Branwen wrote:
Littlestone wrote:
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell
Monday, 30th August 1773: Inverness, Fort Augustus.
About three miles beyond Inverness, we saw, just by the road, a very complete specimen of what is called a Druid's temple. There was a double circle, one of very large, the other of smaller stones. Dr Johnson justly observed, that, 'to go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough'.
Thanks to Nigel Swift for this one - http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=54621
I was reading the above and it got me thinking. How many circles actually have any real connections to Druid's? When I first joined druid groups because some of the storytellers I had growing up were druids, I was mistified at the stubborness of some of them in claiming Stonehenge, for instance. Less blinkered people at some of their forums said they only had circles with a large stone in the centre, and outliers, which fits the description of the site above, but it was more common for them to have a large tree central to the community than a stone. I didn't really get any more info from them, or find any connection to the storytelling tradition I was pining for, and I went from one to another till I gave up.Monday, 30th August 1773: Inverness, Fort Augustus.
About three miles beyond Inverness, we saw, just by the road, a very complete specimen of what is called a Druid's temple. There was a double circle, one of very large, the other of smaller stones. Dr Johnson justly observed, that, 'to go and see one druidical temple is only to see that it is nothing, for there is neither art nor power in it; and seeing one is quite enough'.
Thanks to Nigel Swift for this one - http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/forum/?thread=54621
I know a lot of places have been named "druid" mistakenly by early antiquarians who mislabelled them, but some do feature in druid, or celtic myths. Crom was worshipped by the Crooked Druids, the Cruimetheme, at a circle in Ireland which Patrick destroyed, for instance. Deirdre dashes her brains on a large standing stone to commit suicide in some folk tales too, though that isnt druid so much as celtic. I'll keep scrolling through the ones thrown up on the TMA pages search, but most don't mention any folklore connected to druids, so I'm assuming they are elder antiquarians fanciful names.