Philip Boucher-Hayes
speaker
466 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Sep
Philip Boucher-Hayes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Find my handles, get underneath it, push the ground away to my legs, sit it in, hands around, and up it comes.
Oh my God, you make that look so simple.
It's never easy, you just get better at it.
What was this?
Why did we do it?
How widespread was it?
So, the more I've been digging into this, the more I've realised it's not just man-lift rock, because I was enamoured by the culture of it in Scotland and in Iceland.
And I knew there was a whole culture of it, and also in the Basque region and Spain.
And I always thought it was a really cool thing to look at.
You know, you're lifting a stone, it's primal, there's strength involved.
But what I realised through the research over the past couple of years was there's a whole cultural aspect to this that I missed out on at the beginning.
So these were rites of passage.
They were rites of passage from boyhood to manhood.
They were job interviews to become like a fisherman or a stonewall builder on the islands of Inishmahe.
They were lifted to honour the dead at funeral games.
They were lifted to honour the living at weddings.
They were lifted to honour the harvest at harvest festivals.
They were sometimes parts of chieftains' initiation rites.
And the more I've delved into it, the more I've realised that the seam of this runs deep through who we are as a people.
How widespread do you think it was?
Showing 61–80 of 466 · page 4 of 24
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