Andrew West has just published an amazing blog about the recent Time Team discovery of an Ogham stone on the Isle of Man. He throws doubt upon the transliteration/translation made by the Time Team’s expert, Kate Forsyth from Glasgow University. Andrew makes a well argued claim that the inscription is not a record of Fifty Warriors fighting Viking marauders but instead, in common with most other Ogham finds, a commemorative marker for an individual.

His blog explains: Continue Reading »

English Heritage has commisioned Wessex Archaeology to produce a Teacher’s Kit for schools taking kids to the Avebury monuments. About Avebury, the English Heritage site says: “Avebury rivals - some would say exceeds - Stonehenge as the largest, most impressive and complex prehistoric site in Britain. Built and altered over many centuries from about 2850 BC to 2200 BC, it now appears as a huge circular bank and ditch, enclosing an area of 281⁄2 acres (111⁄2 hectares), including part of Avebury village. Within this ‘henge’ ditch is an inner circle of great standing stones, enclosing two more stone circles, each with a central feature.”

The Kit will help schoolchildren heading for Avebury and the surrounding monuments make the most of their trip to the World Heritage Site. It is a downloadable resource for teachers of Key Stage 2 and 3 pupils. As well as information sheets for teachers there are on-site investigation sheets, puzzles, maps, treasure hunts and other games and activities to help pupils to learn about the history of these historical sites in an entertaining and engaging way. [Wessex Arch. News] Continue Reading »

Silbury Hill is the largest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe. It was built over 4,000 years ago in the Neolithic period. Today part of the Avebury World Heritage Site, the monument’s purpose and significance for prehistoric people remains unknown. The Guardian has reported that the work to prevent this ancient monument from collapsing has been completed. On 29 May 2000 a hole unexpectedly appeared on the top of Silbury Hill. A shaft had become open to a depth of 14 metres. Despite attempts to safeguard it, in December the top collapsed to leave a large crater, damaging important archaeological deposits.

The secret of Silbury Hill, the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe, isn’t the monument but the monumental effort which went into building it, according to the archaeologist who has spent most of the last year slipping around on wet chalk deep in the heart of the hill. Continue Reading »

The BBC tells us that Dr  Donna Heddle has warned that without action to preserrve the linguistic celtic heritage, the old languages would become lost. Orkney-based expert Dr Donna Heddle said without one they would become “devalued and lost”. She was commenting ahead of a conference, Voices of the West, which will be held in Inverness in June.

Dr Heddle, director of the Centre for Nordic Studies at Orkney College UHI, said:

Focussing on education and broadcasting allows us to look at minority languages at work. This conference underlines the fact that we need to learn from each other and work together to produce a unified strategy, otherwise these languages will be devalued and lost. We will lose our tongues and without our tongues we cannot speak for ourselves.

Source

UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

Tara Hill was one of the most venerated religious spots in early Ireland and the seat of the High Kings of Ireland from the 3rd century until 1022. Despite its importance, the expectant visitor may be disappointed in what he sees as, at Tara there are no signs of regal past, nor impressive remains, only the remains of earthworks.

But this cluster of megaliths represents a part a larger system capable of recognising specific parts of the lunar and solar cycles. In the case of Tara, it the chamber of the Mound of hostages’ is aligned to mark the November, February quarter days, along with Dowth and Cairns L and U at Loughcrew. Tara is only 10 miles distant from The Boyne Valley, which is clearly visible from there.

We thought it was about time to give you an update on the progress of the Campaign to Save Tara. At the moment, building is continuing and it seems that Tara’s only hope lies outside of Ireland. Continue Reading »

An update to our post about the new theory about the origins of the Celts, which can be found here, the ABP Welsh Communique gives us a little more detail. The full text of the article can be found here. In his O’Donnell Lecture at the University College, Bangor, Professor John Koch said that on the basis of an extensive continent-wide overview of linguistic and archaeological evidence, he has come to the conclusion that a Celtic civilisation and culture had originated on the Atlantic West of Europe in the Bronze Age.

Recent DNA researches has shown that contemporary British people – Celts and Anglo-Saxons alike – have more in common with the Basques than any other race group. This finding has attracted confusion and amusement in the popular English press. Continue Reading »

The Brittanica tells us that Breton is “a member of the Brythonic group of Celtic languages, spoken in Brittany in northwestern France. Breton was introduced into northwestern France in the 5th and 6th centuries by Brythonic Celtic refugees displaced from southern England by the influx of Anglo-Saxons. The language is closely related to Cornish and Welsh but has been influenced by French and perhaps by a continental Celtic language formerly spoken in the region.” [Brittanica] There are about 540,000 speakers of this Celtic language and a Welsh couple are helping to revive it.

Continue Reading »

Anne’s blog is well known for its podcast reviews and we’re proud to have been the subject of several of his reviews previously. He describes it as an elite podcast listener’s blog. He said in a review of Episode 3: The tale of Bres the Beautiful is the third tale in the series that will deliver the whole Irish mythological cycle. After the gods and wars tales we have had so far, the story of Bres will touch upon another motif in story telling, the ‘Vatersucher’. Why do I know this only in German? My Babylon dictionary couldn’t hep me out here. Literally this is a fatherseeker. Bres doesn’t know who his father is and at some point he is forced to find this out. And this may not be the kind of thing he wants to know. As goes with Vatersuchers until recent times. I was thinking of the character Johnny in a Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving.

Celtic Bloodfine - the New Review

Anne has just reviewed Episode 6 for us. We’d like to offer him a hearty Thank You for his honest and appreciative criticism. All of the constructive criticism he offers has been very useful to us in improving the shows. He says: Continue Reading »

While there are various explanations of the origins of fairies and the nature of them and their lands, there is little explanation in any studies of where the modern conception of fairies has come from. None of the books suggest that fairies have wings like dragonflies or butterflies. The wee-folk of Celtic mythology are generally thought to be the size of small children or dwarfs, rather than the size of insects as they are thought of today.

They also tend to be suitably disproportionate, like chunky hobbits rather than the tiny but perfect adult fairies in modern storybooks. It is likely that these modern depictions of fairies sprang more from the minds of individual humans than any specific culture or mythology.

For almost as long as people have been seeing fairies, people have been writing about them. The countries of the world have a wide variety of myths and legends, but the “little people” crop up in a great many of them. Into more modern times, we have Spenser’s “The Fairie Queen”, and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummers Night’s Dream” in Elizabethan times, both of which did much to cement the modern conception of what a “fairy” is.

A wide variety of cultures believe in fairies similar to the Celtic version, and some cultures see fairies as the animistic spirits of nature. None of these fairies bear much resemblance to the modern fairies and if they had wings, it is a detail that is usually left out. Spencer’s fairies were like the Celtic version, Shakespeare’s were like a combination of tall elegant elves and the wee-folk, but it was not until the Victorian era that fairies were established as little winged beings.

Thomas Croker (1789-1854) in his collection of Irish Fairy Tales, described fairies as being “a few inches high, airy and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dew drop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks.”

One of the first of these “delicate” fairies to impinge on popular consciousness was probably Tinkerbell in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Around that time, there was also a large amount of sentimental art, creating cutesy portrayals of fairies and cherubs. There was also a large fuss made about the fairy photographs taken by two young girls in England at Cottingsley. These photographs sparked a world-wide debate that did much to “fix” the image of the small, winged, fairy in the public mind, and if you ask any group of people, there’ll no doubt be someone who remembers seeing the pictures at some time. The Victorians had a soft spot for the “cute”, and much of the modern conception of the little delicate, insect size fairy came from them.

Disney also has a part to play from the 1950s onward, pushing the sanitised Tinkerbell as a sort of happy go-lucky nature sprite, making fairies happy and unthreatening, reinforced even more by having Julia Roberts play her in the live action version.

From these images people have come to see fairies as happy, positive, creatures… a far cry from the baby-stealing wee folk of Celtic mythology from which they derived.

by Willie Meikle

Thank you to Willie Meikle for allowing us to post this article on our site

Willie is a Scottish author now living in Newfoundland. He has written eight novels and over 150 short stories, you can find Willie and his books at

http://www.williammeikle.com