Mysterious Britain – Fact and Folklore –

“Throughout the length and breadth of Britain, ancient tribes, Druids, Celtic saints, medieval knights and eighteenth-century landowners have left future generations a wealth of extraordinary sights, scapes and structures.

Britain boasts more prehistoric monuments than any other country in Europe, and this beautifully illustrated book presents a comprehensive and stunning selection of the most celebrated as well as the less well-known, ranging from Stonehenge in Wiltshire to the Callanish Standing Stones, seldom-visited wonders of the Scottish Western Isles. Also represented are Neolithic burial chambers and their remarkable caches; monoliths, menhirs and hill carvings; holy wells and ancient fonts; crude pagan effigies carved in stone; the grisly memento mori of fifteenth-century tombs; the extravagant and eccentric follies constructed in Britain’s great estates and country parks.

Homer Sykes’ superb and evocative photographs record these marvels in full colour, while his informative text relates their history, and the legends and folktales that surround them – dancing maidens and unfortunate princes turned to stone in Cornwall and Devon, water made holy by the gilded skull of Saint Teilo in Wales, the witch who milked the giant cow in Mitchells Fold, Shropshire and the story of the magnificent tomb built by the Saxon blacksmith god, Wayland, near Uffington in Oxfordshire.

Some sights are enigmatic due to their antiquity, others are remarkable for the precision of their construction, and yet others are exceptional for their elaborate ingenuity – all are, in their way, mysterious and fascinating treasures of British heritage.”