nicely reasoned argument Rhiannon...

I personally enjoy the folklore for it's own sake I must admit, but you've made me think twice about that. After all, who knows where the roots of some of these tales really lie.

Great stuff, keep it up.

Squiddo

There's a song by the much under-rated 'World Party' called "Always on My Mind". In the song he rails against modern society - decrying the social injustice and environmental damage that has become more and more extreme under capitalist consumerism. There's a piece in it, addressed to the leaders of the world;
>
> I'm sick of feeling sick of you
> You're too smart to be like this
> But you've got no legends that will guide your soul...
>
I believe that folklore / mythology is a hugely important process (for it is an ever-evolving process and not something static) that fulfills the function of anchoring people not only to their culture and past, but to the land itself. It's a way of passing wisdom down through generations. Of stressing the importance of certain things, and of certain places.

When i'm in rural Cork there's a phrase i hear a lot that i almost never hear in cities. "In the time of my grandfather..." is the opening line to many anecdote in rural pubs. And the story that follows it may be 50 years old, or it may be 1,000. I'm not sure i've ever heard someone say it (at least, not in the same way) in an urban setting.

Up until very recently the lives of every human being was inextricably tied up with the land they lived on. Today, people in cities, by and large, take no notice of the land that surrounds them. And with good reason - most of it's covered in concrete. Yet, i recall my grandmother (born and bred on a farm but moved to the city) telling amazing tales about the place she grew up. Many of them would start with "You might think I'm very old, but in the time of *my* grandmother..."

None of that is written down anywhere. And none of her decendants are passing those tales on. The city killed the folklore. In order for the city to effectively sever our link to the land, it doesn't suffice to simply insulate us physically from it. Our cultural and psychic anchors need to be detached too.

Consumerism, technology and urbanisation have successfully replaced our myths with soap-opera plotlines. And it's only by severing our connection to the land that capitalism can get away with poisoning it.

Anyways, forgive the unfocussed nature of this post. I have a jumble of thoughts about all this that i've yet to form into a single coherent argument. But i do feel that folklore about a specific site is an important part of that site. I kind of see those tales as being the mechanisms by which cultures protect those sites. Folklore becomes - in a very real sense - the magick spell that guards the place. Sadly the spell becomes uneffective when the folklore stops being passed down through the generations.

I`m quite happy to agree to disagree over this :-)

I don`t include the neolithic / bronze age people under the title `ignorant and superstitious people` simply because I presume that they were not ignorant about why they built there own structures.

It seems highly unlikely, to me, that any knowledge of prehistory is retained in folklore. We have very little knowledge of many times and events that occurred way after the eras that we are interested in. The Druids and whether there really was a King Arthur are a couple of examples that immediately spring to mind.

Although I think that the folklore about these sites does more to muddy the waters about them than to make things clearer, I do agree that the tales have, in the more recent past, served a useful purpose in helping to preserve them.

Most of the tales seem to follow certain patterns, e.g.

The devil / a giant / etc threw it at a church / his dog / etc and missed.

Dancers turned to stone.

At midnight, they all go down to the stream for a drink.

Someone took ten horses to drag a stone down a hill, he was plagued with misfortune until he used one horse to drag it back up again.

I just can`t see how such tales can add to our knowledge.

baz