Says JC - you just quoted him saying so :-)

It's quite a common theory that natural outcrops were used as sacred markers. They still are in some 'primitive' cultures.

< I'm sympathetic to that assertion but it begs the question 'says who?' >

It's basic animism - i.e. the so-called 'primitive' thought that all things in Nature are imbued with a sense of 'spirit.' But if we take that as the primer, we'd have a website full of spurious rocks and pebbles. We've gotta see this animistic sense of spirit in the right context - and in this case 'spirit' isn't some ghostly or Doris Stokes-type form waffling from the other side. In tribal groups, such <i>spirit</i> is literally the feel or impression one gets of a place. Most of us here have had it surely? You're wandering along through the hills when, for some weird reason, the place you're at suddenly has a 'feel' to it - something decidely different from the land around it. Such sites usually become defined as sacred after many people have experienced similar things there. There are plenty of books on the subject, most of which can be found in your anthropology and comparative religion sections in the library. Mircea Eliade's not a bad place to start.

These days we know that such experiences are due to geomagnetism and its effect on the central nervous system, eliciting a small altered state, but our ancestors knew nothing of the sort and so related to it directly as a feeling or 'spirit of place'. The old school analysts, trying to escape the natural world in their rationalistic science at the time of Darwin, denigrated such experiences as primitive and thought such notions of a 'living universe' to be backward - so they called it animism and thought that would be the last of it. Thankfully not!

Whilst animism is embedded in everything in Nature, it was only with certain large rock outcrops where great gods or spirits were said to reside. Hence, I assume (not having read Mr Cope's works), that's why TMA likes to have big lumpy outcrops. It's their animistic qualities!

There are a number of great rock sites I've been and had weirdy feelings from, then later taken others (without telling) to see their impressions. It might sound silly, but I <i>know</i> that in times past, legends or tales were said of these places, but when I've looked such info up, have found nothing. And so they remain simply in my experiential domain and I don't include them here (I've actually taken some of them off TMA).

I've got a terrible cold so don't expect me to make any sense. But it does seem to me that if you're living in a pre-urban society, where you're intimately involved in the process of catching or growing your dinner, fetching water etc - you have to be aware of your local environment. And some things in it stand out more than others, purely because they're big. Some stand out because they're unusual. Some because something about them elicits a feeling of fear (or awe). I think these things are beyond argument (though I'm sure somebody will disagree). And the things that stand out are well known amongst the local people, and they discuss them and tell stories about them, or they come to represent certain important things to them. I mean they're landmarks aren't they, physically and also part of people's mental maps and their sense of where they live blah blah blah.

Ok we can't say for sure which natural features were definitely important to a set of people x years in the past. But I think you can generally have a bloody good guess that they were important to someone. If you can recognise them, then why couldn't someone else have done? And if this website has a remit of 4500+BC to the Iron age, that's a long time to have noticed an obvious set of rocks.

Ah I dunno. Just because you can't Prove any particular site, does that mean you shouldn't include any at all??

Here's a good one - http://www.lundyisleofavalon.co.uk/lundy/ktrock.htm - the templars (inc. simon) were 'brothers in arms' to the st john knights hospitallers (of Bolton). One of their heads (carved) was stolen two days ago from Rivington Barn. Medieval perhaps, but topical, with the Dan Brown court case. The Templars were expelled in 1308 for worshipping 'heads', amongst other stuff.