The very last of the stone circles known to have been used by the pre-Christian Irish were on the east side of Ireland, in an area now encompassed by County Kildare and the district of Dublin. This is the most urbanized part of the country, so most of these monuments were destroyed long ago, only recently having been identified by geophysics surveys. However, one of these, at Killiney, just south of Dublin, still survived intact to be surveyed in the nineteenth century. Called the Killiney Ring, it was 30 feet in diameter and consisted of ten 8-foot-tall stones and two 10-foot-tall central monoliths. Unfortunately much of the site was destroyed in the late 1800s when the stones were moved by the local landowner to create a scenic garden. Like many of these late stone circles, the Killiney Ring was adjoined by a box cairn, which does survive.
The chief megalithic complex in this area, however, seems to have been in what is now the town of Kildare, but all traces of it were destroyed when a cathedral was built on the site in the thirteenth century. From what can be gathered from early Irish literature, the complex was centered on a large henge monument associated with Brigid, the Celtic goddess of healing, where a sacred flame was kept burning in her honor and the sick came in the hope of cures. Also known as Brig or Bride, this goddess was principally venerated at the festival of Imbolc around February 1, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. She appears in various accounts in The Book of Leinster,9 and according to Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Narrative), compiled by Cormac mac Cuilennáin, the bishop of Munster in the late 800s, she had been the principal deity of the district where the last Druids resided, on the east side of central Ireland.10 Interestingly this goddess provides a vital clue to reveal what may have been the very last stone circle used by the ancient Druids.
During the fifth century, when the Kildare region was converted to Christianity, a monastery is said to have been founded on the site of the healing sanctuary by a woman “coincidentally” called Brigid. This Brigid, referred to by the modern church as Saint Brigit, appears in a number of Dark Age writings, the oldest to survive being Vita Sanctae Brigidae (Life of Saint Brigid) by Cogitosus, a monk from Kildare who wrote around 675 CE. According to these various accounts, all written two centuries or more after the events described, Brigid is said to have been a Druid captive born in 451 CE. She was freed when her tribe was converted to Christianity, became a nun, and rose to be an abbess, founding the monastery at Kildare in 480 on the site of the pagan shrine. Curiously she is said to have continued the custom of the eternal flame, with she and a number of nuns tending to the sacred beacon, from that time thought to represent the perpetual light of Christianity. As we have seen, the Celtic Church in Ireland, with its mixed-gender monastic institutions where both men and women acted as priests, became something quite different from the Roman Catholic Church (see chapter 11). Brigid herself, we are told, actually became head of the Irish Church. Known as the “superior general,” she had the power to appoint bishops throughout the country. After her death, Brigid was proclaimed a saint, and on her annual feast day—February 1—people from all over Ireland flocked to the site of her monastery in the hope of miraculous cures.11
Many historians consider Saint Brigid to have been a legendary figure, invented by the Christians to supplant the pagan Brigid. The saint and the goddess share the same name, they are linked with the same site and the sacred flame, both are associated with healing, and their principal day of adulation is what had once been the festival of Imbolc. Just as early churches were built on the sites of previous pagan shrines (see chapter 8), ancient deities were often reinvented as saints. It was all part of a deliberate strategy adopted by the early church. Called Interpretatio Christiana (Christian Reinterpretation), it was part of the policy of adapting non-Christian elements into the faith. Pagan gods had performed specific roles: appeals were made to individual deities in the hope of eliciting particular results. There were gods of the harvest and weather, childbirth and fertility, health and well-being—just about everything. But Christianity taught that there was only one God. That a single divinity could fulfill all these commitments was a difficult concept for the newly converted pagans to grasp. Accordingly if it was to succeed in its intended mission to convert the world, the church was impelled to adopt the notion that multiple heavenly beings could intervene in mortal affairs; that is, so long as they were regarded as saints.
As in today’s Catholicism, Christian figures considered to have lived particularly pious lives and to have exhibited an exceptional degree of holiness, such as having miracles attributed to them, were canonized. They were declared “saints,” from the Latin sanctus, meaning “sanctified.” These deceased individuals were said to hold an esteemed position in heaven and to have been granted the power by God to intercede in earthly matters. Many became “patron saints.” Just like the old gods, they were regarded as heavenly advocates of specific nations, locations, and activities—all manner of things. There had once been individual gods of crafts, fertility, health, farming, healing, and a myriad of other affairs, so the converted Christians were given equivalent saints. They were usually real, historical figures, although their lives may have been embellished by their biographers, but during the late Roman and post-Roman era many saints were the reinventions of ancient deities.
To give just a few examples: Mars, the Roman god of war, became linked with Saint Martin, the patron saint of warriors, supposedly a Roman soldier who was ordained a bishop in the fourth century. Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, feasting, and theater, became Saint Bacchus, supposedly a flamboyant Roman citizen martyred in the early 300s CE. The Egyptian Osiris, the god of the dead, became Saint Onuphrius, the patron saint of the sick and dying, purportedly a Christian mystic who lived as a hermit in the desert of southern Egypt during the fourth century. The goddess Venus became associated with Saint Venera, allegedly a second-century CE Christian martyr: she was the patron saint of a Maltese town where a great temple to Venus had once stood. Saint Brigid was most likely such a contrived historical figure accredited with attributes of the earlier pagan goddess, although some scholars believe she was a real person. It has been suggested that Brigid may have been the chief Druid of the Kildare shrine, a woman bearing the honorary name of the goddess who converted to Christianity but retained some of the old customs in her mode of worship.12
Whether or not Saint Brigid was a historical figure, the goddess of that name was the principal deity of the County Kildare/Dublin region when it appears to have been the last stronghold of Druidism in Ireland. And the supposed time of her conversion to Christianity, in the mid-fifth century CE, tallies with the final demise of the Irish Druids. Surprisingly, however, this might not actually have been the last enclave of Megalithic culture in the British Isles. There is a megalithic site associated with the goddess Brigid in western England that seems to have been completely overlooked by archaeologists and historians alike. The work of an eighteenth-century antiquarian reveals that it may have been the last stone circle to be used by the Druids in all the British Isles: the place where the 3,500-year-old Megalithic culture finally came to an end.
The last of the Irish Druids may have fled to mainland Britain. Although church tradition holds that a few holy men such as Saint Patrick converted Ireland to Christianity, the reality was somewhat different. The Roman Empire was collapsing, and the departure of the Roman army in 410 CE left many parts of Britain to fall into a state of anarchy. Because of the civil conflicts that ensued, with various warlords vying for power along old tribal lines, a wave of wealthy Roman citizens fled Britain for Ireland, and along with them came the hierarchy of the British Catholic Church. It was a mass migration of educated Christians. Along with these migrants came the full-scale introduction of writing to Ireland as well as the technology to create paper and books and to build monasteries to preserve them—rapidly making the Druids obsolete. The Irish chieftains, long under the sway of the Druids, quickly broke free from their authority, and the appeal of being endorsed by a new, a
lmighty Roman deity was a powerful incentive for them to convert. In Britain the opposite was happening: the internecine strife brought about the virtual collapse of the organized church and a return to paganism. By the mid-fifth century CE, Irish pagans, now in the minority, were fleeing to Britain. Records are few from this period, but the British monk Gildas, writing around the year 545 CE, tells us that the Irish occupied much of the west of the country. (Gildas actually refers to the Irish as the Scoti, an old Roman term for the Celts. The Scots at this time, i.e., the Scottish, he refers to as the Picts.) Archaeology bears him out. Not only have Irish settlements been found in western Britain from this time, but their graves also have been unearthed. It is possible, then, that there may have been a brief reintroduction of Druidism to parts of Britain before the country became, according to Gildas, temporarily reunited and nominally re-Christianized around 470 CE.13 And there is one megalithic site that may actually have been reoccupied by the Druids at this time.
Just north of the village of Biddulph Moor in the county of Cheshire, about 25 miles inland from the Mersey Estuary, which joins the Irish Sea, is a megalithic monument called the Bridestones. As noted, Bride was one of the names for the Irish goddess Brigid. The site is thought to have been of particular importance in Megalithic times as the hill that overlooks it, called the Cloud, is so shaped that the midsummer sun, as seen from the southeast, appears to set twice. The profile of the hill means that the sun sets behind one ridge to reemerge and set again behind a second. Remember how important the midsummer solstice appears to have been to those who built the stone circles. The Bridestones consists of the remains of a box tomb, composed from stones averaging about 1 foot wide and 5 feet high, creating a chamber with inner dimensions of about 6 by 14 feet and divided into two equal parts by a further, broken slab. For years the monument has been mistaken for a pre-Megalithic long barrow due to two 10-foot-tall monoliths that now stand at one end, like the portal stones at monuments such as Wayland’s Smithy (see chapter 3). However, these two stones originally lay fallen nearby, until the 1930s when members of the Department of Geography at Manchester University re-erected the monoliths in their present positions, wrongly believing they were restoring the site to its original condition.14
Luckily a survey of the Bridestones was made by the Welsh antiquarian Henry Rowlands in the early eighteenth century and published in his work Mona Antiqua Restaurata (Ancient Anglesey Restored) of 1723.15 The two monoliths were originally part of a stone circle that stood next to the tomb, all but these two having been removed in the nineteenth century to be used in the construction of an ornamental garden in the area. The circle consisted of ten approximately 10-foottall stones in a ring about 27 feet in diameter. What Rowlands reveals about the tomb is that it must have been over three thousand years younger than the era of long barrows (see chapter 3)—the period from which many modern guidebooks and websites date the Bridestones. In his day, the box tomb still had a roof made from horizontal stone slabs and was covered by a large mound of rocks, which had fallen away at one end, exposing the chamber and giving it the appearance of an “artificial cave.” These rocks were removed in the mid-eighteenth century to be used in the construction of a nearby road.16 In other words, it was a box tomb covered by a rock cairn, dating it to the late Celtic period (see chapter 12).
Astonishingly the Bridestones box cairn may actually have been built well after the period when the Romans invaded Britain. Rowlands’s book includes a diagram showing the stone circle with the tomb adjoining it on the western side. This is exactly the same arrangement we have seen so many times before with late Celtic cairns in Ireland, such Ballykeel South, Brackloon, and Kilgowan, dating from the fifth century CE (see chapter 11). Moreover, the stone circle is shown to have two further monoliths close to the center of the ring. As discussed, this unusual feature has been found exclusively at the late stone circles of pre-Christian Ireland. In fact, the original Bridestones is almost identical to the Killiney site, which consisted of a ring of ten similarly sized stones with two monoliths at its center and a box cairn built right next to it. This arrangement of box cairn and stone circle with double standing stones at its center has been considered unique to fifth-century CE Ireland—nearly four hundred years after the Druids were thought to have been eradicated in Britain. The county of Cheshire is an area that archaeology has determined to have been settled by Irish migrants during the mid to late fifth century CE. Could the Bridestones—which actually bears the name of the principal goddess of east-central Ireland—have been built by the pagan Celts who had fled to Britain in the fifth century CE? And was the tomb the final resting place of the last Druids?
Fig. 13.1. Locations of what may be the very last megalithic stone circles.
No modern archaeological work has been undertaken at the Bridestones, but it cries out to be properly excavated. There has been a great deal of disturbance to the site over the years, but it may still be possible to date material from beneath the stones of the box tomb, even if it proves difficult to scientifically date the stone circle. However, there is a strange anomaly in the area that may well indicate that late members of the Druid caste did settle there and that their descendants survived until recent times. The hilly district around the Bridestones seems to have remained socially isolated for generations. The village of Biddulph Moor, a couple of miles to the south of the stones, has been inhabited from around the fifth century CE. Remarkably as late as the nineteenth century, the people of Biddulph Moor held two annual gatherings at the site: one on midsummer evening, when the village elders made predictions concerning the coming year, and one on February 1, when it was believed the sick could be cured. The Druids were considered prophets, and many stone circles have midsummer alignments, while Brigid’s sacred day had been around February 1, a time when appeals were made to the goddess to facilitate healing. Linked together, these traditions relate specifically to the pagan practices of east-central Ireland during the mid-fifth century CE. Not only might the villagers have been continuing customs that date back to a time when Irish Druids settled there in the mid-400s CE, they also may well have been their direct descendants.
The village of Biddulph Moor was a remote, hillside farming community until the sprawling industrial region to the south finally encroached on it in the late 1900s. Today it is composed of modern houses, a suburb of the city of Stoke-on-Trent, created from the adjoined towns of this ceramic-manufacturing area in 1910. Before this time it was a reclusive village of just a few hundred people who seem to have lived in virtual isolation for centuries.
In chapter 11 we examined how the Druids appear to have had red hair, a characteristic inherited from their Neolithic ancestors. As discussed, red hair is due to a recessive gene; both parents need to have it for the trait to be passed to their children, meaning that since the multiple waves of migration to the British Isles over the last 4.5 millennia, only insular communities have retained it as a predominant feature. The Druids and their predecessors were an exclusive class who appear to have procreated only among their own caste, resulting in a greater number of redheaded people in the place where the sect survived the longest—Ireland. Red hair occurs in around 10 percent of the modern Irish population, but only 2 percent of the English. Accordingly there are a few remote villages in Ireland with a redheaded majority, but none in England, except for one curious exception that existed until the nineteenth century: Biddulph Moor.
Before the age of the motorcar and the influx of modern commuters, various writers referred to the inhabitants of Biddulph Moor as all having red hair and said that they spoke a different dialect from the rest of the area. Their unusual appearance was noted by the Staffordshire historian John Sleigh in his A History of the Ancient Parish of Leek in 1862; he says that the townspeople of nearby Leek believed that their neighbors were descended from Arabs captured and returned to England during the crusades.17 Arab people of the Middle Ages, however, had dark hair, perhaps something unknown to these country folk dur
ing a period before modern communications. In 1909 Charlotte Burne, the president of the British Folklore Society, in an article for the organization’s Quarterly Review, suggested that their ancestors were Gypsies who once settled on Biddulph Moor. The people she referred to as Gypsies were actually those today known as Irish Travelers. The problem with this theory is that although they are a distinctive ethnic group originating in Ireland, few of them have red hair; no more, in fact, than the general population.
Those who settled at Biddulph Moor during the fifth century CE may well have been those who built the Bridestones box cairn and used its adjoining stone circle. Perhaps they had all been members of the insular Druid caste who fled Ireland at this time, their offspring remaining genetically isolated in this hilly district until the encroachment of the wider society during the Industrial Revolution. Biddulph Moor is now a commuter neighborhood for the city of Stoke-on-Trent, the indigenous population having left or been assimilated with others. During the 1970s, as part of a blood-screening study, the Stoke-on-Trent coroner, Fred Hails, reported that there was indeed a significant difference in the blood types of the older inhabitants of Biddulph Moor compared with others in the local area.18 However, this was before the advent of genetic testing, so it was impossible to determine from what part of the world this trait originated. In 2003, as part of a BBC radio show called Meet the Descendants, genetic tests were carried out on the few remaining families whose ancestors had lived in Biddulph Moor for generations. Unfortunately the program specifically intended to test the crusader captive legend, and the tests were searching for genetic markers of Middle Eastern ancestry, of which no evidence was found. No one thought to test for Irish or Neolithic DNA.
Wisdomkeepers of Stonehenge Page 23