Picnics among the stones
7 July 2026
The Drombeg stone circle has stood above Glandore for three thousand years. For one family, it was also the far field: the place you took visitors, and a picnic.
The Drombeg stone circle is one of the most visited ancient monuments in Ireland now, with a car park and a signboard. For the Jones side of this family it needed no signboard. The circle stood on the family's land, and going out to the stones with a rug and a basket was simply something the family did, generation after generation.
The family album keeps the proof. Here is my great-grandmother, Alice Blanche, among the stones decades before the car park, with her son Harry, who grew up to command ships. Nobody is being solemn about the Bronze Age; they are having a day out.
The habit never died. When the American writer and analyst Patricia Damery came to Cork, my mother and father took her out to the circle, the way the family always had taken its visitors. And for the circle itself, its alignments, its excavations and its folklore, there is a wonderful long read at Voices from the Dawn.
One photograph from those picnics has a bigger job to do than this post. In September 1970 Herbert Jones took his afternoon tea at the stones, cup and saucer balanced among the megaliths, and that picture now opens the forthcoming book Afternoon Tea at the Druids' Altar, where its story is being kept.