Standing With Stones - A Video Review

In 2000, film maker Michael Bott and writer and presenter Rupert Soskin met together with a plan to make the megalithic monuments of the British Isles better known to the public.

Standing With Stones. Photo by Standing With Stones

At first, they toyed with the idea of a television series, and even shot a pilot. They got a lot of interest from various broadcast groups, but it quickly became apparent that the logistics of hauling equipment and professional staff all over the British Isles were simply impossible. They also feared that they would lose control of their project. So instead, Bott and Soskin spent two years on their own, traveling around with a video camera and a bus, visiting, researching, writing and filming.

The result of this eight-year journey is Standing With Stones, a visual tour of a fairly small percentage of the thousands of megalithic monuments in England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. The video is presented by Soskin, who takes the viewer on a geographically-based tour of about 100 megalithic monuments, that exhibit a wide range of megalithic elements: stone circles, cairns, dolmens, henges, cists, stone rows, quoits, fogous, chalk giants, passage tombs and recumbent stone circles. The net effect of this journey into the Neolithic and Bronze Age history of Britain is to see not just the intended understanding of the wide variety of megalithic monuments but tantalizing glimpses of an underlying similarity in form and concept across the countries. Fascinating stuff.

Further Information

• Standing With Stones: The Full Review
• Standing With Stones: The Website
• Megalithic Monuments, the glossary entry (where you'll find definitions of the various elements)
• Stone Pages and Megalithics.com, two pages with catalogues of megalithic sites worth visiting.