Just wanted to say what a great time Sharon & I had over last weekend. Hats off to Hugh and John for organising and holding the weekend together.
Speakers were, on Saturday: myself; Peter Marshall; Jay Wakefield & Reinoud de Jonge; Chris Morton & Ceri Louise Thomas; Tony Perrot; Tom Graves; David H. Childress, and on Sunday: Kate Masters; Philip Coppens; Nicholas Mann & Philippa Martin; Sam Samir Osmanagich; David Furlong; Hamish Miller.
What was fascinating in the end was that a conference, ostensibly with the purpose of discussing what I referred to as “lumps of rocks in fields”, becomes a philisophical debate about the nature of being human and how we exercise our responsibility in the world.
Amazing.
Details of the event – and, I’m sure in the fullness of time some photos – can be found here.
I’m afraid there’s much that’s going to come all in a rush now as I’ve finally seem to have the time to attend to this blog.
Anyway, first thing to report is the wonderful success of Standing with Stones at its first public showing at the Chipping Norton Theatre in Oxfordshire – not a stones throw (forgive me!) from the Rollrights themselves. I’m happy to say that filling the theatre for the night proved not to be a problem and it really gives the lie to the notion that interest in megaliths and standing stones is a ‘niche’ subject. Most of the tickets – certainly the initial rush seemed to come from the newsletter of the theatre itself which certainly does not have a demographic bias towards stone freaks. Whatever the main source for getting the bums on seats on the actual night, it was gratifying that the theatre filled to its 213 seat capacity with very little effort on my part.
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