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

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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 Lupricalia, 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 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.

Efebruus.

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 grew up in Limerick, where nicknames, 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 lads wanted to be called Spanner.

Like, that's a tough name if someone's called Spanner.

You gotta 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 dares.

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 gun 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 can't do I can't do seven dares for each letter of my proposed nickname.

No, I'm just gonna stick with Rye.

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 to earn that name.

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, Kenneth Inbush was down there, Kennedy Inbush, Kennedy Inbush was down there, Kennedy Inbush.

You're not Kennedy Bush.

Kennedy Inbush.

And I heard Kennedy Bush 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 you beat up

a gang 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 he knew there was a fella called Fanta.

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 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 wrought 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 stolen somebody's, he'd stolen 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 wanna 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 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 nine in the morning and just getting straight 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 and they were trying to charge me to get a light switch put in, but I put in, 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 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-ins art, not having a fucking leave-ins art.

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 or you were fucked.

that was it and there was huge shame around it and i've done all right for myself despite not having a leave insert 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.

Well I don't have the light switch yet but I have I've got the underpants I've 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 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, 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 Kean,

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 Keowan, who was an Olympic Olympic kettlebell lifter from Waterford, David Keowan found one of these ancient Irish lifting stones and lifted it.

And for the past two years has traveled 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 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 Keown 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 Keon in Vicker Street a couple of weeks back.

at my Vicker 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 them.

My live podcasts, they're a bit like, I try and make them like

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 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.

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 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 Kuman.

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 or after Mass on a Sunday, pre-GAA times, the lads would say, right, what are we going to do?

There's the stone.

stone.

Let's see you can pick it up, replace a few bits, 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 Sarah, like, when I started this, Pot, like, you, 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-fucking internet days, the heady days, like, what were you gonna do?

Fucking, there was nothing to do.

Because you throw stones.

Like, I, I, the, one of the good things that I like, I'm shit at athletics, but 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'm 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?

Now, that's a decent deadlift, like.

Yeah, yeah.

But 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 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 were over lifting in Ireland as well.

So I went up and I spoke about stones and they were like, what 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 had the masculinity strength test and the femininity strength test, which I love also.

But the lads are asking me on the way up, you know, how much does the stone weigh?

I say it weighs 162 kilos.

162 kilos.

I can deadlift 400 kilos.

You know, I can squat 300 kilos.

Sure, 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'd 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 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 fucking art,

like at the moment there's these botanists

and one thing they're very concerned about is 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 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 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 Leoma Flaherty that's out of print to finding the fucking stone.

It's my favourite stone and my favourite story.

I've found 44.

Remember, you said I found 24 the last time I was talking to Bury.

We're 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 has 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 of the clout.

That was like having a million Silgrim lakes.

I was there, he said, right?

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 a test and saw and see you can lift it the highest.

And he lifted it the highest on the day, right?

And he said the shout from the islanders resounded through his head as an old 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.

I still stand, yeah.

I competed for Ireland for six years

and have a world endurance record for uh two hours non-stop lifting, two 16 kilo kettlebells.

Uh, clean and jerk, uh, 634 reps unbroken, so still stands.

It's absolute lunacy, no fucking injuries, thank Christ.

Yeah, so that was that was that.

But um, I said, I went looking for the story, right?

So, I started researching lifting stones, and I came across a man called Dr.

Conor Heffernan, who I believe is here tonight, actually.

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

Yeah Conor 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 Port Valon Dun to Gurtna Coppel.

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 me 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 Aron 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

doesn't say what what size it is it doesn't say what color it is actually no sorry, it does say what colour it is.

Oh, Flattery 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 Blindby, 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 anything about the lifting stone down there?

Oh, shy, he said, the lifting stone.

Oh, yeah, the Malan, Port Valon Downey, he said.

I was like, what?

The Malan, he said, that's the name of the stone, the Milan, and it's in Port Valen Dune.

Milan mean it has a little dip.

Milan means round granite boulder.

Okay.

No.

Is that what it means?

I was researching my favourite one word.

One word.

So to know where the Finnish people might have like 50 words for snow?

Yeah.

The Iron Ireland people have 50 words for stone.

Because what the fuck else is over there only stones anyway.

Yeah.

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 Ivan'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, it was only 100 yards away.

So, Limo Flaherty's looking out of 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 front of the islanders and the limo flowerty society

i'm like i haven't 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 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 thought 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 they're only 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.

Sorry.

You should see the back gardeners and shit.

It's just a mud bit now, 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 ask

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 Aaron 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 by that now.

Sorry.

You were going over to the Iron Islands, right?

With an academic and a third man on 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 Lima Flowery Society

and lift a fucking stone myself.

Nation Ida coming over, TG Carbo are coming over, two documentary teams are coming over.

There was four cameras, four boom mics, and about 100 islanders there and the Lima Flarity Society.

And this hasn't been lifted in like 200 fucking years.

It hasn't been fucking lifted by anybody, right?

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 little 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.

Yeah, yeah, you became the story then, you know.

And then I was sitting there and it was drifting away, and I 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 leaned over it and 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.

Stonelifting is back.

You better lift the fucking thing, Lad.

You know what I mean?

So I blow out my breath, I 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 of the best.

So I could lift that stone to my lap.

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 mud.

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 kettlebell.

It's all mother 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 stabilizing stream.

It's brilliant.

You make through 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 I was like, that's like the story.

And this woman walks up to me in a red jacket and sunglasses and she gives me cold and she's crying.

I was like, are you okay?

David, you know what?

You talked about Fiona, she said.

At the

I'm Fiona, she said.

I'm Fiona O'Flaherty.

You're talking about my great-grandfather.

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 what I want to fucking

I love is bloody writing, but like you can't really go out and buy a Leomo 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.

Like a crit, yeah, really fucking interesting person, really interesting.

I don't know why,

like, you just bring him up and not, you want to 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 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 famous.

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, 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 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 this Palestinian oranges and all the destinations that it was being sent to you know yeah

like culture and 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 know you're 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 just gone.

What I'm finding is 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 right time.

Like the right time would have been fucking 50 years 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, your 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 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?

Like, yeah, 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 don't know.

Everything else goes away.

Like, there's this, I think it's Indigenous American, right?

But they

a cure.

No, Saint 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 wallet, I'm going for a bit of Saint Anthony, you know?

If I really,

but I've since gotten an app called Title, so he can go fuck himself.

But before I got Tyle,

this podcast is sponsored by Tyle.

Imagine that.

Fuck Saint 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 Con 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 how the Saint Anthony thing works.

But how the fuck did I 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 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 if when I'm bored, I type a word into it.

So I type storms into the 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 save it so i think it was up in cavin

this girl went to a woman who was about 90 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 he gonna do?

So the people are up licking the trees, going, going, it tastes like the sea, it tastes like the sea.

And beautiful, mindful thing to notice.

Do you know what I mean?

And

Bannox, anyway, I 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 Dukas?

Yeah.

You get 25,000 references to Stone and Dukas.

So Dukas, 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 pair.

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

During the devil's arsland, 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.

Everyone might get a different advert, but nonetheless, I'm going to play an ocarina here.

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.

Mortgage arrears.

Mortgage arrears.

Whatever the fuck.

You don't need that loud shit.

So here's an ocarina pause.

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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.

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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.

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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 it's, we're independent here.

Advertisers have to do so at my discretion.

I can tell advertisers to go fuck themselves.

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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.

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Upcoming gigs.

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 Drahada this Friday.

There's a few tickets left for that in Drada, so come along if you're near Drohada.

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, Killerne.

In the iNeck 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 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, 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'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 sell out Limerick.

Not really.

My podcast is definitely bigger outside of Limerick and even bigger outside of Ireland.

About 80% of my listeners are from outside of Ireland now.

And

I'd be worried about putting a gig on in Limerick about sending 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 up 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.

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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

and you you the priest who was illegal like cromwell sent over lads whose job was called priesthunter which a pretty cool name for a fucking job but literally they 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 lambland yeah 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, as 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, Ducas, 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 pishoa 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 lifting.

Sorry, at first.

But

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 mass stone.

So it became a mass 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, um, there's a stone in County Kerry down in Carrasa Veen that I found.

It was actually the first lifted 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 Iron Islands, the lifted 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 you know how old this tradition is?

You found a fucking stone that Coo Collin was lifting, didn't you?

I found one at Fion McCool.

Of Fionn 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 Fion McCool would sit and watch the hunt.

So he'd sit up on the top of the mountain and he'd watch Brannard School on 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 feet 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, 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 cooled through with it and 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, they 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 five, it's about five and a half feet tall.

It's about a foot and a half tick each way.

So you have to bare hug it.

Is it liftable?

Yes, I lifted it myself.

Fuck off!

Wow.

And I'll tell you why, because I went up with a film crew, right?

Did you put anything on your arms there?

Oh, my arms were tore off me, but my arms are just

scars, legs, arms, I mean, fucking bits.

But that's the price you pay for it, you know?

But I went up with a film crew, and I tried three times to lift it.

George,

I tried and I was like trying to lift the mountain, couldn't pick it up.

And 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 Fiona McCool's Hill.

You're lifting Fiona McCool's stone.

And I just felt this power come 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.

Now, 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 a squat flu, where if someone squats too much, the next day you can experience like flu-like symptoms.

It was like, yeah, just the CNS just shut down.

It was like, you shouldn't have been able to lift a weight that big.

Like 257, like

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 I said, I think I summoned the strength from somewhere else.

It was

your psychological

day 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 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 fucking form and you must look after nutrition.

You must train and look after sleep.

I sleep like a fucking, I hibernate.

I'm in bed at seven o'clock in the evening.

I'm fucking 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 working.

I work on a lot of, 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 uh

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

when he was writing 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 for it.

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 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 the last one.

Oh, I wear those.

I wear those, yeah.

What's the point of that?

It just kind of keeps your insides from coming on the outsides.

You know what I mean?

If I get a fucking prolapse and you're rectum.

No.

Because you can't be.

Because 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 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 to get away.

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 crack.

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 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 on 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 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.

It's 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 76.

so he's talking about when i when i when i could lift this stone oh he came down he he 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 and I'm 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 it said, all you have to do is get the wind under it or get the guayfuy lifted 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, Mahan Buchel, 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.

Could have been.

But the thing is,

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 mehel, isn't it?

It's the Mahil, 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, 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.

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 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 a little bit more insular 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?

I think.

Does anyone know about metal?

I probably shouldn't ask a room of fucking 1,200 people that.

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 Lunas up in in County Tyrone.

It was only lifted once a year on the Feast of Loo.

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've got a great story for you.

So up he went and he told me all about this harvest festival, a feast of Lou.

I went into the coffee shop to meet him, and the coffee shop was packed, right?

Packed with people.

So 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, Jesus, there's some other people 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.

You were on blind body.

I said, I was, yeah.

Can we come up and watch you lift it?

Yeah, so home to 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 this stone.

He said, Wow, but he said, I'd never seen it lift it.

So, he just was in his 80s.

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 had to smig the stone, he said.

Smig A means chin ate, right?

You had to pick the stone up and touch it off your chin.

Now he said, no one has spoken Irish in this place for over a hundred years.

But the land remembers the Irish through the stone.

Oh, fuck me.

Isn't that unbelievable?

So, if you can,

there you go, and it's still alive, and the language is still there, threw 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 every week.

The culture is back.

It's back and it's flying.

Because

I remember last time you were like, is there anyone lifting stones in Ireland anymore?

And I said, no.

But now 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 wanted to talk to about out here was.

So like

it hasn't gone mainstream yet.

Not when Brazy starts talking about it.

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 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 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 years.

Influencers in Ireland, they're going to be doing this.

And they're going to peeky blinders.

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 second you start coming in and going there's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this it's it's now it's 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 i'm worried about is lift the stones with respect lift them with respect

if they're 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 a 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 you.

But I'm assuming, too,

like you're saying there, lift it with respect, right?

Yes.

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, 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 potting stone it was called so it had a massive history attached to it and then it's broken and it's fucked it's 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 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.

What a name, right?

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 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 tradition was, and it's the only one in Ireland, you have to pick that stone up 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 there's 125 kilos.

It's kind of like the Hussefell stone up in Iceland.

I could walk around the gold pen.

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

Oh, hugely so.

The Basque, they still do stonelifting 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 Canon Stott 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 years old.

Had to lift a stone to become a man.

I love that.

But I'm assuming, too,

like Stonehenge, right?

Yeah, England.

So someone was lifting stones.

How the fuck did that get up there?

Exactly.

But like

this was very widespread, I'm imagining.

Anytime, 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 Stonemason'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?

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.

So, and you're in the grass, and it's pissing rain because it's in his 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 Dritvik 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 stoker, 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 boat, they cast the net, they catch a lot of fish, and then the amount of fish you get depends on how well you could lift a 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.

Just always,

there you go.

Oh, but you go away.

So, how do you decide on a boat who's the straight?

Well, if he can lift that stone, then he rowed 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 there's the same sounded unfair but now it's like no this is the way of sager and how to do it he's walking harder because he's in the middle

but your man could be conserving his energy on the boat gun i'm doing all man i'm saving my energy for that stone

i'm sure there's hubby's ways around everything but yeah so like there were there were job interviews there were rites of passage you know the same thing in in uh in sweden Yeah, the farm man hands testing stone.

So if you 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 in different countries like that that make you go wow that's cool in iceland i wonder did we have that here

or did it make you have little theories definitely because that stonemason's testing stone i was like because i knew about the stones in triedvik and i was like surely we have that here surely with the stone wall building we have to have that here as well you know.

And sure enough, when I went over to English Man, and just through pure fluke, by being on the boat, I'd heard there was a stone on English man.

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.

Ehall, 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 it.

He was sitting asleep.

I said, I'm not waking him up.

So the cabin fell down and gives him a puck in the arm.

Me haul, yeah.

So, 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 land's permission.

Right, 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 a 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 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 like I'm working a 40 hour week.

So like I'm only off two days a week.

So like 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 it 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.

Well, all you got to do is lift the stones and then just write a few thousand words about it.

Oh, I mean, like, let's just use

hurts.

The best day ever for me would be 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.

I'm delighted.

Because for me, it's about getting the stories out there.

That's all I want to do.

I'm becoming 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 is 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 rein 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 in two and a half years part-time.

Imagine what you could do.

Oh, completely.

Completely.

Um,

just to have some infrastructure behind it to be recording it, yeah, do you know what I mean?

And 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 have some of the people speaking to are very old.

Oh, look, there's nobody who has lifted these stones is under 70.

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 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 could hammer on the English a lot and they fucking deserve it, right?

But

I think industrialization, modernization, the widening of roads, especially the tarmacing of the roads, because a lot of these stones are at crossroads.

Loads.

I've only found one crossroad stone, and I've read about 35 stories and dukkhas 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, a 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 the roads in Ireland, which is

so obviously you're looking for stones.

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.

Derry means loads of fucking oak.

Mayo means plain of you.

We had lots of trees and they're gone.

And

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

Mancon goes up and down looking where I can find a little patch of forest so that I can because the important,

you can't just fucking plant trees, you can't just get Irish oak and Irish yew and plant it.

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.

That'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 roads just a foot yeah 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 resourcing

during the Celtic Tiger in Ireland with a few nightclubs, right?

And there were so many nightclubs.

Like fucking Jordan.

Jordan had her hen party in Limerick.

That's some fucking boast.

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 a new Celtic Tiger hotel and put up the big fucking sign and it says Absolute Spa

and Limerick couldn't handle it.

Limerick was 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, Limerick.

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.

I 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 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 colonize, it's

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 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 someone 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 colonisation of Ireland.

It's the fucking exact same.

So I started calling giant hogweed Protestant footsteps.

Love it.

It's because in

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 all over fucking Europe.

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 canonized around 15, 1600s, but everywhere they canized, 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.

Fuck, 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 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 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 brains.

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 we get into 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 oh i'm the most uncool person ever i lift stones what the fuck you're doing you're a weirdo like 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 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 this and Dukas a good bit as well.

Go away, really?

Yeah, and the ballon stones.

The ballonstones all have curative properties as well.

What's the ballonstone?

So, ballonstone is a stone with a depression in the top of it that 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 ballon stones?

There was only one, there was one I found, but I mean, I don't want people out there lifting balances, 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 Boffin 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 there was like in a monastery, there's an old monastery on Inish Boffen, and it's a ruin, but there's this big ballon stone sitting in front of a Catholic altar.

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

You're looking through the window back at Croke Patrick 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, Cropatrick, you know.

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

Crom was like

an evil god of the sea.

Crow Crom.

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 must be fucking pre-Christian.

Anywhere, 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,

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 vote of 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 because Drumcondra is a fucking housing estate, yeah, but it's

like there was a holy well there called St.

Catherine's Well, and you know how they know it was pre-Christian

because it's it's 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 drum condra, 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 we're kind of a 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 if you're all feeling that i know i say 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, doesn't matter where you're from.

These are stories to do with the fucking land and the landscape.

And

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 doesn't give a fuck if you're a man of a woman.

Don't care where you're from, as long as you can pick it up.

That's what I love about it.

It's the simple beauty to it.

You know?

I think it's half ten.

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, 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 Inverse Stone.

That was it.

Peter Martin dedicated the last 10 years of his life to finding it.

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 Martin'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 the 1500s and the pipes yeah and the pipes and you lose song and then what comes out of that when when you take the instruments away that's where you get little thing that's where you get diddly diddle do it's i don't have my instrument but i'm gonna 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 a tough one absolutely i mean the beauty of what

you're doing is it's hard to get rid of a stone.

There are

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

I passed a stone going, come on, I know you're a lifting stone.

I know but it looks to 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 at a caravan site in Bexford.

And literally, he was after rolling it, and the grass was bent where he was at the rolling.

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 all.

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.

I know in Irish mythology, the Tuda Didon, they brought like one of the gifts was like a big stone that stood at the Hilatara.

That's the Leah 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, and I didn't cry out.

I was very fucking disappointed.

But 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.

What I'm thinking as well, though, 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 sure enough.

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 I think it was Ku Collin.

I think it was Ku Collin 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 Ku Collin got into a fight with the devil, beat the devil, and the devil was so pissed off that he went, fuck you, Ku Collin, 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 Cashel.

I fucking love all this.

I don't care.

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 analogy has a 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 and 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 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 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 North Sea gas field?

Yes.

So just between 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 lifted stones, all the stones on the islands are all glacial eratics.

They're all pink stones that aren't native to the landscape.

They belong where they're.

They were brought up.

Oh, wow.

So they were moved first of all.

They moved the stone.

And that's why the queer stone is here.

That's why it's here.

Fuck.

And that's why they stand out.

And that's why they were lifted.

Oh, that's amazing.

Isn't this?

So it goes all the way back.

And the glaciers are like 20,000, 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?

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, cunt.

A question.

Yeah, I thought.

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.

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 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 the 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 signal.

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 these cultural like the stone lifting or other features of our culture that were kind of nearly gone and are coming back it just strikes me as maybe a an element of healing kind of post colonialism and post exactly experience that we saw these kind of thoughts exactly and it's it's wonderful to see it on long way continue you know

um

and on the subject of that it's it's

It's not just they tried to take this from us.

It's like, no, no, no, there was a fucking famine and people died and it got lost.

And

that's very sad, you know?

So it's wonderful to remember it and bring back something so class, you know?

I sure mean just 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 going to 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 no 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 evenings and decent weather.

I'm dreaming about May.

I think May is my favorite 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 because the worm wants to be underneath that stone.

Unless, 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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