This is a very satisfying read because it takes the archaeology of stone circles and other ancient sites seriously while paying more attention to how such places have inspired our imagination and irresistibly continue to do so.

Reading Maiden Castle by John Cowper Powys as a teenager was the first step into the realm of mystical landscapes for me, and within a few years I had walked around Stonehenge, listened to the rooks calling over Avebury, and circumnavigated the Merry Maidens in Cornwall at dusk. I did read the available science about their astronomical function and means of construction but never managed to shake off a sense of enchantment, that even today am more stirred by what I know we will never know and all the myths that have been projected upon them. I find it almost essential that I now live 40 minutes walk from a hill covered in barrows and a short step further from a stone circle- Rempstone in Dorset.

This book tells the retrievable tale of our responses to such monuments from the speculations of Diodorus Siculus (90-30 BCE) , who possibly knew of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, which he believed to be a temple dedicated to Apollo, right down to the contemporary landscape enchantment project, the Hookland Chronicles, that thrives on social media today. Just as these project onto the monuments their contemporary perspectives and preoccupations , Robichaud shows how , this has always happened. Monuments becoming associated in turn with druids, Romans , and even Danes, and infested with faeries and phantoms, and giants before and long after prehistory provided a rational and evidenced history and chronology for them. The creepy children’s series from 1977, The Children of the Stones, Thomas Hardy, Quatermass, Flaubert-we mustn’t forget Carnac-William Blake and the musician Julian Cope all get a mention.

The author writes clearly and with appropriate humour but marvellously manages to evoke the wonder and unknowable nature of all the familiar places which inspire a host of strange theories that have their own compelling logic .

Highly recommended