Britain’s sacred landscape is very much in the news lately, with new finds, concerns over the land’s archaeological heritage, and plans to build new sacred sites getting attention from mainstream media. To start, Jonathan Jones from The Guardian looks at Stonehenge, and the increasing encroachment of development onto the site.

“In the misty, rainy morning, pairs of bright white lights keep appearing on the near horizon, and across the grass there is the unholy spectacle of a continuous flow of cars and trucks on the A303. Amazingly, this crowded road is soon going to get worse. In February, it was revealed that Tesco plans to build a gigantic warehouse near Andover, from which it is estimated a Tesco juggernaut will emerge every minute – many of them on to the A303. The Tesco “MegaShed” is just the final, farcical insult after the terrible news that hit Stonehenge three months ago. Just before Christmas, after nearly two decades of ambitious planning to rescue this landscape from traffic, came a brutal government press release: Tom Harris, under-secretary of state for transport, declared that plans to enclose the A303 in a tunnel under Salisbury Plain ‘would not represent best use of taxpayers’ money’.”

Jones, pondering why the British people don’t care more about Stonehenge, wonders if the recent de-mythologizing of the site by experts and archaeologists has led to a blase’ attitude towards Stonehenge’s fate.

“Stonehenge is a miracle, a mystery, like the ancient world sites that are its peers: the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico. This is why the tourists come. But official archaeology only tells us what we shouldn’t think: we must not believe that this is about astronomy, or druids, or mathematics, let alone – as Oxbridge scholars argued in the 1950s – that the dagger carving on stone 53 betrays a link with the ancient Aegean world. No, it’s the very people whose job it is to describe the unique nature of Stonehenge who make it sound as if it’s nothing more exciting than all the earthworks they dig up in bogs with a couple of wooden posts stuck in the peat. Stonehenge has been talked down by the experts. And now the philistines have an excuse to treat it as if it was nothing special.”

If Stonehenge is losing its enchantment thanks to modern science, the urge for scared monuments haven’t left the British people. In Northamptonshire, two new sacred circles, one explicitly Pagan, are being constructed.

“A ‘woodhenge’ in Rothersthorpe and a new stone circle in Crick are both under construction. The woodhenge is being constructed by organic cooperative Permorganics … The other structure, which will be made of four massive stones, is an art project being sponsored by the East Midlands Arts Council which will eventually stand on Cracks Hill, Crick.”

The stone circle at Cracks Hill will have its foundation markers laid out by local youths on the Spring Equinox, with the project reaching completion in five years. The Permorganics project will take longer, since it has to wait for the planted orchard to grow and surround the sacred grove. Both projects seem to speak to a desire for re-sacralizing the landscape by embracing elements from the land’s pre-Christian past.

Speaking of re-sacralizing the landscape, certain Pagan practitioners are going to love the following story. It seems that excavation efforts of 35 pits along the Cornish countryside have turned up evidence of pre-Christian offerings from a decidedly Christian time-period.

“Evidence of pagan rituals involving swans and other birds in the Cornish countryside in the 17th century has been uncovered by archaeologists. Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron. The finds have been dated to the 1640s, a period of turmoil in England when Cromwellian Puritans destroyed any links to pre-Christian pagan England. It was also a period when witchcraft attracted the death sentence.”

Archaeologist Jacqui Woods then makes an interesting comment regarding one of the finds.

“Often when secret rituals are abandoned people will talk about ‘things that were done in my grandmother’s day’ but there has been no whisper of this. It really makes me wonder whether that is because it is still going on.”

Pagan survivals? Folk customs given a Christian gloss and performed by people who considered themselves good Christians? None of the above? The article all but screams “witches”, and no doubt these discoveries are going to end up generating some interesting conversations among Witches and other Pagans.

These articles all point towards a palpable desire to embrace a sacred landscape that is not only post-Christian, but increasingly post-secular as well. A land filled with myth, story, and art. Enhanced by a ritualized awareness of the changing seasons, and reinforced by natural and man-made monuments. A land where modern Paganism fits right in.

Tags: Archaeology, Paganism, standing stones, Stonehenge, UK, Witchcraft