Having just posted about Avebury, I have been thinking today about standing stones, and how, although I have no idea what they can have originally meant to the people who put them up and revered them or used them in some ceremony, they still have a very powerful attraction to me… yeah, that makes me sound like a real old hippy!
There was a programme on the television a couple of days ago which had a new theory about Stonehenge, maybe the most famous set of standing stones in the world, arranged into a henge; this theory posited that people had come from across the British Isles to help with the construction of the site, and to celebrate whatever it was they were celebrating. People walked from as far away as the Orkney Isles…
The number of times we have been somewhere and I have dragged the family up to view what they think of as a pile of old stones… quite often through mist or driving rain… but somehow I just have to go had visit them.
I wrote this a long time before I saw Long Meg, but this could be her; it’s from ‘Loving Judah’
Her instincts told her to go downhill and she set off across the field following the contours to another wall with a stone style set into it. A style must mean a footpath but there was nothing visible and the moon had disappeared behind a cloud. Something loomed in front of her like a huge woman leaning to one side. It was a standing stone, a single finger pointing to the heavens. Aislin went to her and put her arms round her, leant her cheek against her stony bosom.
Lois Elsden 
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