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Paul Robichaud, "Stories of the Stones: Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany" (Reaktion, 2026)
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Paul Robichaux about his book titled Stories of the Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany, published by reaction in 2026. Now, as the title suggests, we're going to be going very far back in time to look at ancient monuments, right? We're talking standing stones, megaliths, earthworks, those sorts of things, both like alphabetical, actually far back in time. Right. Maybe even close to when some of these things were created. But we can also, obviously they're still there. So we can look at all of the different ways in the medieval period, in the Romantic period, even in cinema. More recently, these stones, these earthworks, have been places people have been fascinated by, have told intriguing stories about, some of which have all sorts of continuities over time, some of which don't. And so clearly we have a lot of fun things to be discussing here. Paul, thank you so much much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Thank you very much for having me.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Sure. Well, I'm Paul Robichaux and I'm professor of English at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut. My most recent book was Pan the Great God's Modern Return. And I've been fascinated by stone circles, megaliths really, since I was a child. I grew up in the 1970s, you know, and watched shows like Doctor who, thinking about some of those episodes, like Stones of Blood, the American series in search of where you'd watch an episode about Stonehenge exploring the possibility that it was visited by aliens from another world. And my grandparents, they would travel to the UK to visit cousins and travel. And they brought me back a book from Stonehenge, and I sort of devoured it. And it's always been something I've been fascinated by. I visited Callanish. The first prehistoric site I visited was Callanish on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland back in the 90s. And the book came about in part because I was reading some weird tales, which I started getting interested in when I was writing Pan. And I noticed a lot of those tales would explore prehistoric sites thinking about a story like Grant Allen's Palinghurst Barrow, where all of these ghosts and revenants from ancient times are still active and menacing. But when I'd read books about the sites, even ones that were exploring kind of cultural histories or cultural representations, they're usually by archaeologists. And archaeologists were mostly interested in whether myths and legends and so forth could tell us something about the sites themselves. And I found myself more interested in the stories we were telling about these places and what they revealed about the times they were written or told, but also more generally about our relationship to these places and the way in which we imagine their origins.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I definitely think we want to get into some of these imaginings, starting kind of as far back as we can. So what are some of the earliest myths and legends that we can still sort of excavate or access about these ancient monuments?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Well, it's hard to say when the very first legends and myths were told. We don't know in terms of ones that have survived here. Again, it depends how we look at it. One possibility is that the earliest surviving story or legend or myth we have about these sites is told by a 6th century BC traveler named Pythias, who records the presence of a temple, a circular temple. This appears in a later book compiled by Diodorus Siculus Diodorus of Sicily. And he records the story that somewhere to the north is a round temple dedicated to Apollo, and people surrounded and sing hymns to him day and night, and play upon their Harps, and that this temple is visited every 18 years or so by the moon. Going back to the 18th century, an Irish antiquarian controversialist named John Toland suggested that this temple was actually Callanish on the Isle of Lewis. And more recently, the archaeologist Aubrey Birrell has suggested that while Stonehenge is maybe the more famous and the more accessible from continental Europe, that because Kalanish is so much further north, the moon appears much closer on the horizon every 18 years or so. And so he suggested that this early account by a Greek traveler may in fact be the earliest surviving story we have. When we get into the Middle Ages, as early as the 8th century, we have stories starting to be told in England and committed to writing, I should say, in England and in Ireland. So, for example, in England, we have the story of a saint named Guthlac who traveled to the wilds of the Fens, and on an island called Crowland, he discovered an open barrow that was inhabited by demons. And being a very vigorous kind of hermit, he decided to make that his home. And so he. He wrestled with the demons who tormented him and eventually expelled them from this barrow, and Guthlac made his home there. And in Ireland, we have this very rich mythological tradition around several sites, particularly Newgrange, where the Irish mythological tradition tells us that the site was taken from the elder God, the Dagda, by Angus, the God of love, who kind of tricked his father into giving him the barrow by saying, well, the burial mount, I would just like to have it for the space of a day and night. But when he was asked to leave, said, well, actually, the entire world is constantly in day and night, and so it's really mine forever. And the Irish account describes the inside of Newgrange as being a kind of almost like a greenhouse. It's full of luxuriant growth and fruit and plants and so on, and filled with sunlight. And clearly, the people who recorded the story were aware of the way the light hits the chamber on the winter solstice and illuminates the inside of it. There's really strong solar connections in the stories around Newgrange. So once we get to the 8th century, we start to get stories that we can identify with specific prehistoric sites across the British Isles.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely interesting to hear about some of these sites that very much are still known today. We haven't talked about Stonehenge, though. Was Stonehenge always iconic?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Stonehenge has been iconic since the early Middle Ages in terms of, well, certainly since the 12th century. The old English writings We have don't make any reference to it at all. But once we get to the 12th century, we get some contemporary references, very different ones. One, just a kind of note that it exists in the landscape and that it's a mystery who built appears in a chronicle. And in the chronicle, in one of the manuscripts, there's this neat little drawing of Stonehenge that is really interesting because whoever made it must have visited the site because it clearly illustrates this kind of mortise and tenon joinery that is used in its construction, where the lintels on top are resting on kind of like little pegs at the top of the upright stones, and there's a little indentation on the lintel to kind of hold it in place. So that seems to have been copied from carpentry with wood. But whoever made this tiny little drawing in this manuscript must have seen that. And Also in the 12th century, the most famous story of Stonehenge is written, and that's found in the account given by Geoffrey of Monmouth and his History of the Kings of Britain. And in that story, which is quite an involved little story, Merlin transports Stonehenge from Ireland, where it was brought by giants and has it reassembled on Salisbury Plain. And he does this because the king of the Britons, Ambrosius, wants to create a fitting monument for the brave British warriors who were treacherously slain by the Saxons. And that story really becomes a prototype for the way Stonehenge is imagined right through the 19th century. His story seems to have entered folklore by the time we get to the 1800s, and it's retold in various forms again and again, again throughout the centuries. So Stonehenge was definitely a site that got people's attention from a very, very early time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to establish, especially because quite often, I think the focus of these stories, or the assumption is that the focus of these stories is not England. Right. You've already mentioned Ireland. Even today, there's a sense that kind of. Well, that's where all these stories are. Or maybe Wales or maybe Cornwall or maybe Scotland, kind of Celtic fringes, I suppose, as it were. Is that in fact the case that there are more stories in places like Ireland and Cornwall?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
I think Ireland has the most fully developed kind of mythological and legendary traditions around several of their prehistoric sites, with Newgrange and Tara and so on and a few others like Rath Crocken in the north being really central and very well developed. When we come to the island of Britain, we definitely have a Welsh tradition that Geoffrey of Monmouth may well have been drawing upon. He claimed to have gotten all the stories from a lost Welsh language book that may have been invented by him. But even as early as the 9th century in the history of the Britons, we have a few stories about places such as Dinas Emrys in Erie, or Snedonia national park, which was a fort built by the legendary king Vortigern. And there, archaeologists have actually found a stone platform concealing a pool or a cistern. And in the legend, there is a pool containing two dragons, one red, one white, symbolizing the Britons and the Saxons, who will fight each other forever until eventually, I suppose, the Britons triumph. But I think the reason why the stories are concentrated in certain geographical areas has to do with the surviving monuments. So there's not a lot of early references to Cornwall, Cornish stones. There's some. But there's a lot of folklore that accumulated and was recorded really starting in the 16th century. And so some of it has to do with the concentration of surviving prehistoric sites. And kind of the further east you go in the British Isles, especially in England, you know, the fewer of these kinds of monuments there are in Scotland, there really aren't a lot of surviving medieval narratives. There's a few. But Hector Beuys, for example, talks about how a pagan king created some of these recumbent stone circles that you can find in Aberdeenshire as a way of trying to formalize and improve the life of his pagan subjects. And it's not clear if Hector Boeuys was just sort of making that up or perhaps drawing on some older folklore. And in the case of Scotland, there's not a lot of early medieval manuscripts and things that have survived. So it's possible some material has been lost over time. But I think a lot of it has to do with having a vigorous cultural tradition that's allowed to survive historically over time, and also having a concentration of sites that people engage with and interact with and provides meaning for their communities. I think those things are key.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about some of the specific time periods, sort of between then and now. So thinking, for instance, around sort of the Renaissance, to what extent was this, you know, we can talk about that as meaning rebirth. Right. Was this a time in which there was interest in megaliths in Britain? Like, what influence did this period have on these sorts of stories?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Yeah, so the Renaissance movement brings us humanism, and so there's this new interest in looking at what we would call kind of secular texts, what we would call literature and history and things instead of simply theology and philosophy and so on. And of course, the Renaissance humanists were interested in classical texts. And yet, as the movement developed and spread across Europe, there also developed a strong antiquarian dimension to Renaissance scholarship, where people in lands that had been part of the Roman Empire or even a bit beyond it, became interested in the antiquities of their own countries. So just as in. In Italy, Renaissance humanists were looking back to Roman remains and Roman antiquities, antiquarians in France, in Britain and elsewhere start to look back to the antiquities of their own countries. For the first time, we have kind of active scholarly interest in old things. And the antiquarians were. Were not very fussy about what they looked at. So old medieval manuscripts or standing stones, it all kind of fell into their purview. They were interested in what was old and what could be used to understand the past of their countries outside of the classical texts and so on. So in England, for example, William Camden and leyland in the 16th century would go around and they would point to a group of standing stones and ask the villagers, what's this about? And so we start to have the earliest recorded folklore as well. And these early antiquarians were often also making guesses about what they had seen. And they were limited in the sense that their frame of reference was basically the Bible and classical texts. That's the way they understand the past. Right. It's a time before modern archaeology. No one has a way of dating anything. No one really knows how old these monuments were. A lot of early guesses were that maybe they were Roman or maybe they'd been built by the Danes during the Middle Ages. No one really knew. And so we start to get these early theories about what these sites are, as well as early recordings of folklore, as antiquarians are starting to piece together the remnants of the past.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to kind of remember that there was a time before we were able to accurately date things. And so, of course, there would be all sorts of things running around that now we'd go like, no, no, no, that doesn't actually make sense with the history. Is that why we get some of the stories around this time? Like, you know, priests or pagan priests, I guess, would have been their conceptualization. Right. Like, is that why we get those sorts of stories becoming popular at this point?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Yeah. So John aubrey in the 17th century, is the first to connect sites like Stonehenge and Avabury. He's the first antiquarian, in fact, the first person to notice Avabury and record the site in writing and so on at all. He decides that if these places are pagan temples, they must have had pagan priests. So he's looking at these sites and he's saying, well, they look like temples, but they must be pagan temples. And Aubrey decided that if they were pagan temples, they must have had pagan priests. And having been educated in the classics like other antiquarians of his time, he knew that the pagan priests of ancient Gaul and Britain were the Druids. So he was the one who made this connection between Druids and stone circles. And in the next generation, William Stukeley really runs with this idea, and he's the one who really popularizes the idea that sites like Stonehenge and Avabury were in fact, pagan temples ministered by druids. And these ideas are taken up by other antiquarians and argued over the next couple of centuries. And even today, we have this kind of popular association between Druids and Stonehenge. We've seen them together in artwork and in stories for so many centuries. It's hard to sort of break that association. And this is true, even though there's no real archaeological evidence linking the presence of Druids. Druids at these particular sites. And I think the Druids worked for a few reasons, like the prehistoric sites themselves. There wasn't that much people knew about them, and they could be interpreted in different ways. So on the one hand, there's this kind of positive tradition around the Druids among some ancient writers, linking them with the philosophy of Pythagoras and a belief in reincarnation and the idea of the druids as. As peacemakers and as learned men, kind of on a par with their Greek philosophical peers. And on the other hand, there's this kind of critical tradition reflected in the writing of, for example, Julius Caesar, which portrayed the druids as bloodthirsty savages, you know, burning people and wicker men and things like that. So depending on how you wanted to look at the druids, you could either look back to your nation's pagan past and say, look, they were pagans, but they were pretty enlightened pagans. They were kind of like the ancient Greek philosophers or whatever. Or you could say, look, our pagan ancestors were terrible and violent and dangerous. Fortunately, they embraced Christianity, and we can put all of that superstition in the past. And so you have a century or more of antiquarians kind of arguing with each other about whether the druids were, you know, good guys or bad guys, and both Those images of the Druid have, you know, persisted in our in our popular culture right down to the present day. Whether we're thinking about the Druid Verlin in the series Britannia or get a fix from the Asterix comics K Pop
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's not a battle.
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It is an honor to share.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, it's our honor.
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
It is our larger honor. No, really stop.
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Ba da ba ba ba and participate
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Edu.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, a very enduring story indeed. Very interesting to hear. Kind of the origins of that moving. However, to some other people that told stories about these stone structures. What about the Romantics? Why did they like this so much? And what are some of your favorite examples of this?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Yeah, the Romantics loved these stone circles. Certainly Stonehenge, Wordsworth wrote about. Stanton Drew stone circles, and Somerset, the poet Thomas Chatterton wrote about those. And Castleregg as well, in the north was visited by Keats, by Coleridge. They were really fascinated with these places. And for the Romantics, they were very much part of the landscape, and they were examples of the sublime. They were kind of in the same category as a rugged mountain or a majestic waterfall. That image of nature not in its kind of softer, more domesticated form, but as something, you know, dangerous and wild and imposing. Right. And I think if we think about a site like Stonehenge or Ava Bury, you know, these stones are imposing. These are monumental. And so they inspire in the viewer a feeling of awe, perhaps even tinged with fear. You know, maybe if we're approaching Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in a storm, you know, we might experience these kinds of emotions. So they were really fascinated by them. And as other storytellers have as well, this. This mystery around them. Wordsworth had this, as a young man, had this really intense, visionary experience on Salisbury Plain, where he had kind of seen, in a waking dream, ancient Britons gathered at the site, and the Druids setting up a wicker man to burn some people in a human sacrifice, for example. One thing I discovered writing the book, and it really was one of my favorite discoveries, was Ann Radcliffe's narrative poem called Stonehenge, which I'd never come across before. And it is this really wild story where she invents her own origin myth for Stonehenge, and the hero of her poem is a druid. So unlike Wordsworth's druids, Ann Radcliffe's druids are heroes. They're on the side of right. And he has to defeat this evil warlock, and it's completely mad. He's. The warlock has multiple layers of teeth. He has hundreds of teeth in his mouth, and this is a source of power. And so the druid has to go visit this warlock in the night and remove his teeth. So this kind of goes according to plan, but eventually the warlock comes out of the cave, and with the teeth he has left, he sews them on Salisbury Plain, and the teeth turn into giants. And just as they're coming to life, our hero, the Druid, casts his magic spell and freezes them in place. And this is Radcliffe's kind of wild story about how Stonehenge came to be. So that was a really fun discovery.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. Goodness, that's quite a fun read. And I'm wondering when you're kind of putting all of this together. Obviously there's also you talk about in the book. Folklorists are intrigued by these sorts of stories too, especially, you know, as folklore becomes an increasing interest in, you know, 19th century, early 20th century, that sort of thing. What did they find in kind of looking at this treasure trove, really, of all these different options, like, I've obviously asked you for a few examples. There's loads more in the book. Is there anything consistent about these kinds of stories?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Well, I think that. I think the starting point in a lot of folklore is a sense that people who live around these places view them as uncanny. There's something odd about them, something strange, not necessarily threatening, but they're often home to fairies or related kinds of beings. And these again, are not our kind of domesticated, friendly, tiny flower fairies, but the older folkloric fairies with their connections to the world of the dead, who are often not well disposed to human beings and need to be avoided or treated with respect and care. So you don't want to go bumbling into an old Iron Age fort that is now inhabited by fairies. So they're places people would often really steer clear of if they knew what was best for them. And so out of that sense of uncanniness, I think you have these different kinds of narratives. There's a fairly rich variety of stories involving encounters with fairies or fairy like beings. But. But there's also some patterns of stories that recur again and again, one of which is this idea that standing stones or stone circles in particular are petrified human beings. And one tale that has attached itself to a number of sites across Britain and elsewhere is the story around the dancers at a wedding. And the story typically runs along the lines of, it's a Saturday night, there's a wedding happening, midnight is approaching, meaning we're about to enter the Sabbath, and there's no dancing and merrymaking on the Sabbath. And just as the wedding guests are thinking, all right, well, maybe we'll, we'll pack it in. A mysterious fiddler or other kind of musician arrives and says, well, no, I've got a really great dance tune for you. You know, along. And he starts to play and the dancers continue their dancing. But time goes by and the Sabbath arrives. And as a punishment for dancing on the Sabbath, they are turned to stone. And this is the kind of origin myth for a number of stone circles like the Nine Maidens and Cornwall and other sites. So there's the sense of not just the uncanny, but of divine retribution associated with many of these kinds of places. And standing stones are often associated with buried treasure. Right. And if we kind of put ourselves back into the past and we think about a poor rural population, the idea that a bag of gold coins or something like that is buried beneath a stone is pretty tempting and magical and perhaps even irresistible. There's an interesting story at the end of the 19th century. A Breton folklorist visiting a farmhouse, listening to a farmer getting more and more excited, talking about the legend of this buried treasure underneath the standing stone on his property. And finally, the man gets up and goes out and starts to dig up the stone, looking for the treasure, which he never found, but he succeeded in knocking the stone over, much to the folklorist's dismay. So those kinds of stories are fairly frequent, as are stories connecting stones with giants. And giants, of course, are, you know, they're big, but they're also very earthy. Right. They're not typically very smart. They're all brawn. They're rather surly. And there are a number of sites all through Brittany and the British Isles that are explained in folklore as having found their particular place by being thrown by a giant, sometimes by the devil. So giants are often associated with these sites as a kind of origin. And again, if we think back to the 12th century, Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of Stonehenge, in his version, that stone circle was brought to Ireland originally by giants. So this is clearly a very old tradition connecting standing stones and giants within popular folklore.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, that would make sense to me. Maybe it's just because I'm not that tall, but, like, who else could build these, right? Like, that seems like a reasonable explanation before we have modern science on our hands. So, yeah, I'm glad to hear that. That's not just me thinking that there is a consistent strand there. One thing, though, that is really interesting is that even when we do get more science and more archaeology and more history, that starts to debunk some of these myths. That doesn't stop people from being fascinated with them, either to go there themselves or to tell stories about it or to have represented in different kinds of art. Why do you think this fascination is so enduring?
- [35:19]
Dr. Paul Robichaux
I think the fascination endures. And I will say, I mean, I share this fascination. I think these sites are really powerful and compelling and fascinating and haunting. And I think it's because, well, archaeology can tell us in ever more depth how these places were built. Mike Pitt's recent book on Stonehenge gives a very really fascinating, really plausible and carefully argued account of how the stones at Stonehenge could have been moved and raised and so we can maybe start to answer those questions with increasing precision. But what we're unable to answer is why. We can advance theories, we can come up with explanations, but ultimately we are constructing narratives. As soon as we turn to that question about sort of why did people do this? What was the situation that led people to construct these things, and for what purpose? We start to enter the realm of speculation and imagination and even saying, well, this circle is lined up with one of the solstices. That doesn't explain why they did that. As soon as we start to imagine people's motivations and their worldview and what could possibly have motivated people to spend thousands of hours putting these sites together? Just one detail that really struck me reading about these sites was in the case where stones are dressed, that is to say, where they've been smoothed in some way by human beings. They worked with antler picks. That was their tool. And the hundreds, maybe thousands of hours it would take to take this huge stone and work at it with a deer antler, to get it nice and smooth or to make incisions on it is really mind boggling. So I think we look at these places, we look at these constructions, and we feel awe and we want to know why and what motivated people and what kind of stories they told about them. Right? Because these were clearly very special, very meaningful places for the people who made them. And so I think because they left no written records, we'll never have their word for it. We'll always come back to our imaginations and our habit of telling stories as a way of explaining and understanding the world and our fascination with the stories that others have told before us.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, if I can ask you to share maybe a little bit of your personal investigations into this and kind of fascination on your end, you mentioned this is something you've been interested in for such a long time. Is there anything you came across in putting this book together that really intrigued or surprised you?
- [38:30]
Dr. Paul Robichaux
Well, I think that one of the things that surprised me as I was investigating was the richness of the Irish tradition around prehistoric sites and how they're not just kind of one off stories like, well, some giants threw this rock and here it is. But these are stories that are really carefully woven into this larger kind of mythological tapestry. They're part of this coherent worldview, deeply rooted in the landscape, deeply rooted in tradition. And that was something that really stood out compared with the other kinds of stories and traditions from places like Cornwall or to lesser extent, Wales or Brittany. And I think as well, the differences between kind of the British traditions of narratives and antiquarianism and storytelling around these places. Compared to Brittany, for example, where the stories around a site like Karnak, these amazing alignments of stones that go on for miles and miles, they don't really start until the 17th century, but the way they're framed is very different from in Britain. In France, there's a much more classical kind of approach to it. So the French antiquarians are looking at these stone alignments and wondering, were they built by the ancient Gauls or were they the remnants of Roman camps and so on. And it comes out of this desire to really map Caesar's account of the war in Gaul onto the landscape. And so the conversations around that and the stories around that really take a radically different course. And there's a number of prehistoric sites in Brittany with names like Caesar's Camp or related kinds of names. So that was really surprising. And in the course of writing, I was also fortunate to be able to travel to Britain and to Brittany and visit some of these sites. And I visited Stonehenge, of course, but Ava Bury and Wayland Style Smithy and the stone circles at Stanton Drew. And I think that really, really helped me as I was writing, because to visit these sites and to kind of experience them firsthand and to put your hands on the stones. I had a really wonderful experience at Wayland Smithy because it was raining lightly. I was the only person around, and I just wandered around and I put my hands on the stones and just kind of tuned in. And, you know, you really. These are really magical places, and I hope I captured a little of that in my book.
- [41:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds very enticing. What could possibly live up to those sorts of experiences? Do you know what you might want to work on next?
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Dr. Paul Robichaux
Well, in the course of writing about stones and folklore, I did kind of catch the folklore bug a bit, and I'm currently working on the traditional ballads and folklore, particularly folklore around the supernatural, as those kind of play out in the traditional ballads, the ones collected by Child back in the 19th century, Tamlin and so on, sort of looking at how the ballads explore kind of traditional folklore and folkloric beliefs, and also what the ballads themselves have to tell us about folklore, folklore, and looking at some of their later adaptations and contemporary versions as well. So I'm in the midst.
- [42:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. And while you go off investigating, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Stories of the Imagining Prehistory in Britain, Ireland and Brittany, published by reaction in 2026. Paul, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [42:47]
Dr. Paul Robichaux
You're very welcome. Thank you again for having me.
- [42:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It.