicely astride these various traditions. And of course, it's used for a very long time. Probably more people go there now than ever went there in prehistory. But it's still the focus of a lot of attention. You know, the nice thing is if you go there on the midsummer, you can go inside the circle, watch the sunrise. That's important lots of people do i think the last few occasions it's been 10 000 people or so turn up for that sort of ceremony but the crucial one at stonehenge is not the midsummer one it's actually the midwinter sunset that's when

stonehenge has all its power not so many people go for that of course it's on the 22nd or 21st of december so it sounds unique in more ways than one in its construction in the time period, how it goes from the early to the late, from the huge stone circles to the small ones. And the process of its construction, is this the key example of the amount of time and effort these prehistoric peoples put in to creating this stone circle? Yes, Stonehenge must have taken far longer, far more effort, far more coordination to put together. Although, as I said before, it does span quite a long period. So it's accretional, it builds up over the course of time, it doesn't all happen in one big bang, builds up. And in a way, a suitable comparison,

it's not a very exact comparison, but we might just compare it with some of the great medieval cathedrals for example you know many of them are absolutely fantastic but a few stand out as you know absolutely superlative examples i mean salisbury cathedral for example you know it's such a beautiful one piece of architecture in the middle there of salisbury city now absolutely fantastic there's lots of other good ones. Everyone's got their favourites, of course, but some of them stand out on an international scale. And we also think of some places, religious places in the world. Mecca, for example, would be one. Jerusalem might be another, for example. Istanbul, Constantinople might be another, for example. Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I mean, you can put on the fingers of a couple of hands these great places of pilgrimage for the great

religions of the world. And Stonehenge, in a way, was probably the equivalent for prehistoric people of Mecca, for example, or Santiago, or Lourdes, or somewhere of this sort from more modern times. Does it seem that Stonehenge has a primarily religious purpose? I think they all have a religious purpose. And we could say that they're places of worship. The problem then becomes, who are they worshipping? What's the power, as it were? Who are the divinities?

What are the deities? How does it work in practice? And there's a lot of ideas about that. Stonehenge might, again again be a little bit unusual the sarsen structure the big structure that we see perhaps is more typical of stone circles more generally but is bigger and better and more carefully formed example whereas the blue stones in the middle are a slightly different thing. Unusually in stone circles the blue stones are moved about pretty regularly during the course of their life and we know from the excavations that Geoff Wainwright and I did there that they are broken up and they're made into objects like

little talismans, little amulets, little sort of items that you could carry away and they'd be warding off evil spirits and this kind of thing. Maybe in our view, they're used for healing as well. People go there for healing purposes in the same way that they go to many of the great shrines around the world. Mecca and Santiago come to mind again. So there may be an element of that going on there. And that sense, perhaps Stonehenhenge is a little bit unusual because we don't seem to have the same sorts of things happening at other places but perhaps similar things are happening but in different sort of ways so perhaps those other stone circles are if you like the in the ownership of a community they're made by a community that must be self

evident from the amount of effort which is there. But they're, if you like, places where that community can meet together. Maybe it's where they meet together for trading, maybe for exchanging, maybe for practical purposes like that. But maybe there's something more. Maybe it's a bit more like the kind of mandalas that you see in Eastern religions. Funnily enough, the word means circle, where a person, a spiritual leader, a spiritual guide, we might perhaps call them more, has created something which is a tool of their trade. And through using that tool, they can take people on journeys, maybe individuals or indeed whole communities, shamanic journeys perhaps, journeys into other worlds, journeys into themselves of course as well. So it may be that stone circles are special places

which are the tools of the trade, if you like, of those spiritual guides who can take people into those other worlds. And so stone circles might be simply a way of delineating, creating special places where, if you like, worlds collide and it's possible to go into other places. So it might represent a spiritual boundary, this circular ring? Yes, a physical boundary, which is actually a spiritual boundary, which when you cross it, and perhaps it's important which direction you go in which gap you go through these sorts of things maybe the people if those stones are people maybe they are the guides who take you into that other world and take you out of yourself into another place there are all these

fictional books and stories where people go through two standing stones or something into another world. And you think this is the origin of that sort of story. Well, exactly. And in a way, I challenge some of the people listening to our podcast. What do you feel when you go through a stone circle? What do you feel as you go between those stones into that central space? Do you feel anything at all? Maybe some people feel nothing and that's fine. Maybe other people do nothing and that's fine. Maybe other people

do feel very spiritually uplifted or more spiritually aware in some way. We'd be very interested to know what happens because I think when we start to look at prehistoric sites, one of the important things we always have to do is try and put ourselves in the shoes of those ancient people. Well, they're a bit like us. They're not exactly like us. They thought differently, of course, but their senses are very much like us. So can we use our senses to try to understand the feelings,

the emotions that they might have gone through? And somewhere in amongst the commonality of human beings, there is that still around us somewhere. And maybe we can capture it. So it's a challenge when you next go to this 10 circle. Don't just rush into the middle. Just go gently. Just think, how is my state of mind changing? What am I experiencing? What am I feeling? What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What's my senses telling me as I move through this space very interesting little trial to have a go at well when this crisis ends you're going to get an absolute

rush of volunteers and absolutely they're going to be lining up to go through well who knows who knows well you know the present situation is one that makes us think about all sorts of things and this question of how we experience the world is one of the areas that archaeologists are very interested in. How do we do it, but how do prehistoric people or other peoples in other situations experience the world? And maybe the lesson of the pandemic is that we all just slow down a little bit. We all perhaps just try and understand and experience our surroundings, our environment, our situation, just a little bit we will perhaps just try and understand and experience our surroundings our environment our situation just a little bit more sensitively and prehistoric sites and stone circles are a beautiful example are places where we can go and just ask ourselves secretly perhaps

but you know what are we feeling is stone circles a vital part of the tradition, especially in Britain, that before the Romans come, the native British peoples have this strong connection with nature, as it were? Well, it's a nice way of looking at it. And I think there's a lot in it as well. We've got to be a little bit careful though here, because we get trapped in what's often referred to, and we're going into a bit of philosophy here, but often referred to as the nature-cultural dualism, that there is this, on the one hand, cultural world that we live in,

and on the other hand, this is natural world that is all around us. And of course, right from the 17th century onwards, physical sciences have tended to separate out, for example, the emotional side of things from the observational side of things from the observational side of things, the way in which we can experience nature in different ways. Well, why don't we just collapse all that down for a minute and just think, hang on,

we're all sentient beings. Maybe other parts of the world that we live in are sentient too. Well, we all accept that in relation to animals. Increasingly, people are thinking that plants have got means of communicating between themselves. Maybe other elements of the world can communicate as well. So if we suspend some of our 20th century ways of thinking and just say, wait a minute, let's make the world an entirely sentient place. And rocks and plants and animals and people, they can all talk to each other. In fact, there's a really interesting creation myth I came across a little while ago, which was the Inuit people in the northern part of North America. And they believe that at the beginning of the world, everything in the world could talk to each other. And the fall,

if you like, the way that the world developed in their way of thinking is that gradually they lost contact with each other and they became more and more isolated and more and more individualistic and that they couldn't understand each other's way of being each other's language and in a way when we think about prehistory we've got to take a step out of our own existence and think what's the possibilities what are the possibilities that people could be thinking about how they could be thinking what are the categories that they use to think about the world we're into some big areas of philosophy and philosophy of science at this point of course but this is the sort of thing that archaeologists are driving towards how can we use

the prehistoric past that we excavate and see around us, to start thinking about the way that people are in the world. How do we interact? So maybe, maybe, I'm just putting it out as a possibility, when we're talking about the communities who built and used those stone circles, those stones were just as much alive as the person standing next to them. Wow. And so you may have a shamanic figure or something overlooking it or responsible for it. Well, he said you never know.

We don't know. But if you believed that these things had agency, had animacy, had the life force in them, you don't actually need a shaman to take you there because you can go there yourself. Maybe you need some spiritual guides to help you think about them and maybe do the interpretation, if you like. But if you see the world in that way, that it's all connected up, that everything in a sense is alive, then the world's a very different place.

Do we usually see archaeological evidence for prehistoric communities very close by to these stone circles? This is a really interesting question. The evidence we've got for settlements is often in the vicinity of stone circles but not very close up to it. The strange thing though is that a lot of the early circles, the great stone circles, actually are built on top of existing houses. So there was a house there. Now whether it was a living house or it was a special house is a matter of some debate but the basic form of the structure is the basic form of a house. So underneath Cullinish for example, underneath the stones of Stenness, Ring of Broga, some of these sites there are houses in the area of them. The same probably applies at Avebury too and the centre of Stonehenge is

modelled on the structure of a house at that time as well. So you might say well it's a house of God, familiar enough kind of theme, but it may be of course a house of a deity or a house of a special person that gets embodied in the way that that monument then develops. So houses are a really interesting thing. The slight snag is that most prehistoric communities, especially in this part of prehistory that we're talking about now, these sort of early farming communities, spent far more time and effort building great big robust monuments

than they did building their settlements. So the consequence is that we don't very often find the settlements, I'm afraid. But they do crop up occasionally. And again, it's another area where watching development sites and monitoring development has really changed the picture. 30 years ago, I could probably have only told you about a few settlements of this period. Now, there are dozens and in years to come, I hope there'll be a lot more and we can really get a handle on where these guys were living. Indeed. And as you said, the Timestone Circles, it crosses eras as it were from the megalithic to bronze age why as these prehistoric communities they develop why do you believe the stone circles

start to decline in their size across the uk i think they become smaller because they're just easier to use they're much more numerous i think everybody knows what they're all about, how they work. And so you build a smaller, more modest scale circle. I think that's the reason. They also become a bit more regionally specific. So in Eastern Scotland, for example, you get so-called recumbent stone circles where there's a nice big flat slab of one of the sectors.

It's usually the sector towards the winter sky. Other places you get just simple circles with not much in the way of entrances. The architecture of them subtly changes as well and regional styles become much more common. In the early phase, the Great Stone Circles, they're very, very similar right across the whole country. At the same time as these small regional circles are developing, do we have evidence that the bigger megalithic sites, do they evolve in any way in their purpose, in their use? We don't know much about that. They certainly continue to be there and certainly continue to be used. In many cases, the small stone circles occur in the same area as the big ones. So if you were to go to, for example, Stanton Drew down in Somerset, there's a huge, great big circle in the middle.

And then there's a couple of much smaller ones, which are these later examples, built on a roundabout in the same valley, a few hundred metres away. So the same would apply to Avebury. We find similar things there. So, yes, the centres, if you like, the foci remain the same, but the scale of the circle and the nature of the circles do change over the course of time. Have we only just scratched the surface with the archaeology of stone circles in prehistoric Britain? How much more is there still to learn? Oh, I think we've only just started. We've only just scratched the surface. We're beginning to think about them in interesting and different ways, and that's always helpful. There's been a few excavations of both timber and stone circles in the last few years, which has started to change our understandings. People have started to look at the geology much more carefully

to try and track the individual sources of the stones, which hill they came from. So we're asking all sorts of really exciting and new and interesting questions. And needless to say, when you ask new questions, you get interesting answers. You mentioned how the circles, you know, they've decreased in size, they seem to become more regional in their shape, in how they're designed. Do you think we're starting to see the origins of cultural tribal identities emerging? I don't know whether they connect into the tribal groups we've got around the time of the Roman conquest but certainly from

the time stone circles start to be created we can begin to see regional groupings the styles of pottery that they use for example are quite distinctive so there are common themes across the whole country but there are clearly communities who are living in particular regions if you like particular areas who have got an identity of their own so some things they project that identity through some things they don't the story of the stone circle is of course that the stone circle is not particularly used as a form of identity in the early periods of its use but by the time they are building in the second millennium around about 1200 1500 bc then they are very much symbols of identity of their

own communities fascinating i love that idea of evolution over time as you say the huge time frame it must have happened it's mind-boggling the the life of the stone circles is the equivalent of the time when romans invaded britain through to now it's similar to the pyramids isn't it like 4 000 years ago when they build we're actually now closer to the time of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the time those pyramids were constructed. It's a huge amount of time. Anyway, Tim, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure too. Thank you.