A riveting, one hundred and twenty minute conversation with a man who lifts old stones

Hi, folks. It's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

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Squint at the withery princess, you gelded Emmets. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.
We're well into the middle of February. February.
Fucking February. I love February.
Well, I don't love it.

I don't love February. I...

I don't mind February. You know, things get a little bit brighter.
I hate having to pronounce February. I hate that R, the R that's in there.
I could really do without the R in February.

It's just a bollocks to pronounce. But I did a podcast last year.
I did a podcast last year where I'm like, I need to know why there's an R in February. I wasn't prepared for the answer.

The reason there's an R in February is because in pagan times at this time of year,

there was a pagan festival called Lupercalia. It was a pagan fertility festival, so it was all about the fertility of the land and the fertility of people and animals.

So during Lupricalia, so there was a god called Lupricus,

and Lupricus was a wolf. So during Lupercalia people would sacrifice a wolf, but catching wolves was really difficult because wolves are wild and they're tough.

So what people would do is they'd they'd find a poor dog.

They used to kill dogs. Then they'd skin the dog and they'd make it like a whip, like a whip out of the dog's skin.
And they'd use this dog skin whip as like a foreplay instrument.

People would slap each other's arses

with a whip made from dog skin to get horny. And this dog skin sex whip was called a Februus, a Februus.

And that's why February is called February. And that's why there's an R in February, February.

Like, imagine April was called Cat Vibrator, because people in the Stone Age shoved a load of bees into a cat's skull and sat on it for the laugh.

I'm not being vulgar, I'm not being obscene, I'm just saying February is called February because of an ancient foreplay sex instrument made out of a dog's skin. It's a fact.

So only because of that lore, because of the depth of that lore, do I give February the respect that it deserves and pronounce that R because that's a well-earned R right there.

Like I grew up in Limerick where

nicknames were a very important thing and a nickname is something that had to be given to you. But in Limerick when we were kids,

if you were allowed to give yourself your own nickname, but depending on the name, you had to earn every single letter of that name by performing dares or tasks that were decided by your friends for each letter of that name, that nickname, the proposed nickname.

Remember when I was about 13, one of the lads wanted to be called Spanner. Like, that's a tough name if someone's called Spanner.
You got an earn a nickname like Spanner.

Spanners can be used as a weapon. So he was like, I'm Spanner now.
Hold on a minute. Hold on a minute, buddy.

That's seven letters. So now you have to do seven tasks or theirs.
And all of us decided. And this fella, his name was Roy.

And his father.

His father drove a flower delivery van

called

Lawless Flowers

because that was that was just the name of the family that was the name of the family was Lawless Lawless is an actual name in Ireland but you saw this van going around the place lawless flowers

Like they're fucking renegade illegal flowers. They're not they're just regular flowers.
Well this fella Roy his dad drove that illegal flower van.

And so Roy wanted to be called Spanner. Probably because his dad delivered flowers and he was insecure about it.
But eventually he just backed off. He said, No,

I can't do seven dares for each letter of my proposed nickname. No, I'm just going to stick with Roy.

Which was that was a big move. Imagine being called Spanner Lawless.
Spanner Lawless. What a fucking name.
But he wasn't willing to

earn that name. And there was another fella.
I'd never met him. I'd only heard him spoken about, right?

And this fella's name,

his actual name was, I think it was Kenneth Inbush. But I'd never met him.
I'd only ever heard him spoken about. But because of the nature of the Limerick accent,

whenever anyone I knew was talking about him, they'd be like, Kennedy Inbush was down to Kennedy Inbush. Kenneth Inbush was down to Kennedy Inbush.
You're not Kenneth Inbush. Kennedy Inbush.

And I heard Kennedy Inbush as Planet Ambush. And I was like, oh my God.

Who the fuck is this? Who's this fella called Planet Ambush? Fuck me. What did he do to earn that name? Planet Ambush.
I never want to meet this cunt.

Jesus, he must be... He must be the toughest fucker going.
Planet Ambush. Like, that's the type of name.
That means you beat up

a gang. That means you beat up 12 lads.
That's the only way you earn a name in Limerick, like Planet Ambush. But he wasn't called Planet Ambush at all.
It was me mishearing his real name.

But it's because of

the rules, the Limerick teenage rules of respecting nicknames that are earned,

that's why. It's the only reason.
It's the only reason I pronounce February correctly. And then there was another fella called Fanta.

And

see, a name like Fanta, that sounds that's like that's a drink, that's soft. But in Limerick, if some if someone had a name like Fanta, that could be like potentially the most dangerous name.

There could be a really, really fucked up story behind the name like Fanta. Fanta was a few years older, I didn't know him, I never met him.
But the only reason

we knew Fanta's name was because my friend

he looked into his sister's diary and she wrote,

I got fingered by Fanta down in Kilkey.

And that's how we knew there was a fella called Fanta. Kilkey, Kilkey is like a seaside village, a seaside village out in County Clare, which it's gentrified now.

The world's first submarine was invented there. But it was a seaside seaside village where everyone in Limerick went to at summertime.
And I just remember every year someone was bitten by an eel.

Except my friend's sister, who got fingered by Fanta and rode it down. In case she forgot.
And then we found out years later, the reason he was called Fanta was because

one Christmas day,

one Christmas day, he'd stall on somebody's, he'd stall on a bicycle, he'd stolen a new bicycle on Christmas Day. But it was obviously a freezing cold December Christmas day, freezing cold.

And he had

pissed into a bottle of Fanta and was using it to keep his hands warm. And it was that piece of information that led to the bike being retrieved.
Because it's like, who stole your bike? I don't know.

But he was cycling around a bottle of Fanta full of his own piss to keep his hands warm.

And

years later, then, yeah, he fingered my friend's sister and she wrote about it in her diary.

February, February, February. So, February having an R in it because people used to skin dogs and get horny by slapping each other in the arses with the dog's skin.

February has earned that R, so I will pronounce it, but I can't fucking wait until February is over so I can stop pronouncing it. I just want to go February, February.
Like January, February.

None of this February, February it fucks with my head my mouth feels full it's like I'm gargling on the testicles of a month maybe that's the point maybe that's maybe that's the point but anyway we're nearly we're nearly done with February alright

so if you're a new listener

if you're a new listener

If you're a new listener, maybe go back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.

Alright?

I have the giggles. I have the giggles this week.
I fucking love my new office. I'm in my new office.
I fucking adore it. This place is wonderful.
I have a window.

I have a window to look out all the time, a decent big window to look out. I'm looking at pigeons, birds, all sorts of things all day long.
And it's so peaceful up in this office.

There's no noise disturbing me. I'm coming into work at 9 in the morning and just getting straight down to work and then leaving at five and being really happy with the work that I've done that day.

And

the injustice, the frustrating stress and injustice of not being able to work because things are too noisy out in the corridor, that's not a problem anymore. So I'm very happy up here.

And on last week's podcast, I mentioned that there was

a light sensor here, which means that the light is on all the time.

They were trying to charge me to get a light switch put in, but

I gave a formal request, a formal request for a reasonable accommodation under the Equal Status Act, I believe.

I put in that request for a light switch that I shouldn't pay for it, and it was successful. They're going to put in a light switch for me.

So if you're neurodivergent, if you are neurodivergent in the workplace, okay, and

something about your work environment is putting you at a disadvantage, a disadvantage that your neurotypical co-workers don't have to deal with, then you're entitled to a reasonable accommodation.

Laws exist. Laws exist to protect that because it's not fair.

It's, I'm renting an office here. I'm renting out an office so that I can work and so that I can live my life and enjoy my job.
My brain processes the world differently.

and it processes a bright light that I don't have control over all day long. It processes that as highly distracting and stressful.

Whereas a neurotypical person, they might be annoyed by it, but ultimately they'll be able to get on with their day.

They'll be able to get on with their day and they'll be fine and they won't think about it. So I put in the request for a reasonable accommodation.
I did it for young me,

young me in school, young me in school, who I was tormented by my itchy school jumper. I was tormented by having to literally be in a classroom every single day with tons of people.

And I was tormented by having to sit still, by having to sit still. And all of these things led to me not having a leave-in cert, not having a fucking leave-in cert.

Which if you're Irish, you know, that's not good. We don't.
In Ireland,

maybe things are different now. But when I was doing my fucking leave-in certain nearly 20 years ago, if you failed your leave-ins art, you were fucked.
That was it.

And there was huge shame around it. And I've done alright for myself despite not having a leave-in cert.

And I'm not gonna I'm not gonna sit here as a as an adult in my office that I rent, that I've worked, I've worked so hard to be able to have an office. I'm not gonna sit here and

have my capacity to work and write and deliver this podcast impacted. because a giant corporation won't pay for a fucking light switch.

But now they have to pay for the light switch under the Equal Status Act and if they don't, that's considered discrimination against a person with disabilities.

I don't have the light switch yet but I have I've got the underpants. I have underpants stuck to my ceiling over the light switch sensor and I have lovely soft lighting.

So I'm meeting my needs temporarily right now until it gets solved properly. But I adore this office.
It's fantastic. I'm incredibly happy to have moved up here.
I'm very happy.

It's smaller it's half the size half the size of my last office which I was concerned about because I I like to be able to pace around but because this office is small I have to keep it tidy I have no choice clutter literally can't exist in this space or else I can't move so the tininess of this office is actually forcing me to be very neat and efficient and to have things in their place and that small little morning ritual of making sure that my office is really tidy and everything is in its place, that small morning ritual of taking responsibility and accepting responsibility for my environment, that tiny act actually builds my self-esteem a little bit in the morning and sets me up for the day, for the next task ahead.

Which again, I've many neurodivergent listeners. We struggle with

what's called executive dysfunction. Terrible word, doesn't sound human at all, makes us sound like machines.
But executive dysfunction, it's to execute, to execute tasks.

Identifying what needs to get done,

actually doing it and then completing it. These things can become very overwhelming.

And when I begin my day with something as small as there's a bunch of books on your desk that you were reading yesterday, put them on the shelf where they belong. Identifying that,

initiating the task, doing it, completing it, that tiny thing is a little mindful self-esteem builder that then makes it easier for me to open and answer emails.

And then once my emails are answered, that's another little boost in self-esteem. And then it's like, okay, sit down and write.

Do the creative part of your job. That now becomes a lot easier as opposed to...

I'm in a messy office, I'm stressed out, I haven't answered my emails. I don't want to start working, I don't really know how to start working.
I want to procrastinate and doom scroll on TikTok.

So I love this new office. It's fantastic.
And all this week too, I'm working on a fantastic new project that I can't tell you about, but I will tell you about it in a couple of weeks.

Something that you'll all enjoy. So I have a cracker of a podcast lined up for you this week.
I'm chatting with a fella called David Keowen, who...

I've had him on this podcast two years ago. This fella's doing some of the most fascinating work in Ireland at the moment because I don't know how to label it.

We have an indigenous folk tradition in Ireland of lifting heavy stones.

Every village in Ireland at one point in history, because there was no internet, there was nothing, had a big heavy stone and people would go and lift this stone as a trial of strength or to show that they were strong enough to do a stonemason job just for something to do and all of these stones had folklore.

These were famous stones. And your grandfather or your grandmother might have lifted it, or your great-great-great-grandfather.

And some of the stories of these stones go back to Irish mythology thousands of years old. But this stone lifting tradition was completely lost, mainly as a result of the famine of the 1840s.

This tradition was completely lost, forgotten, culturally eroded.

And during the pandemic, David Cohen, who was an Olympic kettlebell lifter from Waterford, David Cohen found one of these ancient Irish lifting stones and lifted it.

And for the past two years, he has travelled up and down Ireland finding buried long gone ancient Irish lifting stones and lifting them. And he's finding these stones.

through folklore and through stories.

He'll hear a story, an oral oral story about a stone, what it looked like, how you lifted it, the name of the stone, where it was, and he'll visit a village and speak to the old people and he'll go digging and then he'll find the fucking stone and he might be the first person to lift that stone in 300 years.

The work that he's doing is fascinating and incredibly valuable. And if you work with a university,

if you're a fucking PhD or you run a university department to do with archaeology, folklore, history, whatever.

Please listen to my chat with David Kyon and contact him because I do think the work that he's doing should be funded.

I reckon he should be doing this as a PhD. This is very valuable historical work that tells us about the land and the climate and the culture.

So I had this chat with David Keown in Vicker Street a couple of weeks back. at my Vicar Street gigs which you know I adore and love because they're so intimate Like this.

Jesus, there was 1200 or 1300 people in the audience and you wouldn't even know, you wouldn't hear'em. My live podcasts, they're a bit like I try and make them like going going to going to see a play.

Going to see a play. You're not necessarily roaring and shouting.
I try to create like a type of an intimacy, a conversational intimacy.

on stage where it's a bit like a play that's unfolding in real time via conversation. And I felt that energy in the room when I did this podcast.
So without further ado,

here is the chat that I had with David Keown. He's Indiana Stones on Instagram, by the way.
And this is a long chat. This is, I think it's over 90 minutes.
Because I couldn't cut anything out.

It was too much crack. And, but it's a podcast.
This is a fucking podcast. This is the beauty of podcasts.
I can put in a 90 minute chat.

you don't have to listen to all of it today you don't have to listen to some of it today listen to the rest tomorrow like when i get a if i'm listening to podcasts and there's a banger three four hour long banger that's me sorted for the week i listen to like a half an hour each day for the week and look forward to the next bit the next day so that's the beauty of a long podcast So this is the chat I had with David Cummin.

I love introducing you because it's like, there's no other way to describe it than like what do you do? You lift fucking stones, man.

That's it. I mean, it's a strange hobby, isn't it? You know, as pastimes go, like,

it is a strange one, but to me, it's all about bringing back something that we lost, you know.

Can I try and briefly describe it and you tell me if I'm wrong? Go for it. So

we used to have a tradition, not just Ireland, but many countries used to have a tradition where

there was a very heavy stone in a village or whatever, and this stone was lifted as a test of strength.

And then the famine happened, and this tradition, this huge tradition in our culture of lifting the heavy stone, like people just forgot about it because there was a fucking genocide.

And

stones don't disappear. They stay there in the ground.
And what you do is you travel all around Ireland, speak to older people, and ask them, Did anyone ever lift a stone here?

And they might go, Yeah, my great-grandfather. And you could you go and find a fucking stone, you dig them up, and then you lift it.
That's it. How cool is that?

But

I look, there's part of what you're doing is performance art. Another part of it is fucking archaeology.
There's folklore.

And it's ridiculous in a way, too, you know? It is, but like I said, it ticks a lot of boxes, doesn't it?

I mean, what I love about this is it's not just strong men going doing this now, you know, there's poets and there's artists, and you're inspiring people to get back in touch with their culture again through the lens of stone lifting, right?

So just using stone lifting as a start.

So now, see, they're not just stones, bye-bye, they're stories. That's what I'm all about.
You know what I mean? This is a stone that has been lifted in this village for 500 years, maybe, right?

That's the mad fucking thing. That's the thing.
That stone in particular was picked out maybe 500 years to a thousand years ago in the village because it stood out maybe for its beauty and its shape.

And the men and the women used to go and test themselves on these stones. Say, like on a Sunday, before after Mass.
This is cropping up all over the place.

Before after Mass on a Sunday, pre-GAA times, the lads would say, right, what are we going to do? There's the stone. Let's see, you can pick it up, replace a few beds, and have a bit of crack.

You know, like the other thing, as well, when you're dealing with anything like this, you have to go, there's no internet.

Like, but see, like, when I when I started this, like, you went looking for dead rats as a kid, yeah? Of course I did.

Like, come on, like, anyone, see, I don't know if someone is here, like, if you're 20, right, and you've had fucking YouTube since you were six, you've known you were looking at ISIS beheading videos, you weren't out on the street looking for a dead rat

you know what i mean totally i mean like in the pre-internet days the heady days like oh what were you gonna do there was nothing to do

well did you throw stuff like i i of the one of the good things that i had like i'm at athletics but i i was actually famous for having a really good throw at stones i was great at throwing stones and i'm going like there was no internet I have a sore shoulder now as an adult because and when anyone asked me about the shoulders like yeah I was class at throwing stones as a child we have a lot in common so have you got bad shoulders as a result of lifting stones?

No, I don't, thank God. Because, well, the stones I'm lifting are pretty fucking heavy, but

I'm okay. I'm looking after myself, you know.
How are you?

Like, these stones are no fucking joke, right?

You'd lift the stones as the size of that table, wouldn't you?

In not circumference, but that the oval bit. So, like, say, the average Irish lifting stone is 170 kilos.
Average.

Fuck me. Right?

Like, that's a decent deadlift, like. Yeah, yeah.
But you're a deadlift, you're in a fucking gym.

you're inside with something that's ergonomic, it's made to be lifted, it's equally weighted, and you have chalk and a belt, right?

You're lifting a stone, you're out in a field, you're in mud, you're in grass, it's Ireland, it's pissing rain all the time.

Grip becomes an issue, you know, and you're you have no way of warming up.

You go, there's the stone, pick the fucking thing up, and it's like there's no, there's no warm-up stone beside it, you know what I mean?

What I love too is from the last time we chatted, right? And this is something.

So each stone is in a different place. Each stone, as you say, has mythology around it.
Each stone has stories, right?

It's a bit like

a mythical animal. You know, it's like there's a fucking big fish out there and you have to catch it.
But the thing is, the stone has been there for hundreds of years. Yes.

And something you told me, which I hadn't considered, was...

Like we say this stone over there. It's not just the fucking weight.

It's the fact that it's it's surrounded by mud or it's surrounded by a type of sand that they suck your feet in or it's just a queer shape exactly like that's amazing so it's it's it's it's a difficult thing to do and it looks intimidating you know i brought out guys by right i was speaking at the european powerlifting convention um about three months ago on a panel discussion and we had some of the strongest men and women in europe at this convention and they're over lifting in ireland as well so i went up and i spoke about stones and they were like what the the fuck is this about stones?

This is brilliant. I love the sound of this.
Can we go try it? So the next day, this was happening in Limerick, actually, New L. We went to Clare, which is the closest stone.

It's only about an hour away. And the man's lifting stone there is 162 kilos.
There's the man's lifting stone and the woman's lifting stone, right?

So you have the masculinity strength test and the femininity strength test, which I love also.

But the lads were asking me on the way up, you know, how much does the stone weigh? I say it weighs 162 kilos.

162 kilos. I can can deadlift 400 kilos.
You know, I can squat 300 kilos.

You know, this is going to be a piece of pizza. Take him to the stone.
It's in a graveyard. It was a rainy day the day before.

Take him down, and the boys are just looking at the stone going,

that's me. Said it is.

Give it a go. So he had eight men there who some of them would have like a thousand kilo total in powerlifting.

And out of the eight men, I say two of them lifted the stone, but that much off the ground.

And each stone as well,

it's about where you can lift it, isn't it? There's different centers of gravity. There's whatever way you angle it or you move it.
It all depends. And then, of course, the grip.

The grip is the thing.

No matter how strong you are, if you can't grip something, and that's what these lads were having a problem with.

If you can't get your hands on it and grip it, you won't pick it, no matter how strong you are.

How many new stones? So when I spoke to you two years ago, like the way that I found out about yourself as well. I love how I found out about you, which was

there's an incredible Irish writer by the name of Leomo Flaherty, right? And

his work is out of print. I can't understand why this is a deeply important Irish writer.
He grew up on the fucking Aron Islands. He was writing from about, I think, 1910 up until the 1960s.

An incredible short story writer. That story I read out there, The Donkey, you know, Leomo Flaherty inspired that because he just writes stories about animals, you know.

And what I find particularly powerful about the short stories of Leomo Flaherty is

it's depressing as fuck, right?

He lived on the Aran Islands, he was born in 1910, right?

When Leomo Flaherty speaks about the animals around him, he will talk about a lake and he will say the lake was so full of fish that it was glistening silver.

The biodiversity and the amount of animals that Leomo Flaherty describes in his stories, I'm reading it going, shut the fuck up, you bullshitter.

He's not bullshitting. He's not bullshitting.
We live in a time of biodiversity collapse. We live in a time when there's not a lot of wild animals, there's not as many birds, there's not as many fish.

He's not lying. He's describing a world that's so alien to me that I can't even imagine it.
And that's the beauty, that's the sad beauty I find in Leomo Flaherty's work. It's

like the thing with art

like at the moment there's these botanists

and one thing they're very concerned about is the the biodiversity of fruit so in italy alone there used to be like 600 different types of apples different regions of all these different types of apples

and

Now there's not. There's like five types of apples because of globalization.
But the problem is there, when you have five types of apples, they're fucking delicious, they're green, they're lovely.

If a disease was to hit, it kills everything. Because what you've done there is you've gotten rid of the biodiversity, you've gotten rid of the genetic

diversity with the apples. So there's people who study old Renaissance paintings from Italy to try and see,

oh, what's that fruit? What's that fruit? Because there's a lot of things that people are misidentifying as pears, and they're actually extinct Italian apples.

So people are trying to bring these back so that we have genetic diversity

in case there's a disease. That's what happened with the fucking famine.
You know, why did the famine kill everyone? Let's not talk about the Brits, okay? We obviously know it was the fucking Brits.

But also,

we all had the exact same fucking potato that came from Peru and one disease just went

and it's not natural to Ireland.

So That's why I loved O'Flaherty's work.

His short stories, reading about the variety of different animals that we had, was like these Italian people looking at the fucking paintings for different types of extinct apples.

But one story that Leomo Flaherty wrote, which when I read it, it felt like fucking science fiction.

And the story is called The Stone, right?

It's fucking beautiful. It's a little short story called The Stone, and it's about

I'd never heard of lifting stones. It's just this strange story that could be on Mars.
And it's an old man in the Iron Islands, and he's about 90 years of age.

And this old man walks up to an area by the beach and he sees a pink stone.

And the old man remembers that when he was a young man in his twenties, he was the strongest fucker and he was the only one that could lift this stone.

And in his old age and possible dementia, he decides, I'm gonna go down and lift it for one last time. And he does and he picks it up and he remembers it all as a kid.
And then he fucking dies.

He dies lifting this stone. And I read this going, that's fucking powerful.
This feels like science fiction. I didn't know that stone lifting was tradition.
And then this cunt

read the story, and it turns out that's not fiction at all. It's about a fucking actual stone.
And he found it.

Yeah, oh, Camir. I mean, he found Leomo Flaherty's fucking stone in that story.
And

I mean, it's amazing. Like, tell us about

tell us about going from a fucking short story by Leomo Flaherty that's out of print to finding the fucking stone.

It's my favourite stone and my favorite story. I found 44.
Remember, you said I found 24 the last time I was talking to you, yeah. 44 now.
So we're absolutely flying.

But that stone to me is my favourite one, and always will be. So I read that story like yourself.
I was just bowled over. I was bowled over.
I said, this story is everything.

It has birth, it is death, it is renewal, it is how you deal with old age. And this man talks about his greatest day in his life.

The greatest day in his life on the iron islands was picking up a stone right now we're talking about again culture

the cloud but it's that was like having a million stadium likes i was there he said right and we were there at the wedding and all the men there were like famed for their strength and beauty and the women said okay if you're all so strong go down and lift the test and stone and see you can lift it the highest and he lifted the highest on the day right and he said the shout from the islanders resounded through his head as an old man man that he could still remember it to this day.

It was the best day of his life. So I was like, what a beautiful story.
Imagine if that was real. So I just started researching lifting stones.
I knew there was a culture in Scotland.

I knew there was a culture in Iceland. This was the middle of lockdown, right in the middle of lockdown when everyone was going fucking mental anyway.

And you were, you were up to this point, you were lifting kettlebells. I was, I was lifting kettlebells.
I was competing. You have a world record for kettlebells.
I do.

I do have a world record that still stands, yeah.

I competed for Irelanders for six years.

And have a world endurance record for two hours non-stop lifting, two 16 kilo kettlebells. Clean and jerk, 634 reps unbroken.
So still stands. It's absolute lunacy.
No fucking injuries. Thank Christ.

Fair play. Yeah.
So that was that. But I said, I went looking for the story, right?

So I started researching lifting stones and I came across a man called Dr. Connor Heffernan, who I believe is here tonight, actually.

I was talking to him just this morning. And he was writing about lifting lifting stones and the possibility of them being there about 10 years previously.

Connor Heffernan was going, I think these stones might exist, but we, oh my God. So, he was saying, I think, I think that culture is here as well.
I just haven't got the time. He's a professor.

He's very busy. I haven't got the time to go looking for it, right? So, he's like, okay, we have Connor Heffernan saying they're there.
We have Lemo Flaherty talking about the story on Inish Moore.

So, I started researching Inish Moore. I went through old Reddit threads, and what did I find? Only a man called Peter Martin, who brought back the culture in Scotland single-handedly.

Look at what I'm doing here for Ireland. I was talking to a woman on Inishmore called Fiona.
And Fiona said, the stone that Limo Flaherty wrote about is an actual stone based on an actual tradition.

It's on the pathway from Fort Valon Dune to Courtnacapel. I believe it's still there, and I hope this helps somebody.
That was written 10 years ago. So I was like, fuck off.

You know what I mean? It's real. It's actually real.
So that weekend, I grabbed my mates into a camber van, up the Galway, across on the ferry to the Aron Islands.

Rent a bike, cycled to this place, and started looking for a stone. Now, if you've never been to the Iron Islands, right?

It's a rock made out of rocks, covered in rocks, right? It's just fucking rocks. Just about a half a million rocks.
So it's like, how am I going to know which rock is the rock? Right?

It doesn't say what size it is. It doesn't say what colour it is.
Actually, no, sorry, I'm saying it does say what colour it is. Oh, Flaherty mentions a pink.
He does.

What he said was it sparkled as the sunshine shone upon the particles of mika in the surface. So I was thinking, Mika sparkling, it's probably granite

because I've been doing a bit of research. So I'm walking down this pathway.
Now I have the story in my hand. I'm following like a pirate's adventure map, right?

The man walked down the pathway through an old stone style. There's the pathway.
There's the style. He comes into a field of boulders.
I'm in a field of boulders.

As he walks towards the beach, he sees the stone glistening or sparkling in the sunshine. I'm walking down blind by, and I swear to Christ, it's just grey limestone, sheets of grey limestone.

And in a little patch of grass by itself on the right-hand side is a round pink granite boulder standing out like a beacon. I'm like, that's it.
Now, I didn't know for certain that was it.

I took a guess, right?

Went over, tried to pick it up, couldn't pick it up. Too heavy, way too heavy.
Walking back, and I meet an old man giving a walk in tour with some Yanks. And he's like,

I said, Excuse me, do you know what about the lifting stone down there? Oh, shy, he said, the lifting stone. Oh, yeah, the Malon, Port Valon Dune, he said.
I was like, what?

The Malan, he said, that's the name of the stone, the Malon.

And it's in Port Valon Dune. Does Milan mean it has a little dip?

Malone means round granite boulder. Okay.
No.

Is that what it means? I was researching.

One word. One word.
So to know the way like the Finnish people might have like 50 words for snow. Yeah.
The Aaron Ireland people have 50 words for stone. Because what the fuck else is over?

They're only stones anyway. Yeah.
So you've mulan, muline, maulair, ulon, lack, cluck. I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
But this particular word means round granite boulder.

So Imar's like, yeah, that's it, he said. That's the stone that Limo Flaherty wrote about.
Sure, there's his house right there. And he just pointed at the house, and it was only 100 yards away.

So Limo Flaherty's looking out the window. What'll I write about today?

That's exactly it. He could see it from his house.
So the Limo Flaherty Stone is sitting on the pathway down by his house. And it was written about.
He wrote that in the story of the stone.

Then it just blew my mind. That's the Limo Flaherty Stone there.
There it is.

But even farther from that, like, that's fucking astounding. Like, isn't that like Jesus Christ?

But there's a second part to this that I haven't talked about. Go on.

It gets out that I found the stone.

The Limo Flaherty Society, who do Fela and the Flahertalk on Inishmore every year, phone me up and say, Look, we can't believe you found the stone of the story, the stone.

Would you come over to the Faila next year? This is like a year and a half ago.

Lift the stone for us in in front of the islanders and the Lemo Flarity Society.

I'm like, I haven't fucking picked this thing up yet. The last time I tried to lift it, I couldn't even get it off the ground, right? So we're like, right, I've got 16 months to train.

So we went back in the meantime and weighed it at 171 kilos exactly. And it's granite.

It is a tough, tough stone. It's round, very hard to grip.
So I put in 16 months of training. Did you try and make a replica stone at home? What I done was.
I have a stone.

Now, listen, this is just mad. I have a stone out the back garden that's flat.
It's 90 kilos even. And I have kettlebells, and we're dealing with my kettlebell training.

And I just stack them on the stone and pick it up off the ground. So I built that up.
I said, if I can build that up to 170 to 180 kilos,

then I'll be able to lift that stone up. Your neighbors were looking like, wow, he really cares about training to be a waiter.

Go ahead.

Sorry. You should see the back garden.
It's in shit. It's just a mud bit now, this this day.
But

I've done the training. I trained for 16 months and I went back to Inishmore.
Now, in the meantime,

that's a lot of pressure, man. Huge pressure.
I'd asked Connor to come over and give a talk, and I'd ask a strong man to come over and lift a stone just in case I couldn't do it.

An academic and a strong man. This is what my life has been.
Imagine getting arrested by the guards and going to the Iron Islands with an academic and a strong man to lift a stone.

You're either lifting a stone or making a gay porn.

Oh, sir, stops over. We fucking go, right?

Over we go. I didn't know where the fuck I was going with that now.
Sorry.

You were going over to the Aaron Islands, right? With an academic and a strong man and a boat. Now, the week before through bereavement, both of the guys had to cancel.

So now, oh, fuck, both of them cancelled and through very, very legitimate reasons. So I had to go over and now give a talk for 15 minutes in front of the McFlower society

and lift a fucking stone myself nation odd are coming over tg cattle were coming over two documentary teams are coming over there was four cameras four boom mics and about a hundred islanders there and the lima flaty society and this hasn't been lifted in like 200 fucking years it hasn't been lifted by anybody right

so no pressure lad so

I go over and I didn't even plan that. I just went over and I just talked like I'm talking now.
And it came across great. Everyone was delighted with it.

I gave about a five or ten minutes to chat about finding the stones and about Fiona on the island who started my whole journey. Okay.

Then a young lad came out and read the story of the stone at the stone itself, which was extremely emotional because you're sitting in the stone.

You become the story then, you know.

And then I was sitting there and it was drifting away, and it was like, right, David, you're going to lift it now.

So get up,

shake out your legs, and pick up 171 kilos of granite.

So I leaned over it and I was thinking about the story. I was thinking about the last time I came here, the first time I came here, nobody gave a shit about stonelifting.
Nobody cared.

It was the first stone I'd found. And now look at me.
I have 100 to 120 people here, four cameras. Stone lifting is back.
You better lift the fucking thing, Larry. Do you know what I mean?

So I blow out my breath, grab the stone, and I lift it up to my lap.

And the shout from the islanders, up to your fucking lap, up to my lap. And they said, if a man could lift it up to his lap, he was a champion, equal to the best.
So I could lift that stone to my lap.

And you,

wow.

A lot of training. Put on a lot of weight.

Oh, yeah, you did.

But,

like, okay, you mentioned at home, right, you've got your own stone and the kettlebells on it. But how do you prepare for the shape? See, I'm just out the back in the motor.
I'm not using chalk.

I'm just lifting this awkward stone. And there's kettlebells on it, which are awkward.
So it's all shaking and moving. That's why you're using the kettlebells.

And she's a bit silly. But it's like, no, you're this is a balancing job here.
You're fighting the whole thing as it's coming up. So it builds that stable ice drink.
It's brilliant.

Because you make do with what you have, you know.

So

the best part of this whole thing was I lifted that stone upright and I put it down, and everybody gave a big roar and was like, that's like the story.

And this woman walks up to me in a red jacket and sunglasses and she gives you a big hole and she's crying. I was like, are you okay?

David, you know the way you talked about Fiona, she said at the start. I'm Fiona, she said.

I'm Fiona O'Flaherty. You're talking about my great-grandfather.
Ah, go away.

You couldn't write it. You know what I mean? You couldn't write it.

So, Fiona O'Flaherty, Liam's great-granddaughter, set me on the path to look for that stone and consequently bring back the culture in Ireland. So, talk about a full circle moment.
Ah, go away, yeah.

Fucking hell.

And

because what I want to fucking

I love is bloody writing, but like you can't really go out and buy a Leonard Flaherty book. There's one little collection of shorts.
This is like

you might have studied fucking a short story called The Sniper in the Junior Cert.

That's the only kind of one Leomo Flaherty story that everybody knows, but he founded the Irish Communist Party.

Yeah, really fucking interesting person. Really interesting.
I don't know why.

Like, you just bring him up and not,

you want to be deep into your Irish literature for people to know who he is, but he's incredible.

I just like David Attenborough before David Attenborough as well, like his nature writing, fucking hell. But

what I find so

sad about it, too, is

that's how culture culture disappeared because of the fucking famine. Yeah, this was everywhere.
Like, something I compare it to is

I did a podcast a while back about the Jaffa Orange. Yes.
So, like,

Jaffa was a place in Palestine, and the orange industry was fucking huge. It was global, Palestinian, Jaffa, oranges.
And when it was fucking colonized by Israel, that history was wiped out.

And you're talking 1948 onwards there. And there were people in Palestine now.

And they...

So that the memory,

the state of Israel has done such a good job at erasing these people's history that they're struggling to find proof of these globally famed.

The Jaffa orange was the first ever orange to be bred that could be transported on ships. So before that, oranges were a real oranges were an extreme luxury.

Like, I'll tell you this: my fucking da, who was only born in the 1930s, right?

My da had an uncle, Jimmy, who'd managed to travel to fucking England, right? And Jimmy had eaten an orange, right?

And when they were kids, they, because it was Ireland Ireland was there was no fucking oranges in Ireland in the 1930s not down in West Cork they used to go to

they were like five six years of age and they'd go to their uncle Jimmy and go tell us what an orange is like tell us what it's like and he'd be trying to explain this fruit that they'd never seen until eventually eventually he just said he took out his pocket watch and said this is an orange this is an orange leave me alone and then he fell asleep on the chair

And they used to go up and crawl on him and try and eat his pocket watch.

Do you know what I mean? But that's because in the 1930s, the Jaffa Orange came about. I think it became widespread around the 1940s.

And it was this orange that was made in Palestine and bred for years and years and years of knowledge. And it could be shipped all around the world.

And you could put it onto ships and it wouldn't bruise. And that's the Jaffa Orange.
And it's a Palestinian invention. And that's been erased.

And the people in Palestine now, they had an old building. And they took the facade of it.

And underneath was this huge sign that was just just Palestinian oranges and all the destinations that it was being sent to, you know? So, yeah.

Like, cultural erasure does happen. It does.
Things that are completely widespread. If the culture is being

oppressed in any way, and has

like people have more important things going on in the famine than lifting stones or even writing about them. Yeah.
And that's really, really sad because if you think,

first off, you have to...

No, you're not not picking up a fucking 170 kilogram stone if you're dying but you can barely pick yourself up exactly you can't pick yourself up so you've got starvation then you've got

west of ireland fucking communities where you have a lot of these stones and people are just emigrating and in an entire generation it's just gone it's okay what i'm finding is there's you're only about one generation from this maybe two from this being gone and forgotten about altogether so i just hit this thank god at the at the right time like the right time would have been fucking 50 years ago ago.

But I just hit it now. And I'm after saving, like I said, 44 stories.
I can guarantee you there's another 44 at least out there that maybe we'll never find again.

Because when I was over at the Limo Flattery Stone, the first time, the man was like, I know the name of it, but I said there was an old lad living there. He's dead six months.
He was 92.

He knew everything about that stone. He knew the genealogy.
He knew the lineage of people lifting it. He knew everything about it.
But he's dead now. So the stories are gone.

So what I'm doing is I feel like I'm always part of the national folklore collection now. I'm going out.
I'm finding these stories, I'm writing them down.

Well, you're the paramilitary wing of the National Folklore Collection. That's the best description I've ever gotten.
So, thank you. You're out there, fucking, yeah.

You're out there, actually in the field, literally in the fucking field, doing it, you know.

So, what I love is it's back now, and it's not just me lifting it anymore because I'm finding that there's young lads out there who are kind of they kind of don't know what they're doing lately.

You know, the world has gone fucking mad, as we've all noticed, and

it's kind of a meaningless, shallow kind of society at the moment. Have you found that as well?

Social media.

The thing is, is

just around, so first off,

so the practice of like, I'd be shit at lifting the stones, right?

But I would like to be out giving it a crack just because of the mindfulness of it, the connecting with even something, something as mindful as studying a stone to the point where you have to wonder how you're going to lift it.

Like you do. Everything else goes away.
Like there's this.

I think it's Indigenous American, right? But the

cure.

No, St. Anthony.
Do you know the way sometimes praying to St. Anthony works? It does, actually.
What? It does. It does.

Like, I mean, I'm not into fucking religion, but if I really lose my Wallace, I'm going for a bit of St. Anthony, you know?

If I really, when I've since gotten an app called Tyle, so he can go fuck himself. But before I got Tyle,

this podcast is sponsored by Tyle. Imagine that.

Fuck St. Anthony.
But it used to work. If I lost something, I'd go for the St.
Anthony Prayer. Just like, oh, come on, I'm not into this shit.
But Anthony, where the fuck is my wallet, please?

And then it would show up.

And it was one of these things that would test me. I'd go, hold on a minute.
No, you asked St. Anthony for the wallet yesterday and it showed up.
And it happened before.

And it would test me and make me go, maybe. And then I'd researched into it.
And what actually happens is, is that

when you go for the St. Anthony Prayer, you're calming yourself to the point that, so like,

usually my wallet is somewhere fucking obvious, right? But when I'm going, shit, my wallet is gone. My wallet is fucking gone.

Now I'm catastrophizing because it's like, I can't leave the house with the wallet. I have a meeting, and if I leave without my wallet, I won't be able to pay for anything.
This is awful.

This is terrible. All I'm focusing on is all the awful things that can happen.
What that does, it raises my stress hormones. It gets me so anxious that I'm now not looking for things.
I'm focusing.

I'm looking for threats. And the wallet isn't very threatening.
I'm looking for a dinosaur or something that wants to eat me. But when I do the Saint Anthony, oh, Saint Anthony, please.

And I'm using the complexity and the imagination to imagine some cun called Anthony up in the clouds with wings.

The practice of doing that actually fucking calms me down just enough where I get to go, oh, there it was all along. And that's why the St.
Anthony thing works. But how the fuck did it get into this?

I don't know. Hold on a second.
I had a good point, man.

It was mindfulness about the stone. Mindfulness about the stone, right?

So that's a mindful thing through that. Another thing that I noticed recently around folklore and around

just a mindful connection with nature is that storm that we had last week was nuts, right?

So I was in home going, Jesus, that storm is awful. So I decided

you all know about the National Folklore Collection Dukas.ede.

So this wonderful website, Dukas.ie, and it just contains all of our collected folklore. So when I'm bored, I type a word into it.
So I type storms into Dukas.

And then I'd never seen so many fucking responses.

One particular storm called the Big Wind. The Big Wind, yeah.
Night of the Big Wind, 1849.

Fucking loads. I had never seen such a huge result of folklore, because I've typed in fucking UFOs, ghosts, everything.
I'll type it in to go, did someone mention it in folklore?

The night of the big wind, fucking everyone has a story.

And the most beautiful story I came across is, so the way the schools collection, this national folklore collection happened, is sometime around 1950, the government went to every school child in Ireland and said, go to your village, speak to a really old person, ask them shit and write it down, and we're going to save it.

So I think it was up in Cavan.

This girl went to a woman who was about ninety years of age and said, Do you remember the night of the big fucking wind?

And she's like, I don't, but my granny told me about it, and what she said was, The storm was so great

that we were inland in a forest, miles away from the sea.

But the storm was so great that the next day the villagers we all went up and we could lick sea salt off the bark of the tree now that's fucking beautiful because the thing is i'm thinking now

i have instagram i'm not licking a fucking tree seriously if a storm happens i'm not going oh god that storm was great i wonder what the trees taste like but if it's 1849 like you don't even you don't even have a light switch of course you're licking the trees what the fuck else are you gonna do so the people are up licking the trees going, it tastes like the sea.

It tastes like the sea.

And beautiful, mindful thing to notice. Do you know what I mean?

And

Bannocks anyway had a fucking point.

I had a fucking point.

Shit. That was good enough.
You got a good fact there about licking salt off fucking trees. But what I want to say is, did you ever type in stone into Ducas? Yeah.

You get 25,000 references to Stone and Dukas. So I'm Ducas, I'm assuming, is a place that you go to.
I'm conscious of time. Now, these people need a pint and a piss.
Right.

Let's let them have a pint and a piss before we start talking about folklore because it's too big. Sounds like a flat.

All right, you have a pint and a piss, and we'll be out in about 10 minutes, all right?

During the devil's ars, Gland, you handstand Anthony's.

I think now it's time for a little ocarina pause. We'll throw in some adverts.

I don't know what the adverts are. They're algorithmically generated.
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I've got my base ocarina so that you don't get startled or surprised by any loud adverts. Do you need to buy tires? You purchasing tires,

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That's my dog-friendly bass ocarina, which

smells like smoke. I'd love to know who gave it to me.
It's a beautiful piece of kit. It's almost like it's made out of stone.
It looks

like an instrument that's indigenous to some culture somewhere. It really is a beautiful piece.
Whoever sent me the bass ocarina, thank you.

It probably wasn't sent to me in the post, it would have been given to me at a gig. Please don't send me things in the post because I don't have an address and they end up in all sorts of places.

And definitely, definitely if you live in Canada, if you live in Canada, don't send me legal cannabis because it's illegal here and it just gets sent to my friend's pub.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast if this podcast brings you distraction mirth merriment entertainment whatever has you listening for this to this podcast please consider supporting the podcast directly this podcast is my full-time job this is how i earn a living this is literally my job and i pay all my bills i feed myself I do everything from the money that I earn from Patreon.

I rent out this office. If you support, if you subscribe on Patreon, you're literally paying for this podcast to get made.

You're paying for me to have the time to sit and research and focus on delivering this podcast each week.

This is listener funded and for eight years, for eight fucking years, I have been able to earn a living doing what I love. I've been able to earn a living being a writer, being a writer.

And this podcast is my novel. That's what this is.
And also, directly funding this podcast means that

we're independent here.

Advertisers have to do so at my discretion. I can tell advertisers to go fuck themselves.
No advertiser can come in here and tell me what to speak about.

They can't come near my content in any way whatsoever. I can say, no, you're not welcome.
Go away.

The most important thing for this podcast is that whatever I'm speaking about each week is what I'm genuinely passionate about. I'm not trying to think about how many listens I have.

I'm not trying to think about the podcast going viral or being popular or any of that shit. This is a 90-minute podcast.
Longer, it's probably gone into two hours.

This is a long podcast where I'm speaking to a man about lifting stones. I'm genuinely fascinated by what David Keown is doing.
I adore it. I love it.
I love speaking to him.

And as you can tell by him, he loves doing it you're just not going to get that on the radio or on television you're not going to get it because an advertiser will come in and it up so all i'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's it

and if you can't afford that don't worry about it listen for free you listen away for free no problem because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free so everybody gots it's the exact same podcast i get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And if you are contributing money to the Patreon,

don't do it through the fucking Patreon app on your iPhone because Apple will take 30%.

Go into the browser and access Patreon that way. Upcoming gigs.

Um this Friday I'm in Drahada in the Crescent Hall and I have a fucking cracking guest who I cannot wait to speak to in Drada this Friday.

There's a few tickets left for that in Drada so come along if you're near Drada. 28th of this month I'm up in Belfast at the Waterfront Theatre.
Very nearly sold out up there in fucking Belfast.

Then in March, Killarney. In the eye neck of a cracker of a guest for Killarney.
You don't want to miss that. I don't want to say who the guest is.
Then March. Cork Opera House on the 13th of March.

Don't have a guest for that yet. All suggestions welcome.
Who would you like me to speak to in Cork?

Then my Australia and New Zealand tour, right? That's all sold out in, is that April? That's the end of March and the start of April. That's completely sold out, right?

But Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth.

Please suggest

anyone you want me to speak to there. Any interesting people who you'd like me to have a chat with.
Blind by Boat Club on Instagram. Get into my DMs or comment when I post the fucking this episode.

you can comment underneath this who you'd like to have as a guest when I'm in Australia or any other gig. Then when I come back from Australia on the 23rd of April I'm in

the University Concert Hall in Limerick which is fucking nearly sold out. Nearly sold out.
I know that sounds nuts. You'd be thinking Jesus you'd set out Limerick.
Not really. My podcast is

definitely bigger outside of Limerick and even bigger outside of Ireland. About 80% of of my listeners are from outside of Ireland now.
And

I'd be worried about putting a gig on in Limerick about selling it out. But fucking hell, Limerick Concert Hall, which is the biggest Limerick gig I've ever done, that's pretty much sold out now.

So I'm looking forward to doing that. And then in June, my big giant tour of Scotland and England.

So that's Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich and Edinburgh is in there too.

I know that tour is in June which is a good few months away but that's really setting out quickly and some of those gigs are just about to sell out so please get your tickets to those and don't be disappointed in June if you're looking for tickets and you can get those tickets on fan.co.uk forward slash blindby like the podcast, subscribe to the podcast always on whatever app you're using, leave a comment, leave a review and most importantly importantly, tell a friend about the podcast.

I've stopped reminding, I haven't reminded people about this shit now it's in about a fucking year.

I'm shit at self-promotion and plugging gigs, but any creator you like, independent creator, podcaster, whatever, musician, one of the best things you can do is to simply tell a friend about that creator, just fucking WhatsApp him.

My podcast is pure word of mouth. I think that's where most of my listeners come from.
A friend told me. So let's get back to the chat with the magnificent David Keown.

The second half, the second half is really, really interesting of this chat. Something I'd like to chat about too would be the

dual purpose that some of these stones took on, which is, and you said it to me the last time, was

some lifting stones ended up being mass rocks during the time of the penal laws. So penal laws, sometime around the 1600s, when Catholicism became like illegal.

So Irish people had to, churches were gone, the monasteries were burnt down, and to practice the religion of Catholicism was completely illegal.

So, people had to go off into the fucking into the woods.

Yeah. And you, you, the priest who was illegal, like Cromwell sent over lads whose job was called priesthunter, which is a pretty cool name for a fucking job.

But literally, they hunted down and killed priests. He sent over two groups of people.
He sent priest hunters and wolf hunters. Cromwell was responsible for killing all the wolves in Ireland.

And the reason,

first off, the main thing that Cromwell did is he chopped down a lot of the forests to turn Ireland into a place where you could extract wealth.

Basically, cut the forests down and put loads of lambs, cows, whatever,

grow the fucking mutton here, grow the not grow, but raise, raise lambs, raise cows, and export it all to England. And that was Cromwell's plan.

Wolves were a bit of a problem if you're trying to turn this into lamb land.

So he sent over wolf hunters to kill all the wolves, but also

the Irish rebels at the time would hide in the forests and they used to use the wolf as a guerrilla warfare symbol.

You have these fearsome Irish animals that hide in the woods and strike and they would base themselves on these wolves. We're like the wolves fighting Cromwell's army.

So Cromwell was like, a psychological warfare, I'm going to kill all the wolves. And then he sent over priest hunters to kill all the priests.

So the priests used to have to give mass on lifting stones. The lifting stones stopped being things he lifted and they became now a mass rock.

And you found a couple of mass rocks that you're like, this is actually a lifting stone.

There was one I found up in Den, up in County Cavan, and it's called the Flags of Den is the name of the stone in Dukas.

If you type in D-E-N-N in the Dukas, you get about 25 stories about these particular stones in Cavan. So, this stone started off as a pagan cursing stone.

If anyone ever knows or heard of a cursing stone, a cursing stone was, and there's still loads of them around there, and the heaps of them.

If you could turn this stone anti-clockwise, or if you could flip it over, you could lay a cursor or pish og against someone you didn't like. So, like, voodoo, like you could curse someone, you know.

And did it require the strength? This stone does because it weighs 251 kilos.

That's awful. So, like, only like,

but imagine that only people like Joe Rogan and his friends are the only people who can put curses on people that's all you want to curse someone get the strong lad down to do it lift them sorry

but it started on now at witches or something not fucking Joe Rogan

it started off as that and then it went to like you said in the 16th and 17th century it became a mast stone So it became a mast stone then.

And what they've done was they carved a cross into the stone. And you said the last time, and it stuck with me, maybe that was to curse out the pagan gods.
Oh, that's what they did.

That was like consecration is a wonderful concept. Like,

if you look at what the church did,

the church, so pagan, pagan is like we use the word pagan because we know what it means, but it's actually

not the correct word. Pagan was anything that the church decided was evil and wicked.

And when the church was taking hold, not just in Ireland, but all over Europe, they had a big, big problem with these people who worship nature.

These people, what they wanted to do instead was to consecrate. And to consecrate, what you do is you say, fuck nature.

Nature is a creation of God in the Garden of Eden and it's there to be exploited. So what we must do is create man-made spaces.
And within these man-made, consecrated spaces, demons cannot enter.

So in Ireland, what you see is holy wells. That was the whole crack in Ireland: fucking holy wells everywhere.

And these people would visit holy wells because either they believed that they were a gateway to the other world, or also that the wells had curative properties, which a lot of them did, because a holy well is effectively mineral water from underneath the ground in a time when you can't buy baraka.

That's what it is. It's

what's underneath the earth, only loads of fucking minerals, and this thing brings it up. So a lot of wells in Ireland are shoal wells, so eye wells.

So there'd be a well, and there's stories about if you go here and you wash your eyes, it will heal your eyes. But if you test the water in these wells, there's a lot of zinc.

So, yes, it is actually good for your eyes. So, people, when they had conjunctivitis 600 years ago, they'd wash their eyes in the eye well, and they're fine, you know.
But, like,

it's did you do you find any stones that are also along wells?

Yes. Yes, um, there's a stone in County Kerry down in Carras Iveen that I found.
It was actually the first lifting stone found in County Kerry.

I know there has to be heaps in Kerry, but this is the only one I found so far. It's on this man, John Wharton's land.

And he said this stone used to be up right beside the holy well and was lifted at the holy well.

And actually, thinking about it, on Inish Ear, the smallest of the Arn Islands, the lifting stone used to be beside the holy well as well.

And

like again, it's one of these things where it's like, how do do you know how old this tradition is? You found a fucking stone that Ku Collin was lifting, didn't you? I found one at Fionn McCool.

Oh, Fun McCool. Yeah, I love this one.
It's up in C Finn. Now, what I love about Irish is, right? C Finn literally translates to C seat and Finn, Finn McCool.
So it's the seat of Finn McCool.

And there's eight of them at least in Ireland that I know of. There's one in Wicklow, there's one in Limerick, there's one in Cork, there's one in Waterford, there's one in Maharafeldt up in Derry.

So this used to be where Fionn McCool would sit and watch the hunt. So, he'd sit up on the top of the mountain and he'd watch Brannon Scholon gathering the deer for him.

So, this is where he used to be.

So, what I said was that from a Schleve Galleon, Fionn McCool had thrown this massive stone in a fit of rage and it landed up on top of, which is now called Sea Finn Hill, and it's called the Sea Finn Stone.

So, up on top of this hill, which is just this green mound, and there's just garse bushes and mud, there's no stones anywhere, there's this pillar stone the size of me up on top of this hill.

And the chieftains back in the day, the old Irish chieftains, you used to have to ascend that hilltop with the clan, put their hand on the stone, and announce the right to rule.

John O'Donovan wrote about that in his OS letters. So, this stone used to be a chieftain's coronation stone because Fiona McCool threw it.
It had magical properties.

Now, I got up there at six o'clock in the evening, blind by right, and the sunlight was shining through. George, like the golden hour, they call it.
And this stone is called a schist stone.

It's silver. The sunlight was hitting this stone and it was glowing amber.

I was like, this thing is fucking magic. It's a magical stone.
And they said

in O'Donovan's letter, said it was a great feat of strength for any man to lift this stone off the ground. We weighed it.
It weighs 257 kilos, right?

It's a pillar. It's like the size of me in a stone, right?

It's about five and a half foot tall. It's about a foot and a half tick each way.
So you have to bear hug it is it liftable yes i lifted it myself fuck off

wow

and i'll tell you why because i went up with the film crew right you didn't put anything on your arms there or oh my arms were tore off but my arms are just i'm just scars legs arms i mean fucking bits but that's the price you pay for it you know but uh i went up with a film crew and i tried three times to lift it on john

i tried and i was like trying to lift a mountain couldn't pick it up and do you want someone gives you that kind of sideways kind of I don't think he's going to do it.

And you see everybody kind of looking at each other. I went off and I kind of meditated.
And like I said, it was this time of the evening and I just sat there and meditated. Where are you?

You're on Fionmacool's hill. You're lifting Fion McCool's stone.

And I just felt this power coming through me. I went back, turned on that fucking camera.

Picked up the stone about three inches off the ground and put it back down again.

The people there were like, I can't believe that actually happened.

The price I paid for that was the next day my whole central nervous system shut down. I slept for 16 hours the next day on and off.

The day after that, I got really sick, and I was sick for two days after that. But I lifted the fucking thing, didn't I?

That's fucking mad.

And

when you got sick there, is that I've heard of a thing called squat flu, where if someone squats too much, the next day you can experience like flu-like symptoms.

It was like, yeah, just the the cns just shut down it was like you shouldn't have been able to lift a weight that big

like 257 like no it's an it's an it's over a quarter of a ton when you think about it you know so to be able to get that thing off the ground was

like you said i think i summoned the strength from somewhere else it was

your psychology

that did that purely mental because physically i tried three times and it wasn't happening psychologically it just happened i can't explain it how are you managing to do this without

hurting yourself yet like i mean like you had like i know i mean i'm not a young man i'm 45 years old i know i'm at the tail end of this right but i look after myself i train well i train three days a week but you must have savage form and you must look after nutrition you must try and look after sleep i sleep like a i hibernate i'm in bed at seven o'clock in the evening i'm useless and i sleep at eight and i'm not waking up till seven o'clock the next morning i'm like 11 to 12 hours sleep this time of year especially i'm absolutely desperate But the best recovery is nutrition and sleep.

It's the best recovery. So that's what I do.
And it's, it's, it's working. I work on a lot.
I used to teach yoga.

So I do a lot of mobility and stretching as well, which really helps, especially as we get older. It's like putting oil in the engine, you know.
So mobility, sleep, and eating.

And it seems to be working so far. And

do you ever worry about

your

what you're doing is very, very special. And when you are at a stone and you know that you're the first person to lift this, right? Yeah, there's a lot of emotion present.
Massive.

But emotion is also the thing that can make you make a foolish decision. How do you manage that? How do you the excitement or the pressure when you know

like that's where injuries come from? Injuries come from, I did a fucking stupid thing yesterday. Like the one I always think of is

like fucking Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee nearly ended his career and spent like

a year basically on his back because he was doing a particular type of exercise with a barbell called a good morning. And other ones.
Yeah.

So he did that and he was overconfident and he went that 10 of them with no fucking warm-up and nearly paralyzed himself.

And

even he was right about that. He was like, emotion did that to me.
I wasn't thinking. I just fucked.
I went at it and nearly paralyzed himself. How do you navigate that?

You know, I know my limit, right? I know my limit. The first, the only time I went beyond my limit was that, and I paid a heavy price first.
No, I could have paid a hell of a lot.

A much heavier price, yeah. But other than that, I think stones are self-regulating because it's not like a barbell where you can actually put on straps and lift something that you can't pick up.

Yeah, with a stone, if you can't grip the fucking thing, it's not coming up, you know. So, if you're not strong enough to grip it, if it's too heavy,

it's just not going to come up, and you can't do it. You can't injure yourself that way.
Are you making an argument for basically

where you have something like a barbell that's man-made. Yeah.

This natural, organic thing, you have to find a way first so it will actually keep you a little bit safe. Exactly.
It's like I said, stones are self-regulating, barbells aren't.

And especially when you use straps,

you're picking up something that's actually heavier than you can grip. Or even the straps that they'll have.
Oh, I wear those. I wear those.
Yeah. What's the point of this?

It just kind of keeps your insides from coming on the outsides. You know what I mean?

You're going to get a fucking prolapse in your rectum. No.

because you can't be. Because if you, if you think, like anything, if you think I can't do it, you're not going to fucking do it, are you?

If you think you can and you think you can't, you're right. So, like, if you're going to think that's going to come up, and there's no two ways about it, I'm just going to do it.
And then it does.

But

you always know if it's too heavy, I'm just not going to be able to lift it. How much of this is your

cognitive assessment of the stone? Your mind looking at it and going, I reckon, or can you straight away just try it around?

That's risky, that's risky straight away because I train on the beach, I train in Ben Vi Beach at Waterford. Do you ever just look at any old stone? All the time.
I'm stone mad. Just

I can't fucking look at a stone without thinking I want to pick that thing up. Anywhere I go, the wife is driven fucking crackling.

But I train on the beach and you know straight away because Ben Vi Beach is just like 500 stones on the beach. of every different weight you want.
It's the best natural gym ever and it's free.

So I go down to this beach twice a week and that's where I do my training.

But you know, from the look of a stone, I know that one is too big, I know that one is maybe, so I might warm up to that one, maybe try it, or maybe I mightn't and see how I'm feeling on the day.

But you get to the stage where you can actually just see it and go, yes or no. So, I mean, if I go to a lifting stone, and it's happened, I've gone to lifting the stones, and I can't lift them.

There's only two minds out of 44.

But

I looked at those two and went, nah, no way, it's too big.

Has there been been ever been a stone, right, where

you learned how to lift this by listening to stories from the locals?

I'm trying to think, yes, yes. I went to a stone in Karna, which is in West Galway, a stone called Kluckna Arkeen.
And the Arkeen is a cove, a closed cove, where a crump born would be an open cove.

So it's Kluckna Arkeen. So the men used to come off when they used to go to the islands, bringing out turf, and they'd bring seaweed back.

So the fishermen used to lift this stone as a test of strength. Now it's shaped, what I love about it, it's a fisherman's stone and it's shaped like a whale's back.

So it's kind of tapered at the end and it comes up and down like that, like a whale dipping under the water, which I think is beautiful because it's a fisherman's stone.

And where it is, it's along this wall and it's flowers and furs.

But where the stone is, all that's chopped away and the stone's like an egg in a nest just sitting there because the man who lifted that stone last looks after it doesn't let the weeds grow over it, which is like a veneration, which I absolutely love.

This stone, he said, is part of my family. My dad lifted it.
I lifted it. My granddad lifted it.
So he looks after the stone like a grave. Exactly.
There's a slash hook on the back of the wall.

And I said, when that starts getting overgrown, I just cut all that away.

So the stone is just sitting there in this beautiful big load of vegetation in front of a stone wall because he looks after it and minds it.

But he told me how to lift the stone because he was like, I was trying to lift it from the back.

I was trying to lift it in the middle, but because it's all the way it is at the top of it, because it's shape.

no, he said, you have to lift it almost to the very, very top, because I was just going wrong. What age was this man when he was talking to you? He's 76.

So he's talking about when I

could lift this stone. Oh, he came down.
He walked down. His house is only 200 yards away from this.
And he was calling his wife out. He was calling his friends out.

So there's about 20 people ended up coming along. Then the guards came.
I was like, oh, shit, they're going to tell me to stop. No, he said, I called them.
That's my friend.

So the guards came along and they stood out in the guard of the car and everyone just stood without without watching. So, and then he showed me how to lift it because I was lifting it wrong.

And it was just to get the wind under it because this stone, it's a huge stone. And I said, All you have to do is get the wind under it or get the gafe.
We lift it about three inches off the ground.

So, after about four or five attempts and him setting me right, it came up, you know, and they were fucking delighted. It was the best day they had in ages.

We're like, Mahon Far, you know, Mahon Bukal, anytime you're up here, call into the house, don't even knock on the fucking door, come in for a cup of tea. Thanks for carrying on the tradition.

Isn't that beautiful too?

Because,

and again, it's

thinking about tradition,

you would imagine that man would be like, fuck off, I lifted that. This is my legacy.
Yeah. It could have been.
But the thing is, that's...

That's a very selfish, capitalistic way of looking at things.

And that community might not have had that.

Like, there's a thing in Ireland called Mehel. It's meh, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, which is a collectivistic attitude where a community helps each other.
And it's, it's, you find it too in,

I did a podcast on it. Any culture where rice is grown, right? So, Korea, Japan, if rice is grown, you tend to have a culture that's a little bit more collectivistic.

And the reason is you can't fucking grow rice by yourself. If you're growing rice, the entire community needs to get involved, or else the rice isn't growing.

So, when you have that, you tend to have cultures that are a little bit more considerate of other people. It's you saw it during the fucking pandemic.

Countries where rice was being grown, they were just good at wearing masks. But then you go to the West for but I'm serious

when you had potatoes and you had wheat being grown, it's like you can grow that yourself. So, you tend to get a little bit more

selfishness.

And in Ireland, we had this metal thing and especially in communities around the west of ireland where everyone gets stuck in so that fella there you're not a threat no you're not taking anything from him you're passing you're he's passing that to me and i'm reaching out to the next person to pass it on to them do you have to go and clean it now though but that's the thing it's a five and a half hour fucking journey i think he's 200 yards away he can do that himself

But you were talking about the metal. Was the metal done around kind of harvest time then? Was it?

Does anyone know about Mel? I probably shouldn't ask a room of fucking 1,200 people that.

Wow.

Was it TARF? Was this?

TARF. TARF.
So it's something that required a community effort. And then this translated into an attitude of kindness.

Because I was thinking, like,

the reason I asked for Harvest was there's a stone attached to the Harvest Festival of Lunasa up in County Tyrone. It was only lifted once a year on the Feast of Lou.

So that goes, you think like Lunasa, you think Chalton games, you think thousands of years that this stone has been lifted once a year. They used to have the games, the local games.

It's located on top of a hill called Scalp Hill. So the whole village would come up on this day.
They'd have dancing, singing, they'd have feats of strength.

But the biggest thing of the day was who could lift the scalp stone, the highest, right?

We weighed a scalp stone at 127 kilos there recently. But I said, no one has lifted this in living memory.
They heard me on your podcast.

That day, that Wednesday, when the podcast came out, I got a phone call from this guy called, I think it was Daniel McCork. Come up, he said, I got a great story for you.

So up he went and he told me all about this harvest festival, the Feast of Lou. I went into the coffee shop to meet him and the coffee shop was packed, right?

Packed with people. So he said, geez, this place is doing some business on a Saturday, like, right?

So it's like, we got to chatting, but he came in and he was like, I said, geez, there's some other people here. here, yeah, they're all here to see you.
He said, This is the fella.

So they're all like, Oh, yeah,

you're the fella doing the stones, and you were on blind. But I said, I was, yeah, can we come up and watch you lift it?

Yeah, so all the half the fucking villagers are coming up the side of the hill to watch me lift this stone because it hadn't been lifted in living memory.

And this old lad, the farmer, was there, so I remember my granddad telling me about men lifting the stone. He said, Wow, but he said, I'd never seen it lifted.

So he, this one was in his 80s, he's he owns the land. So he came up and

I lifted that stone up. And what I love about it, what I love about it, right?

To lift the stone, it was called you had to smige. He said, you have to smige the stone, he said.
Smige means chin it, right? You have to pick the stone up and touch it off your chin.

Now he said, no one has spoken Irish in this place for over 100 years, but the land remembers the Irish through the stone. Oh, fuck me.
Isn't that unbelievable? So if you could. That's your condition.

That's the old. There you go.
And it's still alive. And the language is still there through it.
So I picked that stone up up to my chin and they were absolutely fucking delighted.

And now I've been told by Daniel that there's people going there every week to go lift that stone now.

And all it took was someone like a mad fucking lunatic like me going finding these things just to light the touch paper.

And now

every week, I'm getting 15, 20 photographs, videos of men and women going lifting these stones every week. The culture is back.
It's back and it's flying.

Because

I remember last time you were like, Is there anyone different from the Stones Ireland anymore? And I said, No, but no, I can't say that anymore. Now it's like, Yeah, they are, and they're loving it.

And something I said backstage that I want to talk to about out here was:

so,

it hasn't gone mainstream yet

when Brezi starts talking about it.

I haven't talked,

you're fucking talking about it.

i know but i'm surprised i know but brezi's got a different ear brezi has a different ear i've got i don't think any fucking ncad students are going to go up and start lifting the fucking stone but the people who listen to brezi will but at some point right it's it's competitive you know what i mean it's competitive it's simple it's traditional this is going to go fucking mainstream with

The type of people who are going to the fucking, it's influencers. Influencers, give it two fucking fucking years.

Influencers in Ireland, they're going to be doing this and they're going to peeky blinders it.

Okay?

But the thing is,

I don't think it should be policed. As in the temptation is to go, ah, don't do it like that.

No, no, don't do it. Don't do it like that.

You have to let it... You have to let it be organic.

If they want to fucking do it and they want to Instagram it, and they want to do it with a fucking South Dublin accent, fucking, that's the culture. You leave it go.

The beauty of Irish culture, whether it be fucking writing or music, it's not conservative. You don't come in and say you're doing it wrong.

Like I had a wonderful storyteller on the podcast, Claire Murphy was her name, and she's over in England. She's a professional storyteller.

And one of the things about, that's unique about Irish storytelling, no one comes in and says, shut the fuck up, you told that story wrong. No.

We come from an oral culture. You tell the story whatever way works for the audience, whatever feels right in the moment.

And the the second you start coming in and going, there's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this,

it's now it's conservative. Now, I don't care about someone Instagramming or speaking in a South Dublin accent.
If that's what they want to do, that's grand.

The only thing I'm worried about is lift the stones with respect. Lift them with respect.

If they were only lifted to the chest, lift them to the chest. Don't be putting them up on your shoulder.

Don't be trying to push them up over your head and let them drop and fall down and break because you're breaking a national monument. Lift them with respect, and after that, lift them anyway.

But I'm assuming, too, like you're saying there, lift it with respect, right?

If this, if part of the story of this stone doesn't say put it above your head, there's probably a reason because people have been doing this for 500 years.

So, you mean that there's a story to, like you were talking about with the fellow who came down and said, You have to lift it this way. Yeah,

people have figured this out before, so don't try and do any new shit because it might you might injure yourself or fuck the stone up exactly exactly there's that part of it and like you just don't want to break it it happened in scotland that that a guy came over from canada and a stone was meant to be lifted to his just to the chest he tried to throw it up on his shoulder it fell off the back split off a stone on the ground behind him and it was called uh i can't forget i can't remember the name now but it was one of the wallace i think it was the wallace putting stone it was called so it had massive history attached to it and then it's broken and it's fucked just gone forever So it's just, I want people, when they're doing this, because I know it'll get big and it's getting bigger.

And none of these stones are are protected. You can just like, you know what I mean? No, you can just rock up and do it.
Yeah. You know, but it's just bring a crash pad if you can.
Bring a few

towels. Generally, it's on grass, so you're okay.
But just be mindful because they're almost like me babies now. You know what I mean?

And

I have to, like,

someone tried to lift one of these stones when they were drunk.

100%.

Because loads of them are outside pubs.

Really? There's one in Kenny called the bulk, right? The stone is called the bulk. The bulk.

What a name, Brad. It's brilliant.
It's right outside the pub on a little roundabout. There's a tree there and a roundabout and there's stones around it.

And this stone is kind of set into the roundabout. But what used to happen was the men had come out of it, because the church is there, right? They'd come out of the church.
They'd go to the pub.

They'd have about five or six bottles. Then it'd be like, I'm going to lift a fucking stone.
No, you're not. Yes, I fucking am.

He'd come out and a fella try and lift a stone and he could fuck himself up because he's full of bottles, right?

So, what happened was they actually put the stone and pointed it into the roundabout so no one could lift it because lads were just getting too drunk and rowdy.

So, thankfully, I got that thing taken out by the lad who pinted it, actually, his son. And he said, I'll let you lift it under supervision,

not full of bottles. I was like, well, that makes a lot of sense.

But what this stone's mission was, and it's the only one I earned, you have to pick that stone up to to your chest and walk it around the tree. And however far you got was the best, right?

So, one man was meant to have lifted it and walked it around the tree three times. Now, the stone is 100 and it's 125 kilos.
It's kind of like the Hussefell stone up in Iceland.

Um, I walked around the gold pen. If you could give a mention of other cultures, too, because this was Scotland, were pretty shit out at this, and up around Iceland, and also the Basque region, too.

Oh, hugely so. The Basque are they still do stone lifting festivals multiple times a year, But the Irish came from the Basque region.
We have to have. I mean,

the Basque region, you have, it's in Wales. There's a guy called Caron Stodd who's starting to find it now in England as well in North England.
It's massive in Scotland.

You have the clockwid fur, the manhood stones. They're a little bit lighter, but it was boys of 14 to 16-year-old had to lift a stone to become a man.
I love that. But I'm assuming, too,

like Stonehenge, right? In England. So someone was lifting stones.

How the fuck did that get up there? Exactly.

But like,

this was very widespread, I'm imagining.

Because the other thing you said to me, too, is that there was also a very practical reason for this, which was like, if you look at the West of Ireland, there's all these stone walls.

Someone had to bloody build them. Oh, totally.
This was like your job interview.

The stone mason's test on Inish Man was the job interview. If you could pick that stone up and put it on the wall,

you're strong enough to be a mason.

And what is that stone like? It's a granite stone against a pink granite stone again.

And

you have to be able to put it up onto this dry stone wall. I went out there recently and brought a tour out there.
We had 18 men went out.

And I think all of us, bar two or three, done that. Is it a difficult stone? Well,

it's one of the lighter ones, but it's still like the lighter ones in Ireland is 125 kilos. It's still big, you know?

And you're in the grass and it's pissing rain because it's in its man. So up it goes onto the wall and then you could learn to be a mason.

There's wonderful ones over in Iceland called the Driftvik stones, which were the fisherman's stones. There were four stones.
If you could lift, say, the second stone was like 54 kilos.

If you could lift that, you got a quarter of a share of the catch.

If you could lift the second biggest stone called the half starker, half strong, you're a half strong man, you could get half the catch.

But if you could lift a full storker, full strong, you're a full strong man at 154 kilos, then you get a full share of the catch.

So everyone goes out on the bows, they cast the nets, they catch a lot of fish, and then the amount of fish you get depends on how well you could lift the fucking stone. Yes, because you're strong.

So, the stronger man was put in the middle of the boat because they need more fish. He needs more fish, and he's stronger oars.
He's put in the middle of the boat. There's always reasons.

There you go. Oh, would you go away?

So, how are you going to decide on a boat who's the straight? Well, if he can lift that stone, then he rode better than you. So, shut up, he's getting more fish.
Exactly. What are you going to do?

That's brilliant.

So, there's all of these dissamples. This sounded unfair, but now it's like, no, this is the way of saying

he's walking harder because he's in the middle.

But your man could be conserving his energy on the ball gun. I'm doing fuck all, man.
I'm saving my energy for that stone.

I'm sure there's always ways around everything. But yeah, so like there were job interviews, there were rites of passage.
You know, the same thing

in Sweden. Yeah, the farm man hands testing stone.
So whatever stone you could lift, you got more money.

So it was just these in these simpler times, without any mechanical aids, it was a way to show your power. And your strength was your worth.

And are you finding any stories in different countries like that that make you go, wow, that's cool in Iceland? I wonder that we have that here.

Or did it make you have little theories? Definitely, because that stonemasons testing stone, I was like, because I knew about the stones in Dritvik and I was like, surely we have that here.

Surely, but the stone wall building, we have to have that here as well.

And sure enough, when I went over to Inishman, and just through pure fluke by being on the boat I'd heard there was a stone on Enishman I didn't have a fucking clue where it was I was on the boat I asked the cabin crew lads this is a weird question right I'm looking for a stone a lifting stone on English man

we don't know he said but I see the lad asleep down the back

with a dog across his lap me Hall yeah we call him the king of the island Go down and ask the king, he said, and he'll know. So I went down on a, we see he was sound asleep.

I said I'm not waking him up. So the cam fella comes down and gives him a puck in the arm.
Me all,

thought, you know, you man here looking for the stone. Oh, I know where that is.
He said, yeah. Sure, I'll give you a lift.

So out I hop, off the boat, get into this strange man's car.

Don't do this at home, kids.

And he takes me to this lifting stone. And he's like, This is the stone that the stonemasons used to lift.
And he gave me the whole story. And it was just pure fluke that I met this guy in

the ferry going over. You know what I mean? But what I find is it's just all of these flukes and happenstances and lucky breaks.
And

it just seems to be just flowing and flowing and flowing. Because when I was on Inish Moor, we went to a holy well, a lifting well.
The very first stone I found after that, I was cycling back.

And I picked up this little blue stone and I put it on top of the well. And I asked the lands permission.

This sounds fucking weird, but I said, Look, I want to bring this culture back and find more of these living stones. Can you please help me?

Two days later, I got a call about Inish Man,

and then it's just been 44 found from a tradition that was dead. So I really feel that small act of humility and asking permission has helped kind of guide me along the way, if that makes sense.

And your job is you, you, you

that's unbelievable,

You have a shop.

I don't have a shop. I work in a shop.
So how do you manage to lift stones around working in the shop? Well, I'm lifting lumps of fucking timber and buckets of paint all day long.

So that kind of helps, I suppose, a bit. But I'm working a 40-hour week.
So I'm only off two days a week.

So as a part-time hobby, I've managed to bring back an entire lost culture of strength on this fucking island. I mean, fucking fair play.
You know what I mean?

So imagine what I could fucking do if I was doing this for a living. That's what I'm saying.

Because it's the type of thing that,

like, clearly you're into stones. Like,

you should be able to go. My job is to be the person who finds and lifts the fucking stone.
I'd fucking love it. Has anybody contacted you from...

Like, the other thing too, which pisses me off, right? You're doing work that's of national fucking importance. Yeah.
Do you know what I mean?

Has anyone from the museums or anyone been in contact with you to find out you're doing work that should be paid? I'd love that, to be honest. It'd be my dream

to just say, look, have you ever considered doing it as a master's or a PhD? I was thinking practice-based. I was looking about actually Irish mythology.

Oh, down in UCC. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Fucking hell.
I was looking at that. But practice-based, I don't, is that an MA or an MSc? It's an MA.

So if you do an MA, you could probably do it as a practice-based MA. Cool.
You can do. All you got to do is lift the stones and then just write a few thousand words about it.

Oh, I mean, like, that's just

the best day ever for me with me to go out. Because that's what I've done.
I've written the book on this.

I've actually, we were talking, and you were like, Dave, I want to give you some advice on writing a book.

I'm almost finished writing the book, and Bloomsbury Publishing are taking it on. So I want to thank you for

helping me write that. I'm delighted.
I'm actually, because for me, it's about getting the stories out there.

That's all I want to do. I've become kind of de facto, getting a little bit of fame and notoriety through this as well, which is weird because I still work in a fucking shop, you know.

Lads come in, like just 20 people buying paint, and then one of them's saying, are you Indiana Stones? I said, yeah.

Mix me a bucket of magnolia, will you? You know what I mean? But it's weird. It's a weird double life, you know.
During the week, I'm just this normal lad. Weekend, I could be talking to you.

I could be talking to fucking Tommy Tiernan. I could be talking to anybody.
So it's I know how it is, man. I have a bag in my head.

It's been mentally weird to juggle, to be honest with you.

But I would just love to be given free reign to go do this and talk to the people and just go to the places and have chats and find stories and find stones.

Because, like I said, 44 and two and a half years part-time. Imagine what you could do.
Oh, completely. Completely.

Just to have some infrastructure behind it to be recording it. Yeah.
Do you know what i mean and the the the thing is too

you're in a race against time in a sense because

there's going to be older people and they're going to die with knowledge of stones yeah like that's really what you're up against that's what you like you asked some of the people speaking to are very old oh look there's nobody who has lifted these stones is under 70.

jesus so you're running out of time like you said you're at the tail end of this in another 10 years it would have been gone entirely and it would have never been talked about again do you have any like we spoke about the impact of the famine okay but it clearly it didn't disappear completely no there was something happening maybe 60 70 years ago more

when do you think it really disappeared well

like i said we we could hammer on the english a lot and they deserve it right

but um

i think industrialization modernization, the widening of roads, especially the tarmacing of the roads, because a lot of these stones were a crossroads. Loads.

I've only found one crossroad stone, and I've read about 35 stories in Dukas of crossroad stones.

But because they were just widening the roads, they'd either break the stone up and put it into the road or fuck it over a hedge and just forgotten. Oh my God.
You know, so because of where they were.

So that's why I'm not finding stories all over Ireland, but 90% of the stones are middle of Ireland going west, purely because of the landscape and because of the land itself.

You've this more arable, fertile land over here, it's just going to be turned into farmland. And all of these old stones and stories are just going to get fucked away.

Whereas the stories over here, it's just another stone in the field of stones. So it's generally left alone, you know? That's amazing.

Fucking hell.

Just thinking there about the roads.

Because

there's a small positive with the roads in Ireland, which is

so obviously you're looking for stones. Yeah.
there's other people looking for forests.

Like, Ireland was once a fucking forest. It's hard to believe we were once a rainforest.
You can see it in the fucking names: Dera. Derry means loads of fucking oak.
Yeah, Mayo means plain of you.

We had lots of trees, and they're gone. And

people who are trying to grow broadly forest in Ireland, like proper ancient Irish forest for biodiversity, like Mancon.

Mancon goes up and down looking, where can I find a little patch of forest so that I can. Because the import, the important, you can't just fucking plant trees.

You can't just guess Irish oak and Irish yew and plant this.

You kind of need the mycelium that's in the soil as well. It's not just a fucking tree.
So you have to try and find a little untouched bit of ancient forest. There's kind of fuck all.

There's a good bit down in Kilkenny. Yeah.
But where they're finding legit old fucking forest is in the hedgerows of roads.

The areas beside beside roads, just a foot that no one has bothered their fucking hole to go near. If you go looking in there, it's like, oh, this could be maybe 900 years old.

I found one in Ireland, did you? Yeah.

Beside a hotel called the Absolute Spa.

Yeah, I did a whole pocket, man.

So listen, during the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, right?

I was researching

during the Celtic Tiger in Ireland with had a few nightclubs, right? And there were so many nightclubs. Like, fucking Jordan.
Jordan had her hen party in Limerick.

That's some fucking boss. It's hard to say.

Dublin with your Lewis.

You know, Jordan, man, she had a fucking hen party in Limerick in 2002.

But during the Celtic Tiger, you remember the nightclubs. I do, bye.
Every fucking city had a huge nightclub. Heaps.
And we had about three or four proper nightclubs in Limerick.

And as a result of this, we needed a fancy hotel. So Absolute Hotels, who are a big international chain, decided, let's build a hotel in Limerick.
It's going to have a spa in it as well.

So they built the new Celtic Tiger Hotel and put up the big fucking sign and it says Absolute Spa.

And Limerick couldn't handle it.

Limerick would just, no, no, no,

no.

We're not having a fucking hotel called the Absolute Spa.

So

it was there for, I'd say, for about two weeks. And they just, we're so sorry, Lily.
So they took down the spa bit. So now it's just the absolute hotel.
But right across the way from the absolute.

So I was there. I was looking for ancient cholera graves.

What I do is. You understand? Don't worry.
Yeah.

I was following the old, I love old city walls.

So the thing is with ancient walls of any city, you always find cool cool shit outside the walls because if anything happened, they were like, get it the fuck out.

So anytime there was a plague, cholera in particular, like this would decimate everything inside the, so they got the bodies and they fucked them over the walls.

So I was tracing old cholera graves by doing the old walls of Limerick and it brought me to the absolute spa and I looked up and had a chuckle and then I just looked across.

And there's this tiny strange little island that no one has ever been near, nothing's been built on. And I'm just like, this looks so fucking weird.

So I took photographs of it and sent the photographs to someone who knows what ancient Irish forests look like. And there it is, just a tiny little patch.

And this led me then to what I saw in the middle of it was a piece of fucking giant hogweed. Oh, that dirty hogweed.
Yeah, the stuff that can blind you. Yeah.

But it led me to a fucking interesting theory. So

another website that I love, you've got Ducas.ie for the folklore, but there's another one called biodiversity.ie

and what biodiversity.ie is you can type in fucking anything. You can type in fox, wolf, daisy, and it will show you on a map of Ireland every time one of these things has been seen.

Like when you type in wolf into this map, it's fascinating because first off, the last sighting of wolves in Ireland was sometime around, I think it was 1709.

But anytime there's a sighting of wolves on this map, you click on it and it shows you where someone wrote down. And it's all about massacres.
So you can trace Irish colonization.

You've got very, very old sightings of wolves. And then as the Brits colonise,

this town was massacred. Some wolves were sighted eating corpses when people thought the wolves were gone because they were hidden away.

And that was fascinating to me because we're seeing this pattern. But then I went looking for...
giant hogweed. So giant hogweed,

it's massive.

If you touch touch it, it will blind you. It's very, very dangerous, incredibly dangerous.

If you get it on your skin, if sunlight hits your skin, you'll get blisters for the rest of your fucking life. Anytime, really, really dangerous.

And I went looking at the map because this piece of hogweed was on the ancient forest. I was taking it fucking personally because I'm like, get the fuck out.
It's ancient forest.

So I told Limerick County Council and I said, get some onto a boat and get rid of that hogweed. So they did.

But then when I went looking at the maps of the hogweed all throughout Ireland, I looked at a map of the Protestant colonization of Ireland. It's the fucking exact same.

So I started calling giant hogweed Protestant footsteps. Love it.
It's because

there's some indigenous American tribes. So we have...

What's the fucking yellow shit that makes you piss? The yellow flower. Dandelions.
Dandelions. Yeah.

So dandelions all over europe right they're what they're all over fucking europe uh they're brilliant for the fucking kidneys they're yellow we call them pissy beds everywhere around europe they're called pissy beds because dandelion tea is good for the kidneys but they don't grow in america and when the europeans came to america and were genociding the fucking indigenous people

As soon as indigenous people saw dandelions,

this is not a good plant. The white man is near.
So they started to call dandelions white man's footsteps. That's amazing.

So when I saw the hogweed and it matched Protestant colonization, I started calling it Protestant footsteps. But it's so it's

the Protestants didn't bring it over. It's a marker of wealth.
So what happened with giant hogweed is that

the Protestants colonized around 15, 1600s. But everywhere they colonized, they had quite a bit of money and estates.

So in the Victorian times, they brought this hogweed over from Afghanistan because it looked beautiful. But then they put it on their lands because they had the money.

And there, that's how you see it. But then they figured out, oh, this thing is actually great for keeping people away.
So instead of building a fence, let's do chemical warfare. Fucking hell.

But another, it led me on to a fucking mad one.

Have you heard of

what's it called? Is it Japanese knotweed? What's that?

It is Japanese knotweed, yeah. This one I call Thatcher and Reagan's footsteps.

This is fucking fascinating. I want to do a documentary on this.

So, Japanese knotweed, right, which is destroying the place.

It's in Ireland, it's in America, it's in Britain, it's mad dangerous because if it's near your property, you can actually not get house insurance because it's so resilient, it can fuck up the foundations of your house and it grows everywhere, right?

But here's the thing: Japanese knotweed only started becoming an invasive species and a serious problem from about the 1970s onwards, right? Everywhere in the Western world.

Japanese knotweed, it's indigenous to Japan and it grows near volcanoes. So if you think of a fucking volcano, a volcano is...

it takes heavy metals from down deep into the earth and spits them up into fire. And then all around the volcano, you have like lead and all these toxic metals.

But Japanese knotweed grew in the toxic metallic soils of volcanoes. It loves it.
That's what it does. People in Japan eat it.

But what did Reagan and Patcher do? They shut down the mines, they shut down all industry.

So everywhere, you look at fucking New Jersey, you look at the east end of London where they had the Olympics.

This is where Japanese knotweed is growing. Japanese knotweed is confusing former industrial areas where you used to have jobs and you used to have industry.

Japanese knotweed is growing there because the soil is so toxic. So it's Reagan and Thatcher's footsteps.
I love your brain. I love your brain, to be honest.
Thank you. It's called autism.

But

yeah, it's nuts. But the solution, I think, with Japanese knotweed is...

It's very, very tasty, apparently. Apparently, it's an incredibly tasty version of rhubarb.
And also,

it's actually quite good at cleaning the soil. So, if there is, it's a cunt.
Like, if you get Japanese knotweed, you're not getting rid of it.

Like, if you've got to get professionals in, but it does clean toxic metals from the soil, you know? How the fuck did the beginning of this? I don't know.

Do you know what? You were telling me backstage, right? Because you were saying that you've got kids, right? Yes. And you were saying your oldest is 19.
That's right.

And like, we all remember being 19, right? When you're 19, your dad's not cool.

I'm the most uncool person ever. I lift stones.
What the fuck are you doing? You're a weirdo.

But you told me he wants to be a microbiologist. He does.
So when he gets into microbiology, then he's going to start getting interested in stones. I hope so.

Well, stones and, like I said, the Holy Wells. The minerals.
They're interested in the microbiologists are interested in the minerals. And then there's another thing.

Man Khan told me about it last week. I didn't research it properly, but

there's certain soils around Holy Wells, and the soil itself has got curative properties as a result of some bacteria that's living in the soils. I've come across on Duke is a good bit as well.

Go away, really? Yeah, and the ballon stones. The ballon stones are curative properties as well.
What's the ballonstone?

So a ballonstone is a stone with a depression in the top of it, the rainwater gathers in. So the actual minerals in the stone itself have curative properties, and that seeps into the stone.

Are some lifting stones also balanced ones? There was only one, there was one I found, but I mean, I don't want people out there lifting ballonstones. They're not meant to be lifted.

They're national monuments. It's like, don't fucking lift them.
Just go and have a look at them. But there was one on Inish Boffen that was a balanced stone that was lifted.

That was the one I said was lifted onto the altar. Remember that one? Oh, fuck yeah.

Tell us about that. So it was like in a monastery.
There's an old monastery on Inish Boffen, and it's a ruin. But there's this big balon stone sitting in front of a Catholic altar.

And the lad over there, Tommy Bourk, who is an archaeologist and a historian, he was like, the lift was you had to lift this, what he called a pagan ballon stone, which was like a conduit to deities for thousands of years, up onto the Catholic altar.

They're looking through the window back at Cropatrick on the other side of the sea. And he said,

It's a very, very special area. Now, it blew my mind.
So, like, pagan stone, Catholic altar, Croquet Patrick, you know.

And then I was thinking, Cropatrick wasn't always called Cropatrick, it was called Crocrom, wasn't it?

And Crom was like an evil god of the sea. Yeah, Croak, Exactly, it was crom's crom's mountain.

So, like, I don't know how far back this stuff goes, but just the fact that it was pagan Catholic, which say like must be fucking pre-Christian.

Anywhere, if you, if you see,

if there's a fucking church and there's a well nearby, chances are it was pre-Christian. Like, I even spoke about this.
Did you see the Cherry Bridge up in Drumkondra? No, no.

So, up in Drumkondra, which is that's up up beyond the river in the north there.

During the fucking big freeze that happened a couple of weeks ago,

someone just came across a couple of cherry tomatoes on a bridge in Drumcondra, took a video of it, and then people started to respond to these cherry tomatoes by bringing their own cherry tomatoes.

And then they put it on Google as a shrine.

You had this pop-up pagan tomato shrine that people were bringing votive offerings to and I loved it because like I'm overthinking it, but it felt so fucking Irish, yeah, you know.

But then, as soon as I saw the fucking tomato bridge in Drumcondra, I started going, I wonder, are there any holy wells nearby? And there fucking is three minutes up the road in Drumcondra. Go away.

Because Drumcondra is a fucking housing estate. Yeah, but it is.

There was a holy well there called St. Catherine's Well.
And do you know how they know it was pre-Christian?

Because

it's a curative well that cures coughs, but it only works when you drink the water from a human skull.

So up and drum, but this thing could be thousands of fucking years old because the thing with Drumcondra, there were five roads that led out of Tara, and Drumchandra was on one of them.

So there's this well there, and the well, a bit like the stones, the well actually went missing for like 200 years. People had just forgotten about it.

And then they built houses on it, and then someone was there sitting down eating their breakfast in their kitchen. And just, what the fuck?

So the fucking well started coming up in their kitchen like 200 years ago. And now they've covered it away now.
So when you go to St.

Catherine's Well now, it's just someone's house and there's a little plaque that says there was once a well here. But that well, that's pagan.

If you want that well to work, you drink it from a human skull.

And I just love that here you have this thing thousands of years old and now people are doing this cherry fucking tomato votive bridge just five minutes down the road. Those things are connected.

It's in the culture. It comes out, like I said, it comes out in cycles.
Yeah. Doesn't it?

It's kind of a cyclical nature. And what I'm finding as well is that there's this whole kind of Telluric, like from the earth upswelling of love for Irish culture coming back now.

I don't know if you're all feeling that. I know I certainly am.
People want to get attached again to the old cultures, to the language, to the land itself.

And I just think it's fucking great, you know, because I love Ireland. I love being Irish, unashamedly, love it.
I love our landscape, I love our language, I love our cultures.

And just to see everybody just, even younger people now, just grabbing a hold of that and running with it.

But I think it's important too that we have to, like, if you ask a German person to talk about German folklore or culture, they'll be like, No.

And it's like, why not? And it's like, because of what the Nazis did to us, like, the Nazis took German folklore and culture and fucking ruined it and turned it into this racist thing.

You know what I mean? So we have to.

What I always do when I fucking adore Irish folklore, Irish mythology, I go at it from a position of biodiversity. And what I love about that is it doesn't matter who the fuck is on this land.

It's about the land. It doesn't matter where you're from.
These are stories to do with the fucking land and the landscape. And

stones are the same way. Afghanistan.
And if you're here on this fucking land, then the culture is yours. Do you know what I mean? Because it's about biodiversity.
Well, it's the same thing.

It's the same thing with the stones. That's what I love about them.
They're the great equalizer. The stone doesn't give a fuck who you are.

The stone don't give a fuck if you're a man of women. We don't care where you're from, as long as you can pick it up.
It's the great, that's what I love about it.

It's the simple beauty to it, you know.

I think it's half 10, it's a Monday night. These people have got beds to go to.
I'm going to open up the floor for some audience questions. Can we bring the house lights up slightly?

Hello, I'm from Scotland, so I'm really interested in what's your favourite story of a stone from Scotland, and what's your favourite stone that you've visited in Scotland?

My favourite story of a stone has gotten is the Fina Stone.

So the Fina Stone, to become a member of the Fina in Scotland, you have to be able to lift the Fina Stone, the chest, walk at the length of your kilt, which is 10 feet, and put it onto a plinth.

You also have to be able to run under a sword held at chest height without breaking stride. And you have to be able to jump, broad jump the length of your kilt.
So your agility, strength and balance.

But the Fina Stone is there in Glen Lyon in Scotland. It's a beautiful, beautiful place.
And you can go lift it. Anyone can go lift and visit that stone.

Are the Scots better at holding on to this stuff than we are? Peter Martin went and found this culture 15 years ago. Before that, there was only two lifting stones known in Scotland.

There were the Dimmy Stones and the Inver Stone. That was it.
Peter Martin dedicated the last 10 years of his life to finding it because now there's 35 lifting stones in Scotland because of him.

But before that, it was practically forgotten as well. And it's the same crack.
He went and spoke to the people. He went to the locals.
He went everywhere, just like I'm doing now.

And he brought it back himself. So all of this, the whole thing roots back to Scotland and to Peter Marin's find.

Do you ever speak to, because you know, too, like there's people who do this with music. Yes.
Like, I mean, an important thing with, like,

Ireland used to have a fucking classical music on the harp.

The harp was banned sometime in the 1500s. And the pipes, yeah.
And the pipes, and you lose song.

And then what comes out of that, when you take the instruments away, that's where you get little thing. That's where you get diddly-diddle-doo.

It's, I don't have my fucking instrument, but I'm going to hold this melody in my mouth. And there's for years people going around the country trying to find melodies so they don't die.

That's wonderful. It's

absolutely. I mean, the beauty of what

you're doing is it's hard to get rid of a stone. There are no.
There's so much out there. They're there.

You lose the stories, but the story's gone. But all you need to do is find the person with the story.
Have you ever found a stone and

there's no story there because it's not left, and you've had to look at the stone and have a little guess about what the story might be?

It's not a lifting stone unless the story is there.

So, okay. It has to have a story attached to it.
Other than that, it's just a stone. Because have you ever passed a stone going, come on, I know you're a lifting stone.
I know I love you.

The amount of people who just send me pictures of stones in their front garden

or a stone down the end of the road, I'm like, it looks like a nice stone.

Is there any story attached to it? No, but then it's just a stone. You know, it has to have the story.
The story is the important thing, you know.

So whether you get it from Ducas or you get it from oral culture, the story is the important thing. I wonder you're going to get a few bullshitters.
You can guarantee it. There's a fella tried.

A couple of people have tried, and you'd know straight away. There's a fella had a lifting stone down on a caravan site in in Bexford

and literally he was after rolling it and the grass was bent where he'd have to roll and said it's been here for thousands of years.

Just taking the piss. Just taking the piss a bit, you know.
But you tend to know the genuine people, you know.

Of course, there might be a couple of bullshit stories there, but I mean, even in Ducas, you're taking a chance because it was a story written 90 years ago. But I think that people were more genuine.

But it's a total. You're going on faith.
You have to go on faith. I mean, that's the thing.
Like, when you're reading folklore as well, like,

I found stories about fucking UFOs in Clon McNice, and

someone was having taking the piss. You know what I mean? Maybe there was.

Well, there could have been.

Any other questions? Yonder. Hold on.

I don't have my glasses on, so I can't see people up there, but I promise I will ask the people up there soon enough. Down here, if you wouldn't mind.
And then I'll get on to you next. Don't worry.

Charming beard.

um i know in irish mythology the two did an on they brought like one of the gifts was like a big stone that stood at the hillatara that's the lee of fall yeah yeah and would that have been one of the lifting stones as well because i know it spoke to the person so i was wondering i don't i've been to visit that stone and i put my hand on it i didn't cry out i was very fucking disappointed but um it's massive i'd say it must weigh maybe 1500 to 2,000 kilos.

So Sean McCool might be able to buy certainly fucking won't. What I'm thinking as well, though, right? Because I was wondering, there has to be some stones, right? Like that one.

And it's like, no one could lift that. And it's like, yeah, there's gods around it.
They do it. And the fact that it's so big and so impossible is part of.

Because what I love about Irish mythology is the hyperbole, the massive big lies, the big, big exaggerations. So to go, that stone there was lift by Ku Cullen.
That's the size of a house. I know.

But you're not. He was so strong.
The fucking Rock of Cashel.

You know the Rock of cashel it's like a mountain and there's a castle on it there's a story there that's i think it was ku colin i think it was uh ku colin got into a fight with the no no no no there's the devil's base

there's the devil's bit and there's the rock of cashel right so the devil's bit is a mountain that has a bit taken out of it and then you've got the rock of cashel which is this other mountain and the story goes is that kukollin got into a fight with the devil beat the devil and the devil was so pissed off that he went fuck you, Ku Cullen, and then went and took a bite out of a mountain.

That's the devil's bit, and then he spat it, and that became the rock of castle. I fucking love all this.
I don't care if it's not true,

but isn't that what a story? But it's brilliant. But see, there's about 30 Fionn's throwing stones in Ireland.
What were his throwing stones?

They were like these massive glacial erratics sitting in the field, totally out of place. So there's heaps of them.

I think every village in Ireland has an allergy has a stone stone that was thrown by Fiona Cool. Actually, this is what I'm fucking.
This is what's giving me a mind turn now.

We once had a fucking glacier, and I remember from junior songs

about glaciers. I had a teacher called John Luby.
The glacier used to come down, they would slip the rock.

But the glaciers, the ice used to strip the rock and leave all.

So like you could have stories about stones that might be from people who remember the ice age. In the way way that

there's flood mythology all over the world, every fucking culture has got flood mythology.

There was a big, huge flood, and it's not just the fucking Bible, it goes back to Gilgamesh, it's in Irish mythology.

And a lot of people reckon if there is a flood myth, like the Ice Age ended properly maybe nine, ten thousand years ago. Humans were there, and these humans were the exact same as me and you.

They could use an iPhone if you give it to them and show them. Exact same as me and you.

And people wonder, is our flood mythology actually a folk memory from people witnessing literal floods like you know the the the north sea uh gas field yes so just between uh the top of england and denmark there's the north sea gas field like

9 000 years ago that was an area called doggerland that was a place it was a forest 9 000 years ago that's not that long ago

and when they were drilling for the gas and the oil in the North Sea, like I think it was in the 50s, they went down to the bottom of the ocean and they're like, why the fuck are there stone tools here?

Why are there houses here?

And what we are using for gas is the forests that suddenly got flooded.

So what happened with this area called Doggerland, which is just between the top of England and Denmark, the ice age was ending and there was this huge fucking glacier under the sea and it literally just fell off.

And that alone flooded the whole area biblically. Thousands of people died.
So there's a folk memory of shit like that. There's a folk memory of a deluge suddenly came and eradicated society.

And then we have these fucking Noah.

You know what I mean? But what I'm wondering is, in Ireland, we had glaciers, and the glaciers were stripping all these stones. So how much of that is

they were because a lot of the lifting stones, all the stones on the islands are all glacial eratics.

They're all pink stones that aren't native to the landscape that they belong with, they were brought up, oh wow, so they were moved first of all

to the stone, and that's why the queer stone is here, that's why it's here,

and that's why they stand out, and that's why they were lifted. Oh, that's amazing! Isn't this where it goes all the way back?

And the glaciers are like 20, 30,000 years old, and they moved it first, they lifted them first, and now we're lifting them.

Ah, isn't that fucking brilliant?

Um,

I'm going to take one more. I'm conscious of people's bosses, right? So I'm going to take one more question up here.

Hi. Hello, sir.

A question and a thought. I've got two questions, but just on the lifting.
Greedy, Kant. A question.

On the lifting of the stones, do you need to put it down slowly or do you just kind of drop it? Oh, no. Like I said, it's all about the respect, you know.

If you can lift it up, you can put it down slowly as well. Fair enough.
you know. Wow, okay.
So, it's just to me, it's just respect these things. We're very lucky to have them, you know.

Like I said, they're not, they're stories, they're a part of our national identity. Treat them like you would treat something in a museum.

And because you know, they're like any gym you go to, there's a sign on the wall for the lads who fucking drop the barbell. Don't drop the fucking barbell, exactly.
So, that's the same with the stone.

It's the same thing, just be mindful of them, or I'll fucking hunt you down. And what was the thought that you had?

So, just in relation to the kind of culture coming back and these cultural like whether it's stone lifting or other features of our culture that were kind of nearly gone and they're coming back, it just strikes me as maybe an element of healing, kind of post-colonialism and post-exact experience.

Exactly, and it's wonderful to see it a long way continue, you know.

Um,

and on the subject of that, it's it's

it's not just uh they tried to take this from us. It's like no, no, that there was a fucking famine and people died and it got lost, and that's very sad, you know?

So it's it's it's wonderful to remember it and bring back something so class, you know. Ash, I mean, it's an absolute honor, yeah.

It is an absolute honor, and to see it flourish, it's more than I could ever imagine, you know. So, I'm gonna let you go in peace and get your buses and go to bed,

David Cohen, Indiana Stones. Thank you so much for the wonderful night.
God bless everybody. Thank you very much.
Oh, I enjoyed that chat. I really enjoyed that.

I have some, I have a few new tricks up my sleeve for the audio for the live podcasts. I've been recording things a little bit differently so I hope you enjoyed the sound.

That didn't even though that was a live podcast it didn't really sound live. There was a warmth a warmth and an intimacy to our voices.
So I hope you enjoyed that. I'll catch you next week.

I'll catch you next week where

We are heartling towards we're heartling towards nice fucking long evenings. Nice long long evenings and decent weather.

I'm dreaming about May.

I think May is my favourite month.

Whatever month where summer just suddenly fucking blooms and the air is pregnant with the smell of chlorophyll. That's what I'm looking forward to.
Rub a dog, lift a stone,

pick up a worm,

put it back, put it back, cause the worm wants to be underneath that stone. Unless of of course it's one of these New Zealand flatworms, which I spoke about last week.

These New Zealand flatworms that are invasive and that are killing the native earthworm. You'll probably find them underneath stones.

They don't borrow, but they do love to be under things where you'd find wood lice. So keep an eye out for the New Zealand flatworm.
And...

I believe you are supposed to kill them. I believe you are supposed to kill them.

I think lemon juice was suggested as a way to kill them. Look it up.
Look up the New Zealand flatworm. They're of great concern.
I'll be back next week with a hot take.

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