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Thank you. Hopefully you can all see my shared screen. I just introduced myself.

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I'm Susan Greaney. I work for English Heritage. My specialism is pre history.

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Very much involved with how we present Stonehenge. But I'm not gonna mention Stonehenge too much today.

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It gets too much attention anyway. So lately, I guess over the last five years or so,

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I've been involved in projects where I've become more interested in the folklore of our sites that we look after and guardianship.

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And this sort of predates the theme year that we had in nineteen of myths and legends across English heritage.

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But what I wanted to do is a bit like Sally is doing sort of question raising session,

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really about how we present folklore and myths to the public and what what might be the different ways of approaching that.

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And some of the issues involved in that. Some speakers, both on Friday and today,

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have talked about heritage interpretation and the absence thereof at various historic places and places associated with myths.

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So that's sort of where I'm going with this.

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So first, let's start by acknowledging a debt to Leslie Greensill, I'm sure many of you are familiar with his work,

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but Leslie was somebody who really took folklore seriously in his accounts of prehistoric places.

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And he used archaeological evidence, historical evidence, place name evidence, folklore documents, all kinds of different sources to write really,

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really useful books and pamphlets about some of the sites that we look after in our English heritage collection today.

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And I think I guess maybe I just a motto, we ought to all be a bit more greensill.

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He did kind of take all these different sources of information and apply equal weight to them.

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And I think we sometimes have drifted from that in in the intervening period.

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So I just wanted to go through a couple of just very quickly.

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You're all very familiar with the types of stories that are associated with PREST or sites in England.

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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.

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And these these are not just apply to one sites.

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These are myths and legends applied to a number of Prester excites both in England and elsewhere in the British Isles.

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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.

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Many sites have a number of different stories associated with them, but there's ways of tracing these stories,

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both geographically and in the way that they've been recorded by early antiquarians.

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So one example is giants. The idea that in prehistoric times they were a race of giants.

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This is a biblical origin, actually quite logical if you think about these enormous standing stones and portal domains

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and monuments that they would have been erected by people who were of superhuman strength.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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And there's all kinds of associated stories, including the fact that Belle builds nearby Pickering Castle.

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Say that's one example of giants. Another one, petrified people.

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This crops up again and again, particularly related to the tradition of it being a dancing or playing sports on the Sabbath.

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Obviously a Christian movement, something that placed in a great emphasis on keeping the Sabbath wholly free from toil.

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Early 17th century records of this and common sites like hurlers and like Stanson do have this associated with them, but also this site,

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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.

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This magic cow was installed on this site and the villagers were very pleased because it provided constant supply of milk,

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which went up and milked this poor cow into a sieve. So tricking it into giving away far more milk than it wanted to.

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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.

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So another petrified people count the stones as a very common one.

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No one can ever count the stones twice alike. And if they do manage to, then the great misfortune would befall them.

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This is a legend associated with sites like Little Kitz Courthouse in Kent, also known as the Countless Stones The Roll Right Stone Stonehenge.

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It's often attributed to sites where it is actually quite difficult to count the stones.

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And even now, people say to me, how many stones are at Stonehenge? It's a really difficult question to answer.

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So it's this element of truth in this, but it's the idea that you you can't count them.

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And if you do so, it's often associated with terrible thunderstorms and things where early antiquarians and

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surveyors were trying to count the stones and are afflicted with supernatural events.

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As I mentioned earlier, there's a huge number of sites, both natural sites and prehistoric sites associated with the devil,

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many of them associated with sort of devil throwing bits of piece of rock throwing, throwing various quoits.

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Obvious, obvious kind of reasons, I guess.

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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.

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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.

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Obvious reasons why it's called the round table, but also sites like Little like Kitco Teahouse,

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not far from Little Gets Gatehouse, which is associated with Hengel.

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It's the burial place of Hankus, the legendary Saxon leader in Kent.

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And healing powers, you know, so Stonehenge is quite famous for this.

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The bluestones am having particular healing powers in 1787.

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The Reverend James Broom wrote of Stonehenge.

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If the stones be rubbed or scraped and water thrown upon the scrapings, they will heal any green wound or old sore.

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And Mannitol, very famously fertility legends and stories associated with it in the ritual of crawling through the hole

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nine times if you're an adult and three times if your child was set to cure both rickets and scrofula.

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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.

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I think that particularly in England,

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there has been quite a long period of archaeologists and heritage managers and historians not not engaging with these aspects of the sites.

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And that's that kind of authorised view that Sally just mentioned about what is appropriate to be telling visitors, what is it?

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What is not appropriate. And I think this is a particularly English thing.

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In Ireland, for example, where there's obviously much greater traditions of early literature and much more well known associated legends.

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Legend is much more integrated into archaeological interpretation. This is a O'Kelly's book which presents his new Newgrange excavations.

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And there's an entire chapter in this book which covers the associated legends, an early Irish literature, references to the sites.

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This is very unusual in you would never find this in England because of course, we don't have such surviving records.

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But it's also something that means that in England it's not seen as something that's appropriate to be engaged with,

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or at least maybe not until recently.

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So you get sites like Tintagel, for example, where we know that there's incredible amounts of interesting mythology.

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And yet in the Blue Guide, you know, the official Ministry of Works guidebook, it's not mentioned at all.

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And in fact, Ralli Bradford, who writes this book in 1939,

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says there's no evidence whatsoever to support the legendary connexion of the castle with King Arthur.

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So he's very much pooh poohing any of the mythical and legendary stories associated

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with the site because there's no evidence in the archaeology that he's excavating. And this leaves something of a gap.

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Really, this is just an image of a book that's available online.

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You don't get it.

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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.

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Which is because I think any way in which I'm kind of arguing here is because as heritage managers,

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we have not necessarily engaged with these aspects of our sites histories.

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And so people are incredibly interested in them. And and there is a gap there and people are fascinated by them.

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And so you get all kinds of other people writing books and telling stories about these sites.

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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

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records of folklore and present them alongside the archaeological evidence.

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And now we all know how popular folklore is and insects described how popular courses are around the world.

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I think I want to sign up to your Amayo. It sounds fascinating, but, you know, we have a screenshot here of folklore Thursday,

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53000 followers, you know, just on that one Twitter account for place to share folklore.

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And it's becoming, I think, over the last five, 10 years, increasingly visible.

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I think perhaps and popular, particularly in Web fora.

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This is a cigarette card, which I have the full collection of the 50 cigarette cards of the folklore of Britain.

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This is Wayne and Smith, which is so popular, a very well known story.

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But, you know, these are things that capture the imagination, that brilliant stories.

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You know, the really good way of getting people engaged in sites and interested in visiting and exploring their local heritage.

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So, you know, and that's what I was arguing, that what why does she bother?

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Why do we not just tell? You know, it's Whalan, Smithie. It's an Olympic monument, full stop.

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People are interested for a start. These are magical stories. They draw people in. They engage people.

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They're fantastic stories. As Hanna and Kate have just demonstrated how inspiring that could be for creative outlets,

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not only writing, but also art, music, all kinds of creative outlets.

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This is a famous engraving of, you know, finding of King Arthur on the beach at Tintagel from Tennyson's.

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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,

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you know, musical composers, poets, writers, you name it.

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So they really do inspire and set the imagination flowing.

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They're also really worth while studying, as I'm sure many of you know, because they do sometimes contain elements of truth.

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This is the story of Merlin erecting Stonehenge. He's depicted here as a giant.

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So you get two myths for the price of one in this image.

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But he is described as bringing the Giants dance, the stones of Stonehenge from Ireland as a memorial to the British dead.

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Now, that's a myth that's recorded by Geoffrey Monmouth and many others.

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But we do now know that the police stones the smaller stones, not the ones he's putting up here.

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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,

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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.

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In effect, you know, the far west Wales, which in all intents and purposes in the mediaeval period could be described as Ireland.

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So there there are elements of truth in myths and legends.

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And sometimes and as archaeologists and historians, we, you know, do well to kind of take them seriously.

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Whoops. And, of course, myths are entirely entwined with history.

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You just can't understand how these sites have been interpreted, altered, built, visited,

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understood, without understanding how they're so entwined with stories of myth and legend.

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This is an obvious one, not as roundtable in the Great Hall at Winchester, but so many of the sites,

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the English heritage look after and sites more generally have been completely intertwined with history.

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And the myths and legends completely influence how they've been developed, how they've been used, how they've been altered.

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So it's kind of a bit disingenuous, really, to just try and present the history without by, you know,

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without the legend, without stripping out all of that interesting stuff and just presenting the pure history.

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There's no such thing in effect. And what happens if we don't present these stories and others will?

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As I said, so does it. There's a bit of a vacuum that's created if we don't tackle these.

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And that's something I've been guilty of myself. So these are two panels that stand that way.

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Then Smithey Long Burrow guardianship site in Oxfordshire.

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The panel at the bottom is a very standard English heritage, free sites, interpretation panels.

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I wrote it about 13 years ago, I think. And in it, it's a it's a fairly standard panel.

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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.

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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.

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So it does refer in a very small passing way to the name of the site.

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Now, this is a bit problematic because by focussing purely on the priest or story in the bottom panel,

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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.

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I have mentioned that it was reconstructed and excavated by archaeologists, but I haven't touched on, you know,

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some of the really crucial parts of the site about its name and that the really fascinating legend that goes with it.

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And Howard Williams has written about this on his great blog.

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OK. Death recommend looking at it if you don't know it.

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And he says archaeologists cannot spend a century treating these sites as prehistoric and be surprised

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that ignoring their biographies of use and reuse creates a yawning space for extremist fantasies.

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It's not the press, but the Preist Dorians that create this problem. I think I'm guilty as charged in that respect.

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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.

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It's it's very minor and small number of people who engage in these activities.

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But by mentioning the fact that the site was named after the Saxon Smith God Wayland,

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but not mentioning the fact that that was actually a 10th century application in a Christian

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period of a Germanic name without presenting the more slightly more detailed aspect of that story.

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We're basically leaving a gap for interpretation by others.

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And I think that's something that we need to be aware of and to address.

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It's a really complex topic, and I think, you know, I haven't got time to go into it massively today,

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but there's certainly there's a reason for thinking seriously about myths and legends or cites sites.

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And I'm thinking about how we can present them. So recent projects I've been involved in that try to do this.

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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.

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So I think we ought to tackle it. This is.

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This is me trying to attempt to integrate, presenting myths and legends at some of our guardianship sites.

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I'm not saying that these this is the right way to go about it.

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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.

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His first one is a relatively straightforward one, the site of Stanson Drew, which is a series of stone circles just south of Bristol.

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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.

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We tell one of the stories associated with Standardly Now Santacruz and Mazing site for folklore.

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It has about five or six different key stories relating to it.

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This one reflects the wedding party,

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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,

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which kind of tackle the story and gave a kind of question which we hope would involve families

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and children in thinking about the story in relation to the site and engaging with it.

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The artist Jenny Anderson produced these three drawing drawings.

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Illustrations for us say the wedding party story is that top the countless stones and the

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baker who puts a loaf of bread on each of the stones in order to try and count them.

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And the idea that the Stones move and dance and potentially go down to the river at night.

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And so we told each of these stories in each of the panels alongside the more standard,

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I guess, archaeological interpretation and historical information about the site.

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So that's a very straightforward way of doing something, obviously, most of our prehistoric sites are openair.

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They have limited amounts. Sorry, we should issues that. We also put those images and stories on the Web site.

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There's a limited amount you can do with that, although as some my colleagues have presented today,

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there is 100 different ways of engaging groups like education groups in these stories and legends.

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And there are there are other ways of tackling it.

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At Maydan Castle, recently, we did a soundscape audio project which doesn't actually include myths and legends.

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But it could be an ideal way of presenting some of these stories to a visiting public as a downloadable app

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or empathy file for people to listen to some of the related stories and legends that attract our sites.

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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.

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So Tintagel was a project I was involved in back from 2015 onwards for a couple of years.

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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.

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We've presented the site up until 2015. The old displays on the site were minimal.

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There was absolutely nothing to help visitors understand what the connexion to King Arthur was.

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Most visitors knew that there was a connexion thing at King Arthur because they've approached through

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the village of Tintagel with its myriad of plastic swords and a huge number of shops and kind of,

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you know, King Arthur's carpark. King Arthur's pub, etc.

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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,

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which is, you know, really problematic and confusing for visitors.

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So with the new interpretation scheme, we deliberately put the legend and the history together on a level pegging.

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As I mentioned before, the history of this site is completely entwined with the legend.

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You can't understand it without putting the two alongside each other.

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The site has an early mediaeval settlement trading settlement. It then becomes named as the birthplace of King.

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Sorry, the conception place, not the birthplace. Slap on the wrist conception place of King Arthur by Jeffrey of Monmouth.

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It then becomes selected by Richard, of course, more for the sites of his castle, which is built in the 12th thirties.

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He deliberately selected Tintagel because of its legendary associations, both with Arthur but also with the legend of Trystan result, which is a king.

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MOCs castle is really important legends attached to the site.

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The castle then also becomes later ruinous and becomes the inspiration for Tennyson, etc.

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So the site. You can't just present the archaeology and not mention the legendary history.

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These things are completely intertwined. So in the exhibition we we told both aspects at one of the things we did was

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commissioned these these piece of book art to illustrate some of the stories.

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This is the story of Tristan results, meeting in the garden and in the garden itself.

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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.

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If anyone knows it. But people just kind of went in and there's a little Pamela's garden and just kind of on.

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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.

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He's creating the various aspects that come from the legends and adding them to his castle, deliberately so installed.

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I think about six or seven of these slabs in the guide. And as you walk round the garden,

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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.

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We also did things which I think some people might think is a lot more controversial.

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But I would like to point out that both of these aspects, although they may look very permanent,

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are really not the beach that you can see there with Merlin's face is ravaged by winter storms.

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Those boulders move around and we replace those metal steps every year nearly because they're washed away in storms.

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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.

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And the statue is something that we could very easily remove its bolts and take it away if we wanted to.

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But this was an attempt by us to try and add playful, interactive and sort of memorable aspects to the site,

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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.

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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.

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So we asked an artist to work with that idea about. Him being there and not there.

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And that's where the gallows that you came from. And the Merlins sculpture is deliberately very, very small and deliberately hidden.

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So you actually have to work very hard to find it.

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I was on the beach filming a piece for the one show and a lady and I said, what are you filming for?

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And we said, Oh, well, we're filming because of all the controversy over this sculpture Shadow.

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What sculptures that. And it took her about 15 minutes to find it.

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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,

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it's a place that's associated with Merlin.

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And with these stories now, I just wanted to mention quickly wetlands just because Tim picked up on it before.

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It's a really interesting example of a prehistoric site that we look after where there isn't traditional myths and legends,

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but there is modern myths and legends. And that's to do with the child sacrifice in the middle.

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This Flindt can marks the site where Cunnington found the three year old child.

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And as you can see, people come and put flowers and offerings on it on a regular basis.

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Now, Cunnington does mention the burial in the middle, but she doesn't mention it's a sacrifice.

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And most archaeologists have agreed that although the skull is cleft,

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that may be just because a three year old's skull is not yet fused and the skull may have just come apart.

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Although I do think the description of the skull being like two burials and Side-By-Side does suggest that perhaps this burial,

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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.

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Unfortunately, as Tim said, this discussants lost.

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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,

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about the isotopes, the genetics, etc, etc. that would tell us much more.

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So it's a bit of a mystery. We don't mention it on the modern interpretation panel at the site.

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But as you can see, it is a focus for many people.

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So it's almost got this modern folklore around it where people associate this can with the child burial, with the child sacrifice.

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And it becomes a sort of centre for a deposition and offerings.

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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

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more modern piece of folklore that's become attached to a prehistoric site.

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So just to sum up, is there such a thing as authentic myths?

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I think yes. I think we need to be thinking about this a lot more.

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We should be taking this aspect of our sites quite seriously and thinking about how we present them.

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Of course, this is rigorous academic research. This is going back to the primary sources, to the antiquarian records,

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picking up where these stories come from and working out, you know, what was appropriate to be presenting about them,

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but also an acknowledgement of howzit, stories and myths and legends have influenced, you know,

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the historical narratives of the site, but also how they've is inspired art, literature, music, etc.

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I'm presenting these stories in an imaginative, engaging ways alongside archaeological and historical narratives.

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I should say that at Tintagel there are 18 new interpretation panels across the site which tell

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the archaeological and historical side of the site as well as the artistic installations.

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So I just want I guess this is just a way of asking questions about how we do tackle

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this with heritage sites and and whether we're going about this in the right way.

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I don't know.

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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.

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Thank you.