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A very nice review of my talk by Alex Peach ‘Stone Temple Gardening’: Andy Burnham’s Megalithomania 2026 talk celebrated 30 years of The Megalithic Portal and ancient sites online.
My head was still whirling with Nicholas Cope’s ideas as we broke for coffee, and the conversation carried on among the delegates. That is one of the pleasures of Megalithomania. The lectures do not really stop when the speaker leaves the stage. They spill out into the foyer, the market, the coffee queue and the pavement outside.
After the metaphysical weight of centre and circumference, Andy Burnham provided a welcome change of tone. Andy is the founder of The Megalithic Portal, one of the key online resources for anyone interested in ancient sites, and editor of the community’s award-winning book The Old Stones. He had spoken at the first Megalithomania in 2006, so his return for the 20th anniversary gave the talk a pleasing circularity.
His presentation looked back over thirty years of stone hunting, and twenty-five years of running The Megalithic Portal. It was a lively mixture of archive photographs, early internet history, site visits, discoveries, theories, cartoons, jokes and affectionate self-mockery. My notes simply say: lovely light relief. That sounds casual, but it should not understate the importance of what he has built.
The Megalithic Portal is one of those resources many of us now take for granted. It gathers sites, photographs, maps, records, comments and community knowledge in a way that has helped countless people find, visit and think about ancient places. For independent researchers, walkers, photographers, writers and stone obsessives, it has become part of the working infrastructure of the field.
Andy’s talk was funny, knowledgeable and generous, but beneath the humour was a serious achievement. Building and maintaining a community resource over decades is no small thing. It requires persistence, technical work, editorial judgement, enthusiasm and an enormous amount of unpaid or underpaid care. Hats off to him.
I was able to speak to Andy later during the Cotswolds trip, which made this lecture feel even more useful in hindsight. For Stone Temple Gardening, The Megalithic Portal matters not only as a database of sites, but as an example of how independent research communities can gather, organise and share knowledge outside traditional academic structures. In its own way, that too is part of the Megalithomania story: people drawn to stones, building networks around them, and keeping the old places visible.
More write ups of the day here:
http://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/megalithomania-2026-sunday-talks-speakers-forum
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