Thank you. Hopefully you can all see my shared screen. I just introduced myself.
I'm Susan Greaney. I work for English Heritage. My specialism is pre history.
Very much involved with how we present Stonehenge. But I'm not gonna mention Stonehenge too much today.
It gets too much attention anyway. So lately, I guess over the last five years or so,
I've been involved in projects where I've become more interested in the folklore of our sites that we look after and guardianship.
And this sort of predates the theme year that we had in nineteen of myths and legends across English heritage.
But what I wanted to do is a bit like Sally is doing sort of question raising session,
really about how we present folklore and myths to the public and what what might be the different ways of approaching that.
And some of the issues involved in that. Some speakers, both on Friday and today,
have talked about heritage interpretation and the absence thereof at various historic places and places associated with myths.
So that's sort of where I'm going with this.
So first, let's start by acknowledging a debt to Leslie Greensill, I'm sure many of you are familiar with his work,
but Leslie was somebody who really took folklore seriously in his accounts of prehistoric places.
And he used archaeological evidence, historical evidence, place name evidence, folklore documents, all kinds of different sources to write really,
really useful books and pamphlets about some of the sites that we look after in our English heritage collection today.
And I think I guess maybe I just a motto, we ought to all be a bit more greensill.
He did kind of take all these different sources of information and apply equal weight to them.
And I think we sometimes have drifted from that in in the intervening period.
So I just wanted to go through a couple of just very quickly.
You're all very familiar with the types of stories that are associated with PREST or sites in England.
But just to kind of give you some of the background and some of the interesting sides of things, I'm just going to go through some of the key myths.
And these these are not just apply to one sites.
These are myths and legends applied to a number of Prester excites both in England and elsewhere in the British Isles.
And it's really only recently that I've become sort of more aware of how these crop up again and again at different sites.
Many sites have a number of different stories associated with them, but there's ways of tracing these stories,
both geographically and in the way that they've been recorded by early antiquarians.
So one example is giants. The idea that in prehistoric times they were a race of giants.
This is a biblical origin, actually quite logical if you think about these enormous standing stones and portal domains
and monuments that they would have been erected by people who were of superhuman strength.
And one example of that is Waite's causeway on the properties we look after in North Yorkshire, which is a Roman road, possibly has earlier origins,
but it's named after that giant Wayde from Germanic mythology, and it's first named as such in the 10th Century Anglo-Saxon poem.
The Travellers song. And it's said to have been built by Wade so that his wife Belle could go and milk a huge cow on the moors.
And there's all kinds of associated stories, including the fact that Belle builds nearby Pickering Castle.
Say that's one example of giants. Another one, petrified people.
This crops up again and again, particularly related to the tradition of it being a dancing or playing sports on the Sabbath.
Obviously a Christian movement, something that placed in a great emphasis on keeping the Sabbath wholly free from toil.
Early 17th century records of this and common sites like hurlers and like Stanson do have this associated with them, but also this site,
which is Mitchell's Folden in Shropshire, which is supposedly the petrified remains of a witch who uses her devious ways to milk a magic cow.
This magic cow was installed on this site and the villagers were very pleased because it provided constant supply of milk,
which went up and milked this poor cow into a sieve. So tricking it into giving away far more milk than it wanted to.
And so the villagers turned to basically tender into stone and surrounded her by a ring of other stones to make sure she never escaped again.
So another petrified people count the stones as a very common one.
No one can ever count the stones twice alike. And if they do manage to, then the great misfortune would befall them.
This is a legend associated with sites like Little Kitz Courthouse in Kent, also known as the Countless Stones The Roll Right Stone Stonehenge.
It's often attributed to sites where it is actually quite difficult to count the stones.
And even now, people say to me, how many stones are at Stonehenge? It's a really difficult question to answer.
So it's this element of truth in this, but it's the idea that you you can't count them.
And if you do so, it's often associated with terrible thunderstorms and things where early antiquarians and
surveyors were trying to count the stones and are afflicted with supernatural events.
As I mentioned earlier, there's a huge number of sites, both natural sites and prehistoric sites associated with the devil,
many of them associated with sort of devil throwing bits of piece of rock throwing, throwing various quoits.
Obvious, obvious kind of reasons, I guess.
But it's one of those things that found found so widely that it's it's interesting that we don't pick up on it more in our interpretation.
Mythical heroes. We've got, you know, Arthur Stone or kinds of Arthurian connexions as Arthur's round table up in Cumbria, which is henge monument.
Obvious reasons why it's called the round table, but also sites like Little like Kitco Teahouse,
not far from Little Gets Gatehouse, which is associated with Hengel.
It's the burial place of Hankus, the legendary Saxon leader in Kent.
And healing powers, you know, so Stonehenge is quite famous for this.
The bluestones am having particular healing powers in 1787.
The Reverend James Broom wrote of Stonehenge.
If the stones be rubbed or scraped and water thrown upon the scrapings, they will heal any green wound or old sore.
And Mannitol, very famously fertility legends and stories associated with it in the ritual of crawling through the hole
nine times if you're an adult and three times if your child was set to cure both rickets and scrofula.
Safe, very handy. So I just wanted to explore a little bit about kind of how we might present these tales of stories and our sights now.
I think that particularly in England,
there has been quite a long period of archaeologists and heritage managers and historians not not engaging with these aspects of the sites.
And that's that kind of authorised view that Sally just mentioned about what is appropriate to be telling visitors, what is it?
What is not appropriate. And I think this is a particularly English thing.
In Ireland, for example, where there's obviously much greater traditions of early literature and much more well known associated legends.
Legend is much more integrated into archaeological interpretation. This is a O'Kelly's book which presents his new Newgrange excavations.
And there's an entire chapter in this book which covers the associated legends, an early Irish literature, references to the sites.
This is very unusual in you would never find this in England because of course, we don't have such surviving records.
But it's also something that means that in England it's not seen as something that's appropriate to be engaged with,
or at least maybe not until recently.
So you get sites like Tintagel, for example, where we know that there's incredible amounts of interesting mythology.
And yet in the Blue Guide, you know, the official Ministry of Works guidebook, it's not mentioned at all.
And in fact, Ralli Bradford, who writes this book in 1939,
says there's no evidence whatsoever to support the legendary connexion of the castle with King Arthur.
So he's very much pooh poohing any of the mythical and legendary stories associated
with the site because there's no evidence in the archaeology that he's excavating. And this leaves something of a gap.
Really, this is just an image of a book that's available online.
You don't get it.
There's basically a lacuna, a kind of vacuum into which a whole range of other publications and stories and web content and all kinds of things fall.
Which is because I think any way in which I'm kind of arguing here is because as heritage managers,
we have not necessarily engaged with these aspects of our sites histories.
And so people are incredibly interested in them. And and there is a gap there and people are fascinated by them.
And so you get all kinds of other people writing books and telling stories about these sites.
So Greensill was kind of an exception to all of this. It kind of was someone who really was quite happy to really investigate the early
records of folklore and present them alongside the archaeological evidence.
And now we all know how popular folklore is and insects described how popular courses are around the world.
I think I want to sign up to your Amayo. It sounds fascinating, but, you know, we have a screenshot here of folklore Thursday,
53000 followers, you know, just on that one Twitter account for place to share folklore.
And it's becoming, I think, over the last five, 10 years, increasingly visible.
I think perhaps and popular, particularly in Web fora.
This is a cigarette card, which I have the full collection of the 50 cigarette cards of the folklore of Britain.
This is Wayne and Smith, which is so popular, a very well known story.
But, you know, these are things that capture the imagination, that brilliant stories.
You know, the really good way of getting people engaged in sites and interested in visiting and exploring their local heritage.
So, you know, and that's what I was arguing, that what why does she bother?
Why do we not just tell? You know, it's Whalan, Smithie. It's an Olympic monument, full stop.
People are interested for a start. These are magical stories. They draw people in. They engage people.
They're fantastic stories. As Hanna and Kate have just demonstrated how inspiring that could be for creative outlets,
not only writing, but also art, music, all kinds of creative outlets.
This is a famous engraving of, you know, finding of King Arthur on the beach at Tintagel from Tennyson's.
It was of the King. I mean, you can't get much greater than Tintagel in the way that it's inspired people like Tennyson,
you know, musical composers, poets, writers, you name it.
So they really do inspire and set the imagination flowing.
They're also really worth while studying, as I'm sure many of you know, because they do sometimes contain elements of truth.
This is the story of Merlin erecting Stonehenge. He's depicted here as a giant.
So you get two myths for the price of one in this image.
But he is described as bringing the Giants dance, the stones of Stonehenge from Ireland as a memorial to the British dead.
Now, that's a myth that's recorded by Geoffrey Monmouth and many others.
But we do now know that the police stones the smaller stones, not the ones he's putting up here.
The smaller stones are Stonehenge do come from south west Wales. And so there is an element of truth here and that we that that myth,
that legend captures the idea of these stones having come from somewhere else, having come from a very long way away and having come from.
In effect, you know, the far west Wales, which in all intents and purposes in the mediaeval period could be described as Ireland.
So there there are elements of truth in myths and legends.
And sometimes and as archaeologists and historians, we, you know, do well to kind of take them seriously.
Whoops. And, of course, myths are entirely entwined with history.
You just can't understand how these sites have been interpreted, altered, built, visited,
understood, without understanding how they're so entwined with stories of myth and legend.
This is an obvious one, not as roundtable in the Great Hall at Winchester, but so many of the sites,
the English heritage look after and sites more generally have been completely intertwined with history.
And the myths and legends completely influence how they've been developed, how they've been used, how they've been altered.
So it's kind of a bit disingenuous, really, to just try and present the history without by, you know,
without the legend, without stripping out all of that interesting stuff and just presenting the pure history.
There's no such thing in effect. And what happens if we don't present these stories and others will?
As I said, so does it. There's a bit of a vacuum that's created if we don't tackle these.
And that's something I've been guilty of myself. So these are two panels that stand that way.
Then Smithey Long Burrow guardianship site in Oxfordshire.
The panel at the bottom is a very standard English heritage, free sites, interpretation panels.
I wrote it about 13 years ago, I think. And in it, it's a it's a fairly standard panel.
I wouldn't go as far as say it was brilliant, but it tells you that nearly a compressed Doric story of the site, it does not mention the legend.
It does not mention the name, whereas our guardianship panel, which is the one deacons at the top, says named after the Saxon Smith God Wayland.
So it does refer in a very small passing way to the name of the site.
Now, this is a bit problematic because by focussing purely on the priest or story in the bottom panel,
I'd have to say, was actually put up before the one at the top. I kind of excluded really any later history of the site.
I have mentioned that it was reconstructed and excavated by archaeologists, but I haven't touched on, you know,
some of the really crucial parts of the site about its name and that the really fascinating legend that goes with it.
And Howard Williams has written about this on his great blog.
OK. Death recommend looking at it if you don't know it.
And he says archaeologists cannot spend a century treating these sites as prehistoric and be surprised
that ignoring their biographies of use and reuse creates a yawning space for extremist fantasies.
It's not the press, but the Preist Dorians that create this problem. I think I'm guilty as charged in that respect.
And so, as we have heard from others previously, Whalan Smithie is known to have been a site that is unfortunately used by certain extremist groups.
It's it's very minor and small number of people who engage in these activities.
But by mentioning the fact that the site was named after the Saxon Smith God Wayland,
but not mentioning the fact that that was actually a 10th century application in a Christian
period of a Germanic name without presenting the more slightly more detailed aspect of that story.
We're basically leaving a gap for interpretation by others.
And I think that's something that we need to be aware of and to address.
It's a really complex topic, and I think, you know, I haven't got time to go into it massively today,
but there's certainly there's a reason for thinking seriously about myths and legends or cites sites.
And I'm thinking about how we can present them. So recent projects I've been involved in that try to do this.
I'm going to show you two examples. One is historic. One is not, I'm afraid, but it is one that's been mentioned already today.
So I think we ought to tackle it. This is.
This is me trying to attempt to integrate, presenting myths and legends at some of our guardianship sites.
I'm not saying that these this is the right way to go about it.
And in fact, I quite like to hear people's feedback as to whether they this has worked or is the right way to do it.
His first one is a relatively straightforward one, the site of Stanson Drew, which is a series of stone circles just south of Bristol.
We have recently installed a series of three panels at the site. And what we did for this was on each of the panels, as you can see on this one.
We tell one of the stories associated with Standardly Now Santacruz and Mazing site for folklore.
It has about five or six different key stories relating to it.
This one reflects the wedding party,
and we commissioned an artist to provide us with some small illustrations that would go with that and made these boxes at the bottom of the panel,
which kind of tackle the story and gave a kind of question which we hope would involve families
and children in thinking about the story in relation to the site and engaging with it.
The artist Jenny Anderson produced these three drawing drawings.
Illustrations for us say the wedding party story is that top the countless stones and the
baker who puts a loaf of bread on each of the stones in order to try and count them.
And the idea that the Stones move and dance and potentially go down to the river at night.
And so we told each of these stories in each of the panels alongside the more standard,
I guess, archaeological interpretation and historical information about the site.
So that's a very straightforward way of doing something, obviously, most of our prehistoric sites are openair.
They have limited amounts. Sorry, we should issues that. We also put those images and stories on the Web site.
There's a limited amount you can do with that, although as some my colleagues have presented today,
there is 100 different ways of engaging groups like education groups in these stories and legends.
And there are there are other ways of tackling it.
At Maydan Castle, recently, we did a soundscape audio project which doesn't actually include myths and legends.
But it could be an ideal way of presenting some of these stories to a visiting public as a downloadable app
or empathy file for people to listen to some of the related stories and legends that attract our sites.
So I think there are many more ways we could explore this as an organisation. So I'm going to tackle Tintagel just checking time yet.
So Tintagel was a project I was involved in back from 2015 onwards for a couple of years.
It's a site where, as I mentioned before, Raddy Radford's guidebook from 1939, dismissing the idea of Arthur has basically been the prevailing way.
We've presented the site up until 2015. The old displays on the site were minimal.
There was absolutely nothing to help visitors understand what the connexion to King Arthur was.
Most visitors knew that there was a connexion thing at King Arthur because they've approached through
the village of Tintagel with its myriad of plastic swords and a huge number of shops and kind of,
you know, King Arthur's carpark. King Arthur's pub, etc.
But once you got on the site, there was no information to help you understand what on earth this castle and this headland had to do with the legend,
which is, you know, really problematic and confusing for visitors.
So with the new interpretation scheme, we deliberately put the legend and the history together on a level pegging.
As I mentioned before, the history of this site is completely entwined with the legend.
You can't understand it without putting the two alongside each other.
The site has an early mediaeval settlement trading settlement. It then becomes named as the birthplace of King.
Sorry, the conception place, not the birthplace. Slap on the wrist conception place of King Arthur by Jeffrey of Monmouth.
It then becomes selected by Richard, of course, more for the sites of his castle, which is built in the 12th thirties.
He deliberately selected Tintagel because of its legendary associations, both with Arthur but also with the legend of Trystan result, which is a king.
MOCs castle is really important legends attached to the site.
The castle then also becomes later ruinous and becomes the inspiration for Tennyson, etc.
So the site. You can't just present the archaeology and not mention the legendary history.
These things are completely intertwined. So in the exhibition we we told both aspects at one of the things we did was
commissioned these these piece of book art to illustrate some of the stories.
This is the story of Tristan results, meeting in the garden and in the garden itself.
We installed what we called story slabs. So this is the garden itself is a walled garden up on the top of the headland, incredibly windy.
If anyone knows it. But people just kind of went in and there's a little Pamela's garden and just kind of on.
Well, there's a bit of a windy both base, but a garden. But to understand it, basically, which the corner is creating a literary landscape here.
He's creating the various aspects that come from the legends and adding them to his castle, deliberately so installed.
I think about six or seven of these slabs in the guide. And as you walk round the garden,
so you actually get an aspect of the Trystan assault story that the barrel's version of the story as you walk around the garden.
We also did things which I think some people might think is a lot more controversial.
But I would like to point out that both of these aspects, although they may look very permanent,
are really not the beach that you can see there with Merlin's face is ravaged by winter storms.
Those boulders move around and we replace those metal steps every year nearly because they're washed away in storms.
We think that this carving will last about 15 years and then it will be long forgotten like the rest of the big boulders on the beach.
And the statue is something that we could very easily remove its bolts and take it away if we wanted to.
But this was an attempt by us to try and add playful, interactive and sort of memorable aspects to the site,
which told the story of their absence in effects the fact that King Arthur is attached to Tintagel, but he is not present on sight.
There is no archaeological evidence. There's no nothing you can look at and stand and say this is the bit that it's all ephemeral.
So we asked an artist to work with that idea about. Him being there and not there.
And that's where the gallows that you came from. And the Merlins sculpture is deliberately very, very small and deliberately hidden.
So you actually have to work very hard to find it.
I was on the beach filming a piece for the one show and a lady and I said, what are you filming for?
And we said, Oh, well, we're filming because of all the controversy over this sculpture Shadow.
What sculptures that. And it took her about 15 minutes to find it.
It's a deliberately hidden thing for people to find on the beach and adds just something that tells them that this is you know,
it's a place that's associated with Merlin.
And with these stories now, I just wanted to mention quickly wetlands just because Tim picked up on it before.
It's a really interesting example of a prehistoric site that we look after where there isn't traditional myths and legends,
but there is modern myths and legends. And that's to do with the child sacrifice in the middle.
This Flindt can marks the site where Cunnington found the three year old child.
And as you can see, people come and put flowers and offerings on it on a regular basis.
Now, Cunnington does mention the burial in the middle, but she doesn't mention it's a sacrifice.
And most archaeologists have agreed that although the skull is cleft,
that may be just because a three year old's skull is not yet fused and the skull may have just come apart.
Although I do think the description of the skull being like two burials and Side-By-Side does suggest that perhaps this burial,
it was a cleft skull or it was perhaps a mummified burial that was then partly decomposed by the time it was put into the ground.
Unfortunately, as Tim said, this discussants lost.
We can't do the kind of biomolecular analysis of it that we would for any other burial where we could find out much more about that,
about the isotopes, the genetics, etc, etc. that would tell us much more.
So it's a bit of a mystery. We don't mention it on the modern interpretation panel at the site.
But as you can see, it is a focus for many people.
So it's almost got this modern folklore around it where people associate this can with the child burial, with the child sacrifice.
And it becomes a sort of centre for a deposition and offerings.
And it's obviously means a huge amount to the people who visit the site. So I just thought that was an interesting example of of a kind of more much
more modern piece of folklore that's become attached to a prehistoric site.
So just to sum up, is there such a thing as authentic myths?
I think yes. I think we need to be thinking about this a lot more.
We should be taking this aspect of our sites quite seriously and thinking about how we present them.
Of course, this is rigorous academic research. This is going back to the primary sources, to the antiquarian records,
picking up where these stories come from and working out, you know, what was appropriate to be presenting about them,
but also an acknowledgement of howzit, stories and myths and legends have influenced, you know,
the historical narratives of the site, but also how they've is inspired art, literature, music, etc.
I'm presenting these stories in an imaginative, engaging ways alongside archaeological and historical narratives.
I should say that at Tintagel there are 18 new interpretation panels across the site which tell
the archaeological and historical side of the site as well as the artistic installations.
So I just want I guess this is just a way of asking questions about how we do tackle
this with heritage sites and and whether we're going about this in the right way.
I don't know.
Be interesting to hear people's feedback, but at least I think we're moving in a direction where this is something that we're doing much more often.
Thank you.