When the dull haze lifts from the black peat at Lindow Moss it is still possible to envisage why, for our predecessors, this was a sacred location. And although silence may still skulk – as it did limitless lifetimes ago – there also remains an overwhelming babble of recollections cradled by the secret and coiling wind blowing in across the Cheshire Plain from the Irish Sea.
    It was here, on August 1, 1984 (the Celtic festival day of Lugnasad, the harvesting of crops), amid this brooding and abused landscape just a few miles south of Manchester, that peat worker Andy Mould uncovered an object he thought at first was wood. A fumbled toss to co-worker Eddie Slack knocked off the enveloped peat and it proved to be a piece of bone. Soon a well-preserved body was uncovered which archaeologists eventually dated to 2 BC – AD 130. This was Lindow Man, possibly a Druid Prince and perhaps the victim of a ritualistic sacrifice within a Druidic sacred grove. He had suffered a triple death including strangulation by a rope, garrotte, or cable tow, which had been placed around his neck. His torso can be now viewed, preserved for posterity, in the British Museum.
    Such groves, within wild, secluded serpent-haunted forests were the `temples’ of the Celtic Druids. There are just a few surviving examples within the British mainland: at Knypersley in the moorlands of North Staffordshire and at Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor, for instance. Their name is probably related to the Greek drus, an oak tree, with the suffix wid from Indo-European, meaning "to know".
    The Druids, priests, teachers, healers, diviners, magicians, judges and philosophers, impressed the ancient Roman writers. Caesar wrote that they believed in a kind of reincarnation, debated the stars and their apparent motion, the extent of the universe, the size and physical constitution of the earth and the "power and properties of the gods".1 Diodorus stated that Druids were "philosophers and theologians", that they were "skilled in the divine nature" and could speak with the gods. Lucan wrote that to them only was "given knowledge of the gods and heavenly powers".2 They had considerable astronomical skill and used a calendar based on the Moon. It is well known that there was a great Druidical "centre of inspiration" at Chartres – Caesar wrote of it – probably where the famous cathedral now stands. Tara, in eastern Eire, was the site of another renowned Celtic Druidic centre.
    According to the classical writers, Druidic training could take up to twenty years of study, the student being secreted away in caves, remote forests or valleys. Their doctrines were communicated orally – since it was forbidden to write them down. The Romans under Tiberius (14-37 AD) suppressed the Druidic hold in Gaul; in Britain, Roman occupation, and later Christianising, forced the learned Druids further west, to Cornwall, Wales and Ireland, where in some secluded places far more than their memories linger still.
    It was with Hector Boece’s, Scotorum Historiare a prima gentis origine, published in Paris, 1526, that the reputation of Druids as persons of "definite account and dignity" was revived in Britain. Boece valued in the Druids their apparent similarities with the Renaissance scholars. William Blake frequently mentions them in Milton and Jerusalem: the desolate surface of Britain, after The Fall, is covered with "Druid stones"; its horizons are lit by their holocausts and they build Stonehenge from the rocks of Eden.
    The Rev. Dr. William Stukeley, a renowned Freemason (initiated 1721) – also a scholar of Kabbalah and sacred history – along with the earlier mystic and Freemason, Elias Ashmole, were both fascinated by Druidism. Local tradition – and we should always take this seriously - relates that Ashmole visited the grove at Knypersley, north of his birthplace in Lichfield. But what purpose this pilgrimage served we can but speculate.
    This grove is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least its sense of place – that intangible and aesthetic intuition experienced by many but acknowledged by few. Now part of a countryside park, it was owned by James Bateman (yet another Freemason) a Victorian industrialist and student of the mystical, who transformed much wild moorland into parkland. In doing so, he not only rescued but also retained it for our edification. Here at this sacred place where the oak, yew, holly and ivy intertwine, a blanket of contentment has been wrapped around the circular temple of the ancients, its inner harmony disturbed only by the cooing of the ringed dove, the barking of the fox, or the occasional clamour of a schoolchild at play.
    Stukeley (who gave his name to London’s Stukeley Street, a few yards north of Freemasons’ Hall) was a successor to one of the most influential scientists of the Elizabethan age, Dr. John Dee. Both Stukeley and Dee were attracted by the innate magnetism of antiquarian sites such as the stones of Avebury and Stonehenge. Stukeley was adamant that the Druids created both as temples. He was invited by the Duchess of York to discuss the Druids with her and the two spent the morning at Kew House deep in conversation of Druids and oaks and mistletoe.3
    Describing the vast scale of Druidic achievements, Stukeley wrote,

"The ancients indeed did make huge temples of immense pillars in colonnades, like a small forest; or vast conclaves of cupolas to represent the heavens; they made gigantick colosses to figure out their gods; but to our British Druids was reserv’d the honour of a more extensive idea, and of executing it. They have made plains and hills, valleys, springs and rivers, contribute to form a temple of three miles in length. They have stamp’d a whole country with the impress of this sacred character, and that of the most permanent nature. The golden temple of Solomon is vanish’d, the proud structure of the Babylonian Belus, the temple of Diana at Ephesus…are perish’d and obliterated, whilst Abury, I dare say, older than any of them… in the beginning of this century, was intire; and even now, there are sufficient traces left, whereby to learn a perfect notion of the whole".

Whereas the majority of modern archaeologists are adamant that these structures were built long before the Druids, a number argue that there is hard evidence that the Druids used these sacred sites just as the Church took over pagan places of worship. And there is also the opinion that the masons who carved the splendid churches and cathedrals on the sites of these former ancient groves would often allude in stone to a Druidical Grove in the way that the pillars and vaulted ceilings they lovingly created represented a cluster of trees, a forest of pillars: the way through the woods to the sacred grove.

FREEMASONRY AND THE DRUIDS

Anderson, in his Constitutions of the Freemasons (1723) spoke of the "Celtic Edifices, erected by the ancient Gauls, and by the ancient Britains…", but his line of transmission of masonic secrets and techniques came via the Roman world. However, eighteenth century scholar and novelist, John Cleland – author of Fanny Hill - argued that the Freemasons took their origin from the Druids, and that as masons, or "May’s sons" they kept the old Druidic title of "The Sons of May". George Smith, in The Use and Abuse of Free Masonry (1783) also supported a Celtic context for masonic origins, claiming that the Craft first came to Britain around 1030 BC. Later, Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man, while not a Freemason, wrote An Essay on the Origins of Free Masonry (1811) in which he argued, "from the remains of the religion of the druids…arose the institution, which, to avoid the name of druid, took the name of mason, and practised, under its new name, the rites and ceremonies of druids". The connections between the two maintained a certain popularity: until his death in 1867 the Rev. George Oliver, a prominent Freemason (initiated 1801), lectured on Celtic Mysteries and Ceremonies of Initiation in Britain and published his History of Initiation (1840). A E Waite in his A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry (1921), described Oliver’s lectures as, "guides of the perplexed as to things that should be avoided in this kind of research".

1 Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul, trans. S.A. Handford, Harmondsworth (Penguin), 1978, pp.32-33.
2 Piggott, S., The Druids, Harmondsworth (Penguin), 1977, p.101.
3 Michell, John, The New View Over Atlantis, Rev. Ed., London (Thames & Hudson), 1983, p.18.
4 Ibid, pp.18-19.

Doug Pickford is the editor of six local newspapers in Cheshire and Staffordshire and regularly broadcasts on local radio. He is a member of Kirby Lodge, No. 2818, and Unity Lodge, No. 267, Macclesfield.