It was quite strange, really. After a brief, initial wander around the inner stones of Stonehenge, marvelling at the scale and workmanship, almost all of the little party of out-of-hours visitors congregated by the storyteller to listen to and question his words. To be fair, he was an interesting and knowledgeable guide, but knowledge you can find anywhere and anytime… experience, presence, feeling the spirit and atmosphere of a place? That can only be a gift of the moment and once past, such moments may never come again.

That was certainly the way I was feeling, as I walked between the stones, greeting old friends I had not seen this closely in over forty years. You cannot touch the stones these days…but then, you do not need to. The magic of the place wraps itself around you like a warm blanket.

Stonehenge is a place where legend and mystery meet and meld. It was raised by the giants who once inhabited these blessed isles… or by the Devil, stealing the stones from an old woman… or by Merlin, asked to build a monument by Uther Pendragon for his fallen men, using stones carried by magic, by water and by music all the way from Ireland… Although, of course, the usual Arthurian myths go back only a thousand years to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Nowhere near far enough for this ancient circle, although Monmouth’s stories may have reached back into a more ancient past for their source and inspiration. Oddly enough, though, the old stories do tie in with the idea of music or vibration as part of the stone circle’s properties and ith the idea that the stones were carried here by sea.

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