Facebook druids herald the spring

They blow incense into my face, hissing the word “commitment”

The second-largest stone circle in Europe is in a sharp-smelling cow field 20 minutes south of Bristol in the Chew Valley. Built around 4,500 years ago for reasons unknown, it lent the root word stan (stone) to the name of the surrounding village, which, became known as “Stantone”. This evolved over the subsequent millennium into Stanton Drew, towards the end of which its local druids have taken to using Facebook to discuss logistics.

The rising popularity of pagan spirituality has caused attendance to explode at the eight “Wheel of the Year” celebrations held at Stanton Drew – comprising equinoxes, solstices and fire festivals. Inevitably, a scourge of “thoughtless and entitled parking” has descended upon the village, and meetings were held with Stanton Drew Committee. After a good deal of discussion – and at least one mention of a QR code – a small car park has been established to accommodate festive overspill (for a small fee, of course) in front of the Druid’s Arms pub.

The Škodas and Dacias lined up neatly in the compromise car park overlook three giant boulders nestled in the beer garden, which pre-date those on the Stanton Drew site by 1,000 years. It is a fitting place to meet, forget about parking and get in the mood for pagan worship. Today is Imbolc – a fire festival day – and the druids’ Facebook page says we need to be at the stone circle at 7am.

Imbolc, held at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, is an ancient Gaelic celebration observed by both Christians and pagans to honour Brigid. To Christians, Brigid is a saint, one of Ireland’s three patrons. To pagans – including most modern druids – she is a goddess, the daughter of Dagda, a Celtic deity who has two pigs, one alive and one perpetually roasting.

In the Celtic mythology, Brigid is associated with fertility, renewal and the coming of spring, which seems a little aspirational on this frigid morning on the first day of February. Still, the Imbolc-goers march resolutely across the cobalt-coloured field, towards the sound of a distant horn. Robed figures wait ahead, among the mist-shrouded boulders.

We arrive at the centre of the stone circle to the sound of drums. About 50 people are gathered around a small group of druids, dressed in white, who are beating goatskin instruments and chanting. There is an altar at their feet, filled with mysterious objects and flickering candles. The sun has not yet risen, and the gathered crowd are still indistinct. The air is cold and smells of mud and livestock. When the chanting stops an owl’s falsetto rings out, and as a cloaked woman begins to speak it bursts from a tree and disappears into the blue morning.

The druid is reading loudly from a laminated sheet of A5 in a strong West Country accent. She invites us to hold hands and take several long breaths together. Look to the sky. Breathe. Look to the earth. Breathe. Look to the stones and take a moment to reflect on how they were placed there by our ancestors, she says, “with such purpose and dedication”. “And perhaps,” she adds with a mischievous pause, her eyes darting up from the plastic sheet, “by magic.”

I look up from the stones. The day is breaking now. The morning light has illuminated a shining sea of crushed velvet, and a young man dressed like Edgar Allan Poe with a top hat. One woman’s blood-red headgear closely resembles those festive paper frills you put on the ends of turkey legs; she has paired it with an emerald-green hooded cloak to pleasingly Christmassy effect. Another man’s hessian beanie looks convincingly medieval – somewhere between a sock and a sack – but the effect is somewhat ruined by the fake Ikea sheepskin he is wearing as a cape.

Throughout British history, the figure of the druid has been shrouded in mystery and chaos. The Romans all but wiped them out in the first century AD, and many of the Latin sources detailing druid culture are considered unreliable. With so little known about them, they have served as a blank canvas onto which people have projected various images at different times. During the Renaissance, amid deepening interest in ancient history and mythology, Scottish writers drew an imagined link between druids and megalithic culture. In the 1700s, when the need intensified for a unified British state to instil a sense of shared history, the druid was hailed as a nationalist hero. Druids, conveniently, were both ancient and native, and did not have a history of being murdered by the English.

In the centuries that followed, druids were variously interpreted as Christian or pre-Christian figures, deeply in tune with Romantic ideals, or as demonic flesh-eating heathens. Druidic clubs modelled on Freemasons became open to – and popular among – working-class men in the 1830s, who sought the benefits such associations provided in a society without a welfare state. A Scottish trade union activist founded a druid order in 1909 that gathered to hear revolutionary sermons at Stonehenge, and later laid the groundwork for the movement’s association with the counter-culture.

And at Stonehenge 111 years later, during the unnatural heat of the first Covid lockdown, my friend Eddie cycled to a field near the ancient site, met a large gathering of druids and persuaded them to storm it. After being halfheartedly removed by some security guards, they went on to storm it three more times.

Back in Stanton Drew, the druids are faithful to the revivalism of the 1980s, practising a non-dogmatic spirituality incorporating elements of pre-Christian pagan traditions and focusing heavily on a connection with the natural world. In truth, records of Imbolc don’t appear until around the eighth century, by which time the druids were long gone, but here we are. Culture isn’t linear.

Two men navigate the circumference of the gathered crowd; one holding a smoking bowl of incense and the other the dismembered wing of a bird (possibly fake). The man with the incense, while dressed unremarkably in jeans and a jumper, has adopted a zany walk and has a wild look in his eyes. He blows the incense into our faces, one by one, hissing the word “commitment”. The gentleman wafting the dismembered wing in a dispirited way is dressed like Friar Tuck.

“He’s gotten a bit carried away,” he says quietly of his companion when he passes us.

After an hour and a quarter, my delight peaks as my flatmate’s mother, pulling a metal water bottle out of her coat pocket, produces an impressive sound as the vessel scrapes against her keys. A woman wheels around in ecstasy, certain she has just “unsheathed a sword”. We end with a gratitude circle, in which participants share things they are thankful for – the plants and animals, the awakening of the inner child – and are led around in a counter-clockwise spiral dance.

The ceremony is over. We have broken out into a run towards the car park before we find ourselves gridlocked by hippies and crushed velvet. I worry I am beginning to sound like Ronald Reagan, but perhaps I am just tired.

Once home and settled after a large breakfast I email the druids, wishing for their hearts to be filled with warmth and hope with the returning light. I can feel the new season’s sweet lunacy in the air.

[Further reading: Justin Hawkins: Would you like to wear my catsuit?]