Book Review - Ancient Stones on Old Postcards

Submitted by Runemage on Thursday, 11 August 2011 Page Views: 4864

**Popping Stone** submitted by kentigern : Old postcard, undated but showing figures in Victorian costume, showing the old shape of the Popping Stone. Note that the right-hand end is higher, now lower, and the smaller stone in front is now two much smaller stones. (Vote or comment on this photo)

The inspiration for the Jerry Bird's book Ancient Stones on Old Postcards apparently came from a small bunch of old postcards re-discovered during a house move. That sparked the idea of matching the folklore that the photographers would have heard at home with the often haunting images they created.

The advent of the railways and the charabanc bus had initiated tourism on an unprecedented scale and photographers started to explore the length and breadth of the Britain and Ireland to record scenes for a newly mobile population. People wanted to see and to be seen at interesting and unusual locations.

Jerry Bird is the editor of Merry Meet Magazine, the independent journal of Folklore and Paganism, which has published 44 issues since its beginning in the year 2000 and he is very knowledgeable in the subject.
This is a lovely book to dip in and out of, no matter what your interest in megaliths and lithic oddities, you will find something of interest in here. Having the local folklore as well as an archive image to see what a site looked like is icing on the cake. Some sites are hard to classify and Bird has provided an index of some that could fall into more than one category.

The postcards span three decades from 1900 to 1930 and the few that include people give a glimpse of them as being in their Sunday Best, not the easiest of things to go megalith-hunting in.

Every page showing a postcard follows the same format with the name of the stone, location, publisher of postcard, followed by an actual size black and white photograph of the postcard, a short description with folklore, six figure map reference and brief directions of how to find it.

One I particularly like is of a dolmen on a hillside. On the top of the postcard is hand-written ’Could not find dolmen anywhere’ and the text explains that, unbeknown to the sender, when the postcard showing the dolmen was sent, the image on it was already old and the dolmen had slipped down the hillside at some time in the past. I have a vision of the sender traipsing up and down that steep hill, totally bamboozled, wondering why he couldn’t see something as large as a dolmen.

In addition to ordinary sites, this book contains some of the more unusual ones, stones that move, lovers and rogues associated with natural outcrops, logan stones, follies and oddities.

The only down side is that some postcards have not reproduced as well as they possibly could have done, a combination of general ageing, limitations of the monochrome printing process and the economics of making the book affordable. For the most part this doesn't detract from enjoyment of the book but there are a few shots, possibly where the original was hand-tinted, that aren't as clear as the others.

Despite this, if you like your stones combined with a tale or two, this book is for you.

Review by Runemage

Ancient Stones on Old Postcards by Jerry Bird
ISBN: 9780956188632
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Green Magic
208 pages

Available from the Merry Meet Magazine bookshop, price £12.99 + p&p or discounted at Amazon.co.uk