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REVIEW BY ROB IXER
This is a book for stone circle fans. After a brief but succinct account of prehistoric stone circle-building, the stones are described starting at the geographical (and perhaps interest-wise) top in Orkney, around the Ness of Brodgar, and in Lewis, around Calanais. Coverage then heads southwards through Scotland via golf courses, cottage gardens (ask permission), and blasted heaths to England, finishing in Cornwall, before moving into Wales and Ireland.
All the 344 sites within the British Isles are treated uniformly, and the relative difficulty in finding each one is noted as easy, fair, or hard, with clear and detailed directions (travel by car is given in miles, and by foot in metres). The main text describes their present-day ambience: most are rated kindly between ‘nice’ and ‘lovely’, some (such as Gask) are ‘gems’, but one poor Welsh example is ‘forlorn’. Detailed present-day configurations are compared with earlier 18th- to 20th-century visits, often quoting the colourful views and descriptions of Aubrey Burl. Changes in the circles are noted, sadly mostly for the worse, as ‘Druidical temples’ have been a source of distraction, destruction, and wall-construction for centuries, it seems. Finally, suggestions are made for enriching the visitor experience – from looking at the local setting; searching for sightlines; distinguishing between cup marks and weathering hollows; contrasting variations in lithology or colour between the stones; and, very usefully, photogrammetry.
Just under half of the sites are accompanied by a photograph. Their quality is uniformly good, but easily the most astonishing image is of the small circle at Torbreck Inverness-shire that has been repurposed as a chicken coop and is shown with strutting brown hens on p.74. To end, there is a glossary and a good bibliography, the latter divided geographically. The Republic of Ireland, despite its abundance of lovely (and a very few dissatisfactory) circles seems to have less published research than elsewhere.
All the well-known glamorous sites are given due attention, but so are the myriad small and overgrown foot-high stones, strangled by heather and bracken. Despite the authors being quite severe in their choice of what should be included, the Welsh source quarries for Stonehenge are noted – almost the only non-circle sites to be given a description.
Field guides, despite their blurb, are not intended to be read in one go, but these days to be an aid and used with a digital camera/phone – en plein air – to enhance/record the experience (indeed, for many circles the reader is exhorted to do just that). However, the repetition of words and themes cause natural patterns to emerge: the seemingly inexorable 18th- to 20th-century abuse of the stones and the arboreal visual erosion of many sites and their sightlines; the ubiquity of white quartz, from small pebble flooring to albeit rather rare ‘large’ orthostats; that the south-wests of England, Ireland, and Wales seem especially rich in circles (including a large number of the authors’ many favourites); that ‘access to a trained geologist is gold dust’ is very true, and still needed for most sites.
It would be impossible and unjust not to compare and contrast this volume with Andy Burnham’s 416-page The Old Stones (Current Archaeology Book of the Year 2019), despite no mention of the latter by the former. Burnham’s book is more eclectic, describing standing stones, chambered tombs, and so on. All the sites have an accompanying photograph with the descriptions, which are still good, although less academically definitive, and it has those whimsical articles. It has a more immediate but less serious appeal. Both Burnham’s and this field guide are hefty tomes, hence ideally both should be taken on safari, although this might require hiring porterage (but that would be money well spent). Both volumes required enormous dedication, care, and love to research and write, and so are vastly enriching.
Stone Circles: A Field GuideColin Richards and Vicki Cummings
Yale University Press, £30
ISBN 978-0300235982
