What Would Your Ancestors Say To You?

From the air, a Bronze Age stone circle looks exactly like what it is: a ring drawn by human hands in the landscape, older than almost anything else we have built, designed to mark something the people who made it considered worth marking. Standing inside one and asking what your ancestors would say to you is not a comfortable exercise. The ground makes the question urgent.

Bronze Age stone circle, Isle of Man. The circle has stood for thousands of years. The figure inside it considerably less.

You Forgot That Abundance Was a Gift

The people who built this circle lived in a world where nothing was guaranteed. The harvest, the weather, the health of the animals, the turn of the season: all of it required attention, reciprocity, and gratitude. Abundance was not assumed. It was received, and receiving it came with obligations to the land, to the community, to whatever forces they understood to be behind the regularity of the seasons.

We have largely dismantled that understanding. The supermarket shelf is always full. The heating comes on when you press a button. The idea that any of it could be otherwise feels remote. The stone circle does not let you sit with that assumption for long. It was built by people who knew exactly how thin the margin was, and who made something lasting to honour the forces that kept them on the right side of it.

The circle complete, and the figure lying inside it. The human body inside a Bronze Age structure built to hold something sacred.

You Forgot the Old Gods

This is not necessarily a religious statement. It is a statement about attention. The old gods — Manannan, the Cailleach, the Dagda, the Morrigan — were not abstract theological propositions. They were names for real forces: the sea, winter, abundance, war and transformation. Giving them names and stories and ceremonies was a way of paying attention to those forces, of building a relationship with the world you lived in rather than treating it as a backdrop to your own individual story.

The Isle of Man has always understood this. Manannan Mac Lir, the sea god whose name the island bears, still gets his rushes strewn on the processional path at Tynwald every July. The old names have not entirely gone. But the quality of attention behind them has thinned. We use the mythology as aesthetic, as heritage, as content. The ancestors who carved this circle into the landscape were doing something else entirely.

Barefoot inside the stone circle, flower crown, white dress. Dancing in a Bronze Age site is its own kind of conversation with whoever built it.

You Forgot Your Roots

This one lands differently depending on who you are and where you are standing. Standing inside a Bronze Age stone circle on the Isle of Man, wearing a flower crown, barefoot on ground that has been considered sacred for thousands of years, it is hard to argue that you have completely forgotten. But the forgetting the ancestors are pointing to is not about aesthetics or heritage. It is about the kind of knowing that lives in the body: which plants are edible, which weather is coming, which direction is home, which people you are responsible to and why.

Roots are not decorative. They are functional. They are what anchors you when everything else moves. The people who built this circle knew exactly where they were rooted and what that obligated them to. The question of whether we know the same thing about ourselves is worth sitting with longer than is comfortable.

Made With The Woodgies

The reel was filmed at the stone circle and set to music by The Woodgies — Irish sisters Hannah and Meghan Woodger, indie-folk musicians based in Switzerland whose sound carries exactly what this ground demands: honest, timeless, and rooted in something the present tense cannot fully contain. Their debut album earned the Coup de Coeur at the Montreux Jazz Festival. This is what a collaboration between Celtic landscape and Irish-rooted folk music sounds like.

Follow along on Instagram for more from the Isle of Man's wild and ancient landscape throughout the Celtic year.

She has Celtic roots. Obviously.