Professor Ronald Hutton

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248 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 2 Aug

Professor Ronald Hutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Empire: World History · 383. Romans vs Druids: The War For Celtic Britain (Ep 1) · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

Problem is, the Druids are the common names in Celtic languages for the priests and magicians who are in charge of Northwestern European society when history begins.

And before we had a realization of how immensely long prehistory is, we assumed that anything prehistoric must therefore have been their work.

But now you're going back over thousands and thousands of years with dramatic changes in the nature of monuments and therefore belief systems.

It's most unlikely that the same kinds of functuary with the same beliefs would have been around in the year zero in the common old Christian reckoning than were about 3,000 years before.

Okay, Samhain, which is Irish, is Halloween, and it's the Irish name for the ancient festival that underlies Halloween.

It's one of eight festivals which modern pagans celebrate, and six of those, that's the solstices, midsummer, midwinter, and the feasts that open seasons, the beginning of spring, summer, autumn, and winter.

are very ancient.

The odd ones out are the equinoxes, which seem to have been less generally observed in ancient Europe, but are added at the present day for the sake of symmetry and they work very well like that.

So we now at the present day have the solstices and equinoxes and the quarter days that begin the seasons.

And as said, at least six of those are really old and have an immense amount of history and folklore attached to them.

Well, number one, it's the most famous prehistoric monument in the world.

Number two, it's incredibly accessible just off the A303.

Very nice for the home counties.

Number three, there's a tremendous contemporary wish for reconnection with fundamentals, with community, with nature, with the land.

And Stonehenge enables all three.

It's a place in which people can worship as ancestors did up to around 5,000 years ago.

There's a great buzz there on solstice night.

Lots of drumming, dancing, wonderful costumes.

And a sense of linking together horizontally with everybody else who's there and vertically with things, whatever they were, that happened there a long time ago.

We don't know what ceremonies happened there prehistorically at all.

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