If you're an anglophile, a lover of all things British, then this time of year must be like Christmas for you. Well, it's real Christmastime as well, but you know what I mean, right? If you have a soft spot for Dickensian carolers, candlelit mince pies, snow-covered country villages, special episodes of inexplicably popular TV shows like Downton Abbey and Doctor Who... well, in December, we all become a tiny bit British, don't we? But not everything we think we know about life across the pond is strictly "pukka." We've enlisted Sir Kenneth Jennings, VC, GBE, DJO (Distinguished Jeopardy! Order) to help us "mind the gap" between fact and fiction when it comes to Merrie Old England.
The Debunker: Did the Druids Build Stonehenge?
"Hundreds of years before the dawn of history a lived strange race of people: the Druids! No one knows who they were or what they were doing, but their legacy remains hewn into the living rock... of Stonehenge!" So begins Stonehenge, the epic rock saga brought to the stage with disastrous results in the classic 1984 rockumentary (if you will) This Is Spinal Tap.
But Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel isn't the only leading authority to credit the building of Stonehenge, the ancient stone monument on England's Salisbury Plan, to the Druids. In 1640, the British writer John Aubrey (Brief Lives) undertook the first academic study of Stonehenge, and proclaimed it to be the work of Druids, an Iron Age Celtic people first described by the Romans around 200 BC. This view was parroted by archaeologists for centuries, and it wasn't until 1952, when carbon-14 dating was first used on Stonehenge artifacts, that scholars began to realize how spectacularly wrong Aubrey and company had been.
We now know that Stonehenge was a monument as far back as 3100 BC, making it older than the Pyramids of Egypt. The first stones were raised about 700 years later. In other words, it precedes the Iron Age by millennia, and crediting the Druids with its construction is about as chronologically accurate as claiming that Elvis Presley built Solomon's Temple. Almost nothing about Druidic religious practice has survived, so there is no evidence that they ever used Stonehenge. Ironically, modern pagan groups, some of whom identify as "neo-Druids," have recently begun using Stonehenge for ceremonies at the solstices and equinoxes. It took millennia, but Druids have finally arrived at Stonehenge!
Quick Quiz: According to the only surviving account of druid rituals, their sacred plants were an oak tree and what festive evergreen?
Ken Jennings is the author of six books, most recently his Junior Genius Guides, Because I Said So!, and Maphead. He's also the proud owner of an underwhelming Bag o' Crap. Follow him at ken-jennings.com or on Twitter as @KenJennings.