Hello and welcome to the fourth and final episode of the Lives of Stonehenge, a short podcast series from the London Review of Books with me, Rosemary Hill.

In this series, which we're finishing appropriately at midsummer,

we've been looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the past few hundred years

and why it's mattered so much in the story of Britain.

And our characters so far have included architects, Inigo Jones and John Wood,

two pioneering antiquaries, John Aubrey and William Stucley,

and the Romantics, Wordsworth and Blake,

all of whom have reshaped Stonehenge in different ways in our collective imagination.

But still, still, we have very few answers about what Stonehenge is or was and how it got there.

You might even conclude that doesn't matter very much,

but as we move now on into the 20th century and up to the present day,

we'll see that for lots of people, including but by no means restrained to archaeologists,

this question has mattered very much indeed. It has mattered to the point

where Stonehenge has seen physical violence, the intervention of the police, the erection of

razor wire. So in this concluding part, we think about the people who over the past century

have challenged the established views and the authorities, not only on the point of what Stonehenge was in the past,

but what it is, what it can be in the future,

and most importantly, who it can actually belong to.

And joining me for this final leg across Salisbury Plain,

I'm delighted to say, is the folklorist Jeremy Hart,

author of many books, most recently Cloven Country,

The Devil in the English Landscape, whose author's bio says that he lives alone in a dark

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