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Thank you, sir.

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Right.

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Well, I'm very pleased to be standing here so close to the fire escape in case I have to run away.

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That is Stonehenge.

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Right, that's it, pretty much.

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Okay, let me tell you something about Stonehenge.

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My book, Wisdom People's of Stonehenge, came out early on this year.

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And it really was the culmination of many years of research that I've been doing.

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To try and figure out what Stonehenge actually was.

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Now, you've had many theories over the year, over the years, over the years, over to what Stonehenge could have been.

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But to be quite honest, nobody really knows.

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It's about 5,000 years old.

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It was built in stages over around about 500 years, ending up with what you've got there, except the arches,

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arches, joining a circle all the way around.

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And there was other arches in the centre.

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And it's about 50 feet across and is made up of stone, some of them weighing up to 15 tons.

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Even the stones that go on the top way around 8 tons.

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I mean, it's an astonishing achievement for something that was built in the Stonehenge,

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using stoneage implements, such as, well, they didn't have any metal implements, so they were using antlers, animal antlers for axes.

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And they were using stone tools.

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They were using wicker work baskets to carry away rubble.

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And they were using something along the lines of the shoulder blades of various animals for shovels.

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Now, this was an astonishing achievement for the time, something like perhaps building the large hadron collider would be today.

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And yet nobody really knows why it was built.

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Now, let me just give you some background to it.

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Stonehenge may be the most famous stone circle in the world.

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And it's certainly the only one we know of that actually has those arches around it.

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Except whenever you watch one of these TV shows or movies, you will often see the druids or the ancient people of Britain using stone circles with arches around them like that.

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Series Britannia that's just been on.

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But no stonehenge was actually the only one that was built like that.

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But the where many other stone circles around 5000 it's been estimated throughout the British Isles.

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Island, Wales, Scotland and England.

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And there's over a thousand, perhaps I think it's around 1200, 1100 and something, that still survived today in various states of preservation.

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But stonehenge is just one of these and they're spread all over the place.

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But it didn't begin with stonehenge.

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It actually started far away from stonehenge which is in central southern England.

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It began up in the north coast of Scotland, off the north coast of Scotland on the Orkneiles.

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And the very oldest, the first stone circle that's known to have been built.

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And before I go on about this, you may be wondering, how on earth can they date these things?

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You can't do radio carbon dating on stone.

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But you can do it on animal matter.

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And consequently if you find bits of broken bone, for example, underneath the stones, which have been used to line the bottom of the pit.

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Perhaps the broken bits of the stone-age tools that we're using, then you can carbon date that and come up with a pretty accurate date.

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And this is how we know that those particular stones you see there were set up right around about 2500 BC.

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And the very earliest stones around stone circle were put there around 500 years earlier.

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But the oldest stone circle that has been dated to this point in time anyway is the stones of Stenes.

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On the island of mainland on the Orkneiles.

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Now that was originally, did not have all these arches round it, but it had, it was a series of stones, perhaps around 12 to 15, set in a circle around about 50 feet across.

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And the stones, what about as high as the ones at Stonehenge, but not so elaborate?

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And they were erected around 3,100 BC.

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That's a 100 years before Stonehenge was erected.

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And then over the following 100 years, the stone circle building practices were caught on all over the country.

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They went to Ireland, to Wales, other parts of Northern England throughout Scotland.

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And it just literally took off really, really quickly.

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Now, so what were all these stone circles?

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Well, one thing that people have noticed over the years is that certain stones were placed in very specific positions to a nine with the heavenly bodies at particular times of the year.

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For example, the rising sun on the midwinter solstice, or the rising sun on the midsummer solstice.

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And the set, the rising and setting of particularly important stars at particular times of the year, which is led over the last few decades for archaeologists and other scholars to suppose that perhaps places like Stonehenge were used as some kind of astronomical calculators.

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So you could tell the exact time of the year when you could grow crops, when you could reap crops, when you could show and so forth.

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Now, very well, but surely you wouldn't need something as elaborate as that in order to work out when you needed to grow crops.

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So it would seem that Stonehenge and other of these large stone circles were built for some very precise astronomical calculations, indeed.

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Now, okay, so how long were these stone circles built for? Well, they started off as I say around 3,100 BC, and until recently people thought that the last stone circles stopped being erected around a thousand BC.

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But we now know, thanks to more modern forms of dating of these stone circles, not only carbon dating, but something called thermoluminescence, which has basically been able to date how long ago pottery was fired, that has been found at these sites.

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We know that stone circles, although to a lesser degree, continue to be built maintained and repaired right up until the Romans arrived in the first century AD.

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So this stone circle building tradition went on for over 3,000 years, which is quite astonishing really, because throughout Britain, we were still in the stone age and then later the Iron Age, but it was all,

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and the Bronze Age, but it was all a prehistoric period. The people of Britain didn't have any form of writing, or the Romans turned up, and the people of Britain didn't have any sophisticated cities.

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They didn't have what you would normally call civilization with roads and an extensive infrastructure. They didn't have an organized form of government, a single government that decided throughout the country.

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Well, this is what we should all be doing. No, it wasn't a civilization. It wasn't a...

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The culture. Not a civilization as such. So the question is that always struck me is, how come it is that people throughout the whole of the British Isles that were living in tribal communities in small settlements spread all over the place that may have been trading with each other, but didn't have an overall civilization. How come they were all building these stone circles.

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Now, stone age may be impressive, but it's far from the biggest, the largest stone circle in Britain. In fact, the world is about 20 miles north of Stonehenge, and that's called the Averystone Circle.

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Now, you might think that's being a hundred feet across. The stones of the Averystone Circle are a thousand feet in diameter, and some of them weigh up to 50 tons. It's so large that it's around half a village, and the Collins knows he used to live in it.

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And what's more astonishing is if you walk all the way around the outside of it, it's surrounded by a ditch in embankment around 30 to 40 feet deep and 30 to 40 feet high, that would have taken God knows how long the people with Stonehenge tools to dig an erect and cut from solid chalk.

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And if you were to walk all the way around this outer embankment, you're walking for around half a mile. So that's the Stonehenge Circle's pretty small, really. Now, no one's going to tell me that that stone circle was just built so that people could grow certain crops.

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Because through people throughout the rest of the world, we'll find happily growing crops and cultivating the land without the new for these impressive stone circles.

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Now, they know that there's the megalithic monuments from the old Greek words meaning large stone. If you didn't know that, you shouldn't be at a megalithomaniacomference.

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But anyway, the interesting thing is that although there are megalithic circles, a megalithic stone monument elsewhere in the world, particularly in northern France, in Brittany, Britain, the British Isles, is the only place to actually have stone circles like this, or just, sirk.

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Now, these stone circles can be all sorts of different sizes. Some of the smaller ones are perhaps stones of about two or three feet high, maybe only about 20 feet across, maybe up between 10 and 15 stones.

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Others are like the A3 stone circle, which I just told you about, is absolutely huge. And then you've got a really elaborate one like Stonehenge.

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They had different sort of shapes and sizes, but what does tend to be a common feature throughout is the fact that certain stones, place just outside the stone circles, or within the stone circles, or they are aligned in a particular way, to quite clearly have something to do with determining certain times of the year.

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Okay. Now, we have to ask ourselves, could these stone circles be the equivalent of a temple or a church? People built the great cathedrals in the Middle Ages without them having to have a practical purpose?

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People built pyramids, which may not have had a practical purpose, so all these things just temples? Well, if they are, they're very unusual.

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The churches of the Middle Ages kept being built because people continued to be Christians, but during the 3000 years of the mega-lithic culture we'll call it, during the 3000 years that these things were being built, there were lots of different people with different religious ideas,

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coming to the British Isles. How do we know this because of the way that they buried their dead? That is a sure giveaway, usually, for whether somebody shares a religious idea with somebody else.

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Now, first of all, you have what are known as a neolithic people of the British Isles. They are the ones who started to build stones, and the ones who started to build the first stone circle up in the Orkney Isles, the stones of Stenet.

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Now, when they started to build these, they buried their dead in pits in the ground, and they covered them over by what's known as a tumulus.

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Not always. It's just buried in the ground, just ordinary, buried in the ground with known as no markers, but people of higher status were buried with a small mound known as a tumulus.

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That carried on for about 500 years until a new culture arrived in Britain, about 2500 BC. Now, they came from what is now the Netherlands, and they were known as the Beaker People, because they buried their dead in the ground with a small pot or Beaker.

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Very different from the earlier culture. Now, again, they still sometimes used tumulus, these mounds, but they started having a different sort of pottery that was being buried with the dead.

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So, there's all other ways in which we know that these people came from the Netherlands. 500 years after that, or a few years after that, another group of people arrived.

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They came from what is now Belgium. They were known as the Wesig's culture, and they began to bury their dead different way yet again.

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They would actually make a little coffin known as a system the ground, made from long flat stones. The body would be put in there, and then over the top of that, that would be put built a grassy mound.

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And then a few centuries after that, yet another group of people arrived.

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Known as the Earnfield culture, originally from what is now part of Germany, and when they arrived, they started burying their dead in, as their names suggest, Earnfields, they've committed their dead,

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buried them in Earnfields or Cementaries. And then after that, you've got what people have called the Kelts, or to be more accurate, the house that culture that came from what is now Austria, and they buried their dead.

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The Gennin mound, sometimes under the ground, but they were often buried their dead under piles of stones known as Cance.

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Now that, if I have a lost count, is four or five completely different lots of people. Every few hundred years, turning up in this country, still following their age practices of burying their dead, still going by their own culture, where they came, but what's incredible from what we know about what they did when they got here.

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They all helped build these stone circles and maintain them and met there and carried out whatever went on at these stone circles.

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So you've got culture after culture, arriving in the British Isles, and deciding to join in with building stone circles.

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So they can't be just a religious thing. Well, certainly by the time the Kelts got here, they're giving it up completely, but we now know they didn't.

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And there's no doubt at all, but at least the first three lots of these people were heavily into building the stone circles.

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And when the Beaker people arrived, they helped to bring the Bronze Age with them, and they helped to build what stone ends became in the end, and the Avery Circle.

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So why? These people went building stone circles back home on the continental Europe, but the moment they came here, they thought saw that people in the British Isles building these stones circles and thought, hey, that's a good idea.

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So doesn't that make you think it was some sort of practical purpose that would be behind it?

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Okay, so what kind of practical purpose could possibly be behind this other than just general crop cultivation?

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The question then is, who actually was building these stone circles? Who was officiating at them?

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I mean, we've got lots of different groups of people arriving in the British Isles, and they're all using them, were they being overseen by anybody?

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Well, one particular tomb, which is interesting, that it's often found close to stone circles, is something known as a box tomb.

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Basically what it is, is there can be around about 18 feet long and about eight feet wide.

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They're created from long flat stones or megalis, placed to create a rectangular structure, the box.

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And it's divided into two, by another stone half a year long, the rectangular structure, and then over the top of it, our place cap stones, and over that is a earth amount.

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So you basically got a mound, and at one end you've got an entrance way, and it leads into a two separate chambers, one which contains the bodies or just the body, and the other side which contains grave goods.

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Now, those particular kinds of tombs, they're not the same as everybody else was being buried in.

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I've already explained how the burial traditions changed throughout the years, and how people were ordinary everyday people, how they were being buried.

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But the people who were being buried in box tombs, close to stone circles, were obviously some kind of exalted cast or perhaps some form of priesthood.

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They obviously had something to do with what was going on in the stone circle building, and the stone circle used over all the years.

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And what's interesting is, in Ireland, the stone circle building carried on after it did in Britain, because in Britain it stopped when the Romans turned up.

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They brought a completely new cult to it, and brought about into the stone circle building.

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It didn't mean that it stopped in Ireland, because the Romans never occupied Ireland, and what happened over there is stone circle building did continue until Christianity took root in Ireland at the time of St Patrick in the 400s.

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And so we know that there are still some very well-preserved box tombs in Ireland dating right the way until the mid 400s.

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And there's in fact one in the middle and Zav England, not far from where I live in Staffordshire, and it's called the Bride Stones.

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It was long thought to have been a much older structure known as a long barrow, such as somewhere like Whalen Smeddy that some of you may know of, or West can it long barrow down in Wiltshire.

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Now that is a kind of chambered to central passage where we chambers leading after the side.

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And what happens there is that the deceased are buried in these side chambers with their burial goods.

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Now what's different about the overall structure is that even though there's a mound the mound is long and not round, and at one end of a long barrow, you've got usually two or three or four more standing stones.

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I think similar to what you have in stone circles forming the portal or the entrance, and these are often known as portal tombs, where there's the box tombs are very much simpler.

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And these two separate chambers with the body and the one side and the grave goods in the other.

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Now these people, again, are to tell that's what I was saying about in Staffordshire, there is something that had been thought of as being a long barrow, which actually turned out to be a box tomb, known as the Bride Stones.

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And excavations there and elsewhere at other box tombs throughout the British Isles have revealed something very interesting.

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It seems to have been the same type of people, the same cast of people who were being buried in these box tombs throughout the entire Megolithic era.

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How do we know because their grave goods are similar? What are their grave goods? Generally speaking, pottery pots, well obviously pottery pots, ceramic pottery pots, in which there were certain types of medicinal substances.

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In other words, they were being buried with the tools of their trade. And we find that there are things that aren't being used to eat.

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They are things used for their medicinal properties such as for their...

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So there are some other things that are used for curing intestinal worms for stopping infections.

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In other words, the people who are being buried in these box tombs are being buried with the tools of their trade, their healers.

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Now, maybe not all they are, but certainly they are known for being able to create all sorts of concoctions.

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Do these concoctions actually work? Are they just some kind of ancient, horrible remedies that probably didn't?

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Well, from what we know, they did work. For example, we know that something that did grow in this country, going back 5,000 years right until the Romans came, is something known as the Jimson Weed or the Thorn Apple, which taken in the right amount is can be used as a general animal.

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A general anesthetic, it can knock you out. And so you could actually produce, you could actually practice painful surgery under anesthetic hundreds of years before anesthetic really invented.

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They've also found that certain substances that are used for pets to get rid of intestinal worms were also being found and harvested by these people, ancient people of the British Isles.

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And what I found most incredible of all is that they found that they had all sorts of different substances extracted from mistletoe.

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And what's fascinating is that one of these particular substances extracted from mistletoe that is found in these pottery vessels was exactly the same as something which is now used in modern chemotherapy.

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The treating cancer. Okay, right. So you've got these people who seem to have been healers, who seem to have known how to grow all these medicinal substances.

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That are being buried near stone circles that have obviously got some kind of adult estateers that seem to be the same kind of people or same group of people that have some of them with the stone circles all the way through until stone circle building and you see seizes all together when the Romans turn up in Britain and when Christianity takes off in Ireland.

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So how on earth I mean you know who are these people? Okay remember I said that the British Isles until the Romans turned up was in a prehistoric era.

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It was a time when before there was any form of writing.

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Now one or two people have suggested that the certain people at the certain members of the Celtic tribes had rooms.

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Well, they didn't. Rooms are a much later invention of the Vikings.

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The Celts as far as we know had no form of writing before the Romans turned up. They didn't need to have any form of writing.

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They hadn't got anything to write on. You can't just pile away at Stowe. You try carving stuff in that stone.

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It's not the same kind of thing as you do in ancient Egypt in the lovely sandstone walls they've got there.

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They hadn't got papyrus. They hadn't got anything to write on and they hadn't got anything to write with. They had an inventor gink.

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So there's a whole house to reasons why the prehistoric Britons, none of these people, whether they're the beaker people, whether they're the westex culture or the Celts.

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Why there was no reason for any of these people to have or use writing. They got on perfectly well without it.

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Now when the Romans turned up they start to tell us a bit about the people who were using these stone circles.

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At least the people who were buried in the box tombs. Now what do they tell us?

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Well they tell us about a group of people that until relatively recently, I mean I thought,

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was some group of the Celtic priesthood who'd only arrive with the Celts around 700 BC.

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The druids, that's what the Romans said they were called.

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Now many of you today have obviously seen TV footage of the druids at Stonehenge.

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Well those sort of druids today have recreated themselves and they come from groups that started in the 19th century.

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They're more Masonic, they're more New Age or whatever.

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But they certainly not direct successors of the original druids. They had to re-found themselves based on what they learned about what the Romans tell us.

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The original druids themselves, but in this country anyway, on the Mason mainland Britain,

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were wiped out on the orders of the Emperor Nero in 61 AD after the revolt of Queen Boodica.

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But that's another story. They were all rounded up into accuracy on the North Coast of Wales and butchered to a manwoman and child.

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Now what we know about the druids is very interesting. We're told that what they did was they weren't just a priesthood of men.

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They included men and women.

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Celtic society anyway was something that was pretty equal. Men and women were pretty equally.

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The oldest child, a male or female, would become the new tribal chief.

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So that's how they were generally anyway. But it seems that the druids were both men and women and children.

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And it is these people that seem, from when we learn from what the Romans tell us, who would the same people, who were not just come over with the Celts,

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but are being buried in these box tombs for 3,000 years before the Romans turned up.

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They weren't the Celts. They were the high priesthood or the exalted class of a whole series of different migrants to the British Isles.

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Now, why do we think this? Well, because of what the Romans tell us they did.

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We had told that they were accomplished healers.

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Which is quite astonishing really for the time because the Romans are pretty good at that.

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And their physician said, no, these doids, they know something.

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They even tell us. Remember I said about one of the substance that has been found in the box tombs is, is,

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is, Missile Toe. This same substance, part of it that's used today to, for chemotherapy.

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Well, various Roman writers such as Pliny the Elder actually tell us that the druids used Missile Toe to cure what seems to be tumors or to control them.

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So we're actually told by the Romans that they used this stuff.

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Various other Roman writers refer to them using other substances like Jimpsonweed, like the Tansy Plants.

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Other plants that we found in these box tombs that would only have been used for medicinal purposes.

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So it seems like the druids were one and the same as the box tomocke plants.

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And the box tomocke plants were very nested stone circles.

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And that's where it seems they were responsible for.

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They put a better than those tombs or responsible for whatever one and another stone circles.

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And whatever one of the stone circles seems to be organised by the druids.

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Now the Romans tell us, yes, the druids did worship at stone circles as they called it worship.

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They did perform ceremonies there.

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But maybe people thought that well they'd only just take an over from the people who originally used the stone circles.

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And the calts had inherited these places.

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But as I say, the dating of box tombs suggests and the content of box tombs suggests very much as if these people had been.

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The high exalted cast of people in the British Isles for centuries.

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And they included the Romans tell us men, women and children.

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And men, women and children have been found in box tombs.

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Now what does this tell us?

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Well it tells us firstly that somehow these people knew an awful lot about medicine.

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And how would they actually prepare in these medicines?

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Now this is the really interesting thing.

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Many of these substances found in these tombs.

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And many of the substances that the Romans tell us they used would be deadly poisonous if they are not prepared in a very particular way.

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Specifically, for example, in the case of the missile to plant.

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You might think it's the berries of missile that they're using for this cancer cure or for other medicinal purposes.

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But no, it was the plant, the actual flower which looked a bit like a lily.

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Now when this plant, if you just took a bite out of this plant on any particular day of the year when it's flowering, you'd probably kill yourself or be very ill.

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At least it will be completely useless.

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But to be useful in certain medical applications, it has to be harvested at a very particular time of the year.

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And on a very particular night at the particular phase of the moon.

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Now why is that? Why would a phase of the moon on a particular day of the year mean anything to a flower?

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Well flowers have to be pollinated. That's what they're for.

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And very often plants are pollinated by night flying insects such as moss.

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And when the to attract a certain type of moss so that you can get the pollination right, plants produce certain substances at a very particular time of the year.

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Very often when the moon is full or in a certain position in the sky to attract the right kind of moss.

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Now this is when you would need to find some very specific time of the night in a very specific day of the year.

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And then you would need to get the order to get this substance which is attracting moss.

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But also just so happens to be very good at curing certain diseases.

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Now I could go on an on a bat in my book The Wisdom Keepers of Stonehenge.

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I use a lot of examples of all the different kind of medical substances that these people use.

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I like that the Romans tell us or have been found in these tomes.

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And the Romans say that the Romans have been found in these tomes.

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And the Romans say that the Romans have been found in these tomes.

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And the Romans say that the Romans have been found in these tomes.

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And the Romans say that the Romans have been found in these tomes.

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And the Romans say that the Romans have been found in these tomes.

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And the Romans say that the positions of the stars, the sun, the moon and so forth.

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I eat these things.

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The stone circles.

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So is this why stone circles were so popular?

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Is this why when whoever came to Britain started joining in using them?

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And because they were practical, they weren't some religion.

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They could carry on with their own religion.

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These stone circles were enabling some very precise calculations indeed to manufacture ancient pharmaceutical products.

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So you'd say, what is stone sands? Well, in my opinion, it may have been some ancient healthcare facility.

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Now, okay, you've got times when these things are just two elaborate.

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They sheer size of the stone circle at Avery is something that would clearly wouldn't need something that big.

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The elaborate arch is round the top of stone hinge.

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Probably is unnecessary. You probably do develop into a situation where you've got the local druids.

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You've got them using these stone circles in order to make medicines.

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But also you have got a certain status of the local tribe to be considered.

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And the richest places in the country, like around Stonehenge and Avery, start to try and express and get more people to come to their healthcare facility.

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Or just generally turn up in that area.

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So when Stonehenge is case, people decided to build something that was more elaborate than anybody had done before.

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Whereas at Avery, they decided to impress with sheer size.

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Now, okay, what else do we know about these druids who may have been using these stone circles for year after year?

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How do they even know how to create these concoctions?

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They didn't have any form of writing.

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Well, we learn from the Romans.

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Something quite interesting about them.

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They lived separately to other people.

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They lived in their own communities of the not monastic communities,

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because as I say, they had both men and women.

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And they had children.

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Juniors, these are, for example, tells us that children, what girls and boys were chosen at a very early age,

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and then trained for up to 20 years to become druids.

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Now, this isn't just learning each individual potion to create for medicinal purposes.

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They were trained in some astonishing memory techniques.

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They trained in order to be able to, well, they were picked at seams as children,

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from those who already had idetic memories, photographic memories, or people who tested well when they taught,

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well, this kid has got a good memory to start off with.

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Then they trained them in techniques of remembering such as visualization,

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something which the stage conjure often impresses people by.

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By, if you want to remember a whole series of cards in a pack,

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you have to visualize, let's say, a road that you're travelling along, a place that you know,

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and a teach corner, you see another card.

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There's the Queen of Space, there's a four of hearts.

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And so when you go through that journey in your mind,

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you see each card as you go along, so that you can remember whole packs of cards.

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That's what the modern mentalist impresses people by and stage conjuring tricks.

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Well, they were able to learn things like that using visualization.

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They were also using what we would call rhyming scheme.

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It's much easier to use something if you create rhymes and poetry and song.

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And that came into it too.

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And in addition to all that, they seem to have been using something which we would describe today as hypnotic techniques,

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to remember vast amounts of things unconsciously.

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And in fact, Julia Caesar tells us about the Jewelry.

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He encountered them. He tried to invade Britain, but he gave up because he had half his free to got sunk.

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So he'd come into the arms and attack with the Jewelry to Britain.

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He also came into contact with druids in Gaul, which is part of Malph France.

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And but he says that the druids came from Britain, although some of them travel to Gaul.

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And these people he said were how they went through an initiation ceremony.

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There were all sorts of things.

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But part of this initiation would have to be to hypnotize people,

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to go to see somebody in a particular tribe,

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get them to believe something that was clearly crazy.

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In other words, there were teaching them how to run in a round, try to be a chicken.

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They had to do that sort of thing.

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Go to that guy and that cottage and make him think he's a chicken.

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Write your past that test.

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The other thing they were doing, and this is to do with their memory techniques, like composing great long poems that would have meaning to them.

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In other words, they might be the ingredients of some potion.

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The druid would have to spend the whole night on a hillside in the freezing cold rain.

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They would be buried in a coffin up to there with water, with just a reed sticking out through the ground for the debris.

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And all night they had to stay in this condition and compose kind of like a 10,000-word poem.

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Now those kind of feats are known today, only in places like Shaolin Monasteries or the Yogis of India.

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Now this is quite incredible, but this is what the Romans tell us.

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They might have been exaggerating, but the Romans didn't really exaggerate about anyone apart from themselves.

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Everyone else was useless.

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So in my opinion, if the Romans said these people were impressive, they were impressive.

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So what were they, what did they need to memorize all this stuff for?

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Because they didn't have any form of writing.

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So what did they do?

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These people were basically living libraries of culture before the Romans turned up.

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The druid's lived in communities of, we don't know how many they were in them.

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A few hundred maybe in these local communities.

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They lived outside traditional Celtic society or the culture that went before the calts.

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Each area would have a different tribal allegiance, but the druid would live outside of tribal allegiance.

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And they'd lived throughout the countryside.

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Maybe near the stone circles, they would often live in forest in gledes or what the Romans described as groves.

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But that's because a lot of these areas were forested, Britain was heavily forested at the time.

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And they would live there in communities where they would learn the law of their culture.

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They would learn the history.

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They would learn the exploits of leaders.

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They would learn the art of metallurgy when that came around.

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They would learn how to plant crops.

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They would learn how to build.

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They would learn how to make and prepare these medical pharmaceuticals.

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And this basically meant you'd got whole communities of people.

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Some of them remembering one bit of culture, another lot remembering another part of it.

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And they would all gradually work together as a library.

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Your local library was your local druid community.

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And so that is why I call the book The Wisdom Keepers of Stone Eng.

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The libraries and the libraries of the megalithic culture.

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Wisdom Keepers, libraries, healers.

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They were all these things.

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Now, okay, that's pretty amazing really until the Romans came along and got rid of it all.

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But it carried on island for quite a long time.

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Now, it'll take a bit long to go into it.

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So I won't now.

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But if any of you want to go online and have a look at my website, Graham Phillips.

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Orther.

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You can see a bit about it there.

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But if you also look at my YouTube channel, Graham Phillips author.

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And you have a look, I made a half hour film showing all of these places I've been talking about.

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That should have been rolling as I went along, but it doesn't matter.

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You can go on.

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You can see all these places.

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You can see these evidence.

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You can see how all this works.

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Visually.

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And what I find fascinating is that the last of these blocks tombs that seems to be built anywhere in the country.

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What's this one at the Bridestones in the very north of Staffordshire in Central England?

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And what seems to have happened is there was a Bridestone.

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The last of the druids are on the west coast of Ireland at the time that Christianity starts to take over in Ireland.

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And what happens when Christianity starts to take over the tribal leaders of the Celts said no more druids.

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We don't want the druids anymore.

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And so unlike in this country where they were slaughtered by the Romans a few hundred years before,

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some of them came across to Britain.

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Why do they come to Britain?

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Because the Roman Empire had collapsed.

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Britain was in a state of Anarchy.

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The late 400s is around about the time that the King Arthur's story is said.

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Britain's in a state of Anarchy.

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There had been Christianity in this country.

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Roman Christianity.

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But paganism had been re-asserting itself.

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And so in this new climate in this country, a lot of the,

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some of the druids anyway from west from eastern Ireland came across to Britain.

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And went inland.

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And if my theory is correct, and you can read it all in my book,

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the last of these druid box tombs was at the Bridestones just north of Stoke on Trent,

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near a place called Bidolf in northern Staffordshire, the Staffordshire, Mollons.

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And that's maybe where the laughs of them ended up.

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But the question is, where did they very first start?

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As I said, it wasn't at Stonehenge.

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It was on the Isle of Anglesi.

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I'm sorry, on the Isle of, on the Orcnears to the north of Scotland.

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And what's absolutely fascinating in there is that the people who built it actually lived in a village,

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which still survives.

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It's one of the oldest villages to survive in the world.

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It dates around about 3000 BC, and it's known as Scarab Ray.

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And it was occupied until around about 2500 BC.

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And it was covered.

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It was a freak storm, and it was covered completely by sand.

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Now when it was covered by sand, it managed to survive,

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like a kind of ancient British Pompeii,

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for thousands of years, and another freak storm, some decades ago,

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washed away the sand, and suddenly there was this pretty much perfectly preserved village.

379
00:45:30,000 --> 00:45:40,000
You've got these little stone-built dwellings that are set below the level of the earth,

380
00:45:40,000 --> 00:45:46,000
in order for them to be kept very clever way to keep warm and dry

381
00:45:46,000 --> 00:45:49,000
in the damp climate of the Orcnears.

382
00:45:49,000 --> 00:45:55,000
And these kind of underground dwellings are all connected together by tunnels.

383
00:45:55,000 --> 00:46:01,000
And this is one of the actual villages where the people who built the very stone circle,

384
00:46:01,000 --> 00:46:04,000
we know of, actually came from.

385
00:46:04,000 --> 00:46:07,000
And you can still, and you go there if you go to the Orcnears,

386
00:46:07,000 --> 00:46:10,000
and have a look at Scarab Ray, and it's open to the public now,

387
00:46:10,000 --> 00:46:15,000
you can go there, and you can see where it's been excavated,

388
00:46:15,000 --> 00:46:21,000
and you can see stone shelving that used to be what these people used.

389
00:46:21,000 --> 00:46:27,000
There's even stone boxes for beds that would have been filled with straw,

390
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:30,000
or maybe seaweed, for people to sleep in.

391
00:46:30,000 --> 00:46:34,000
And the remains of fires, pottery was found there, everything.

392
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:38,000
It was literally as if the place had been covered in storm,

393
00:46:38,000 --> 00:46:41,000
and left for thousands of years.

394
00:46:41,000 --> 00:46:44,000
You go to see the Orcnears circle in the world,

395
00:46:44,000 --> 00:46:50,000
which is on the stones of Stenès.

396
00:46:50,000 --> 00:46:54,000
Still, astonishingly, after 5,100 years,

397
00:46:54,000 --> 00:46:57,000
there's still four or five of these stones still standing.

398
00:46:57,000 --> 00:46:59,000
And they're pretty well shaped.

399
00:46:59,000 --> 00:47:04,000
And a few miles away, you've got the village where the people who built it actually lived.

400
00:47:04,000 --> 00:47:11,000
And there's another right next to the stone circle, the Stenès,

401
00:47:11,000 --> 00:47:16,000
in between that and the latest stone circle, called the Ring of Broadgar,

402
00:47:16,000 --> 00:47:23,000
archaeologists at the moment are excavating an area that is not the same as Scarab Ray.

403
00:47:23,000 --> 00:47:25,000
That seems to be where the Orcnears, everyday people,

404
00:47:25,000 --> 00:47:29,000
the Orcnears, nearly the people lived on the island of Orcnears,

405
00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:33,000
but some sort of religious as they're calling it at the moment,

406
00:47:33,000 --> 00:47:40,000
or sacred community, possibly one of the earliest communities of druids to exist anywhere.

407
00:47:40,000 --> 00:47:43,000
But that excavation is still going on now.

408
00:47:43,000 --> 00:47:48,000
And you can actually go and see the archaeologists actually taking part in that excavation,

409
00:47:48,000 --> 00:47:54,000
just a few half a mile or so from where this oldest stone circle in the world actually is.

410
00:47:54,000 --> 00:47:59,000
And what's really astonishing is, only in the last few months,

411
00:48:00,000 --> 00:48:06,000
archaeologists have discovered the re-enarchologists have discovered that on the coast,

412
00:48:06,000 --> 00:48:13,000
just off the shore of the Orcnears, the seems to be an underwater stone circle.

413
00:48:13,000 --> 00:48:20,000
It wasn't built underwater, basically over the centuries rising sea levels,

414
00:48:20,000 --> 00:48:26,000
had eroded the coast, but it seems like there are older stone circles to be found,

415
00:48:26,000 --> 00:48:29,000
and the one actually out at sea.

416
00:48:29,000 --> 00:48:34,000
Now, the big, big question is, I think I've answered to my satisfaction anyway,

417
00:48:34,000 --> 00:48:38,000
what the stone circles were, what stone hinge was,

418
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:41,000
but the question is, where did it really start?

419
00:48:41,000 --> 00:48:44,000
Did it really start on the wind swept up the Orcnears?

420
00:48:44,000 --> 00:48:48,000
Well, what they've managed to discover, archaeologically at the moment,

421
00:48:48,000 --> 00:48:53,000
is an already very well established culture.

422
00:48:53,000 --> 00:48:59,000
You've got people building these kind of houses that they've got on a scar of brave.

423
00:48:59,000 --> 00:49:02,000
You've got people building stone circles,

424
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:07,000
and you've got people preparing medicinal substances

425
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:10,000
that they seem to have been well established in doing.

426
00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:13,000
It's not as if they suddenly one day thought, right,

427
00:49:13,000 --> 00:49:16,000
let's start creating some new medicinal substances,

428
00:49:16,000 --> 00:49:19,000
and because if you just do that without any trial and error,

429
00:49:19,000 --> 00:49:21,000
you're all going to end up poisoned.

430
00:49:22,000 --> 00:49:25,000
Obviously, this had taken place over many years.

431
00:49:25,000 --> 00:49:29,000
There have still been somewhere where people came across the idea,

432
00:49:29,000 --> 00:49:32,000
or gradually developed the kind of building skills they had,

433
00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:37,000
the way of cutting and transporting the stone-sistered circles,

434
00:49:37,000 --> 00:49:39,000
and of making the kind of pottery they did,

435
00:49:39,000 --> 00:49:43,000
and of developing the kind of pharmaceutical products.

436
00:49:43,000 --> 00:49:48,000
So if they were doing this, it kind of just started on the Orcnears.

437
00:49:48,000 --> 00:49:52,000
When it appears on the Orcnears, 3,100 BC,

438
00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:56,000
at 5,100 years ago, when it starts there,

439
00:49:56,000 --> 00:49:59,000
it's already a fully formed culture.

440
00:49:59,000 --> 00:50:02,000
That means it has to come from somewhere else.

441
00:50:02,000 --> 00:50:04,000
Well, we know it doesn't come from mainland Britain,

442
00:50:04,000 --> 00:50:08,000
because we know it comes south from the Orcnears

443
00:50:08,000 --> 00:50:12,000
over the period of time after it first emerges there.

444
00:50:12,000 --> 00:50:15,000
So does it come from Scandinavia?

445
00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:19,000
Well, there's nothing in Scandinavia that shows any similar kind of culture.

446
00:50:19,000 --> 00:50:21,000
Back as early as 5,000 years ago,

447
00:50:21,000 --> 00:50:23,000
could it have come from Iceland?

448
00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:25,000
Well, highly unlikely,

449
00:50:25,000 --> 00:50:28,000
because Iceland would have been even colder than it is now.

450
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:33,000
Or does it come from someplace that is now under the sea?

451
00:50:33,000 --> 00:50:35,000
Now, that is very possible,

452
00:50:35,000 --> 00:50:42,000
because even though the last Ice Age finished around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago,

453
00:50:43,000 --> 00:50:47,000
and suddenly, as the Ice Meltyed, the sea levels rose,

454
00:50:47,000 --> 00:50:49,000
it didn't let overnight.

455
00:50:49,000 --> 00:50:54,000
And 5,000 years ago, the sea levels were still rising.

456
00:50:54,000 --> 00:50:58,000
And there was an area across the coast of Scotland,

457
00:50:58,000 --> 00:51:00,000
sorry, after the coast of Eastern Britain,

458
00:51:00,000 --> 00:51:03,000
known as Dogoland, where Dogoland is now,

459
00:51:03,000 --> 00:51:08,000
that once connected Britain to the continental Europe,

460
00:51:08,000 --> 00:51:12,000
but there's something else that happened in Northern Britain.

461
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:17,000
It's not just that the Ice Meltyed and the water began to rise,

462
00:51:17,000 --> 00:51:22,000
because there'd been such a pressure of ice on the north of Britain and Scotland

463
00:51:22,000 --> 00:51:25,000
two miles of the stuff,

464
00:51:25,000 --> 00:51:28,000
it had basically pushed the land down,

465
00:51:28,000 --> 00:51:30,000
had constituted it together.

466
00:51:30,000 --> 00:51:34,000
And after the Ice Meltyed, the land in Northern Britain and Scotland started to rise.

467
00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:39,000
So for a long time after other land that gone under the sea,

468
00:51:39,000 --> 00:51:43,000
Northern Britain was compensating by rising.

469
00:51:43,000 --> 00:51:50,000
So around 5,000 years ago, there was a lot more land around Northern Scotland

470
00:51:50,000 --> 00:51:54,000
than people have previously thought about.

471
00:51:54,000 --> 00:51:57,000
So it seems very possible, and I said this in my book,

472
00:51:57,000 --> 00:52:01,000
that the might very well have been a land north of the Orkney Isles,

473
00:52:02,000 --> 00:52:06,000
from where these culture originated,

474
00:52:06,000 --> 00:52:10,000
and what's fascinating is when there are a few months of my book coming out,

475
00:52:10,000 --> 00:52:13,000
they have found a stone circle under the sea.

476
00:52:13,000 --> 00:52:17,000
Now, what's more fascinating to my mind,

477
00:52:17,000 --> 00:52:19,000
and this is what I'll leave you on,

478
00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:22,000
is that there could be a lost land,

479
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:27,000
the kind of the north seas version of Atlantis or Mew or the Muria,

480
00:52:27,000 --> 00:52:30,000
and the Romans called it Tule,

481
00:52:30,000 --> 00:52:33,000
or some people pronounce it Tule,

482
00:52:33,000 --> 00:52:36,000
it's what it was called, T-H-U-L-E.

483
00:52:36,000 --> 00:52:42,000
And when the first explorers from Rome and Greece came to Britain,

484
00:52:42,000 --> 00:52:46,000
a couple of centuries before the birth of Christ,

485
00:52:46,000 --> 00:52:51,000
they arrived here and said that they heard from local people,

486
00:52:51,000 --> 00:52:54,000
the Celtic people at the time, and from druids,

487
00:52:54,000 --> 00:52:58,000
stories that there was once a great civilization,

488
00:52:58,000 --> 00:53:01,000
great as they called it, north of Britain,

489
00:53:01,000 --> 00:53:03,000
and it was called Tule,

490
00:53:03,000 --> 00:53:06,000
and that the people who were the druids,

491
00:53:06,000 --> 00:53:11,000
the people who had this wisdom and passed it down through memory,

492
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:14,000
had developed this fantastic memory techniques,

493
00:53:14,000 --> 00:53:17,000
and had developed pharmaceutical products

494
00:53:17,000 --> 00:53:20,000
that were only rediscovering now,

495
00:53:20,000 --> 00:53:23,000
that these people had originated in Tule,

496
00:53:23,000 --> 00:53:25,000
the north coast of Scotland,

497
00:53:25,000 --> 00:53:29,000
and it seems maybe just in the last few weeks,

498
00:53:29,000 --> 00:53:34,000
they have found the first evidence of this lost land.

499
00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:35,000
Thank you.

500
00:53:35,000 --> 00:53:37,000
Thank you.

501
00:54:05,000 --> 00:54:07,000
Thank you.

502
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:37,000
Thank you.