There's no one meaning you can put on Stonehenge. I don't think it's a single syllable answer that you can throw at it. I'm a Stonehenge druid of the Asteyna grove. It's a meeting place, it's a great calendar, it's a temple, it's a living space, where people come together at very significant times to do very significant things. Some of those are spiritual, some of those are practical. And the landscape is just showing that every time we think we know the answer, we find there's more to the question.
Druidry is about becoming synchronised with nature, being priest of nature, but also with the ancestors. Stonehenge itself is a monumental achievement in terms of the artistic ability, the technical ability, understanding of the ancestors, and here we feel they are talking to us. And by having rituals and celebrations here we are part of the cycles, which they were part of.
It's a lot more of Stonehenge landscape and environment than Stonehenge itself. On the left of Stonehenge you have a Heelstone. And the Heelstone is what the sunrise on the Summer Solstice will shine across of the top of that into Stone circle itself.
Just slightly to the East you see the line of Burial Mounds, they are late Neolithic – early Bronze age. They're essentially part of the landscape, where there are dozens of these very special ancestors. We don't know an awful lot about them but they're buried all over the landscape. Shifting around the horizon line, we will see a gap in the trees there. That's the end of very mysterious straight line feature, which is much older than Stonehenge, maybe another thousand years older, called Cursus. I think, some of the first archaeologists to notice it thought there would be the chariot racing there, because of its long shape and its banks and ditches on either side. And you can walk across this landscape quite freely (There's no charge) and you can walk the length of the Cursus and I haven't done this yet, but it goes along the tree line behind us to the North of Stonehenge.
And just over to the North-West we see another line of burial mounds, these are known as the King Barrows. You can just see that they are...their presence on the horizon is always saying: “We are the ancestors, we're watching you”. So we are literally surrounded by our ancestors, they are beneath our feet and all around us.
We're on the outskirts of Amesbury and we're actually stood in a very, very special place, because where we're standing right now, beneath our feet is the beginnings of the Avenue that led up to the Stonehenge in ancient times. If the Riverside project are correct, then the priests and priestesses would have landed in their boats behind us. And if you look through the gate across the field, this is the actual ancient Avenue way, probably on the Winter Solstice, they would processed up this way to Stonehenge.
The most important thing about this site for Druids is that potentially it potentially connects the Druids which were talked about in Celtic times, back through the Bronze Age to the Mesolithic Period when Stonehenge was built. And the reason for that is that stone henge here was built before the big Stonehenge. It was used for several hundred years, than deliberately stones were popped vertically out of the ground and taken probably to Stonehenge. The ditch in bank around the henge was then filled in quite deliberately, it was hidden.
Fifteen hundred years, an entire Bronze age goes past. You would think they would forget about it. However the people at that time managed to remember about this secret hidden henge, go back and reconstitute it at the end of Bronze age – beginning of the Iron age and start using it again putting wooden posts back in place of the stones that were here before and that's the Druid period that we all accept. There's a passing on of knowledge for over 1,500 years spanning the whole Bronze Age, between our Stone Age ancestors who built Stonehenge and our Druid ancestors who wrote down folklore that we now take from Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And that means that folklore possibly has earlier origins going right back and we should now be looking at it as a serious study and we shouldn't be laughing at the Druids with their connection to Stonehenge anymore.
The Bluestonehenge stood there against those trees. The tree lines actually marked the centre of the circle. The far side is actually on the riverbank now and the near side is – well, was – excavated a few months ago.
The river Avon flows behind that, very, very beautiful, it just meanders along. All rivers in ancient world is sacred landscape are sacred themselves, they carry the life forces of the Earth Mother. The source of most rivers has gone to present, when people are hanging rags on trees, the little gifts.
The other interesting feature about British rivers is that their names are the oldest words in our language. So, for example, here we are on Avon, the River Severn, the names like that are pre-Celtic, possibly 7,000 years old and they survived all the incursions and different cultures that have come, and we've never changed the names of our rivers.
So they're sacred places; they're places of spirit and it is very easy to imagine people getting excited on the eve of the Summer or Winter Solstice, floating in their boats, disembarking here, lighting a great bonfire and sitting in their standing stone circle, gathering in the energies and the focus of the ancestors before processing up to the great henge.
For us, as Druids, Arthur and myself, we came here and we did a very simple ceremony, we didn't want to interrupt the magic of the place being untouched since it was last covered up. So anything up to 5,000 years, since priests last operated here. So we just spoke to the ancestors and just said: “We really honour you, we still trying to learn from you and what we are doing here we'll pass to the future generations with honour and truth”.
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