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BBC News - Michael Johnson carries Olympic torch at Stonehenge

Ok, it's not much to look at, but the echoes of time really got me:

The Stonehenge in the clip was built about 2000 bc, and there was a site there for over a thousand years before that.

The Olympics go back to 776 bc, and sit about half way between the start of Stonehenge and the modern day.

Michael Johnson is a modern African-American performing a Classical Olympic style ritual at a Bronze and Stone Age site where ritual has been performed for 5000 years. And who is to say that one of the actual rituals performed might not have been the carrying of a torch round the ring?

Gave me goosebumps anyway. :wah:

Bah. You do realize if I turned up there any day of the year and did the same I'd get questioned at length by Wiltshire's Finest long before I finished the lap.

So It's ok for him to posture and pose for the camera's but low behold any genuine Druid wanting to practice his beliefs.

Hypocrisy and double standards.

Bah. You do realize if I turned up there any day of the year and did the same I'd get questioned at length by Wiltshire's Finest long before I finished the lap.


Yeah, it's a shame. But a large amount of the stones has gone missing, especially since Victorian times, with people just knocking off a little bit as a keepsake. Also, it is still a largely unexcavated site of great importance and a few decades of the sort of numbers we get now would wear down the ground surface to the point where damage was done. Very thin soil there.

It's World Heritage, remember - we have duty to protect it for all the people of the planet.

So It's ok for him to posture and pose for the camera's but low behold any genuine Druid wanting to practice his beliefs.



Hypocrisy and double standards.


There are no genuine Druids. The Romans destroyed them on Anglesey. These modern plastic imitations have as much right to Stonehenge as anyone else and no more.

I'm sure they genuinely believe in what they are doing, and they are pretty harmless generally in my opinion, but they aren't real Druids in any way other than they've nicked the name. And even if they were, Stonehenge was built at least a thousand years before the Druids emerged and we don't even know that they used Stonehenge - we assume they must have used so imposing a monument, but there's no real hard evidence for that. It might have been taboo!

Anyway, for me, it was a ritual act that resonated down time from the Modern, through the Classical, and down into the deep green mysterious past of Britain.

I do agree as far as the resonance goes, and you do well to recognise it. Most people don't care.

Stonehenge has been in my thoughts more than usual: I'm reading a book called The Tribes of Britain by David Miles and just done the Stonehenge era and I'm trying to plan a walk down the relevant Avon (weather and other factors permitting, grrr), so the timing of the clip just fit nicely.

chuckle, the subtitle of the book is who are we? and where do we come from? which has to be Barmy Army.:wah:

Oh, and you probably got the gin at Ligny story from Stanhope's Conversations where iirc a Colonel Harding(e?) is mentioned as the source???

Clodhopper;1398759 wrote: Oh, and you probably got the gin at Ligny story from Stanhope's Conversations where iirc a Colonel Harding(e?) is mentioned as the source???I can see I'll have to try harder.