Once Upon a Time.....

Once upon a time there was a land of mist & fog & rain & some peeps said hey! yeah! this looks like a splendid place to set up housekeeping, let's go over in our boats b4 someone else grabs it! Some of them painted themselves blue to match the weather & other peeps looked at that askance & told them to keep walking so they went to Scotland & called themselves Picts & liked to raid the borders for cattle & look scary & spent an inordinate amount of time primping for it what w/ all that folding of 11dy6,000 yards of wool from their sheeps that they spun into pretty colors.

The peeps who didn't keep walking sniffed & called them barbarians & tried to keep them on their own side of the border b/c they were getting low on steaks & burgers what w/ all the cattle raiding. They decided hugging trees was a splendid religious thing & so they invented Druids to be in charge of that stuff. The Druids invented lots of fun festivals to keep church attendance up, Halloween being one of the bestest. It had lots of baking of soul cakes to leave on the graves of their departed ancestors b/c hey, the deceased might get hungry, ya never know. They had no pumpkins but they carved jack o'lanterns out of turnips instead. As if anyone really wanted to eat the turnips anyway, so it was a good use of a revolting vegetable that failed to go well w/ steaks & burgers. They decided they needed a spiffy place for peeps to gawk in awe at & started dragging great big rocks from all over the place to Salisbury Plain & put em in a circle, & that was Stonehenge.

Stonehenge

But wasn't nobody really in charge of everyone & so when the Romans paddled over in their boats to see if they were missing conquering anything good, it was pretty EZ for them to take over & set up a nice city on the Thames called Londinium from which to be in charge. They built Hadrian's Wall to keep out those blue dudes in the dresses b/c the Romans were keen on steaks & burgers as well. A chick named Boadica hassled them for a while

stained glass window in Colchester Town Hall

but eventually the Romans were running the joint & frowning at all the tree-hugging & adapting all the fun festivals to slide into the calendar of Christianity. They even sent a peep called Patrick on a boat over to some other place of mist & fog & rain close by, to make all the peeps Catholic & drive out the snakes & pick a lot of shamrocks to represent the Holy Trinity. Then the Romans got irked w/ the long trip & forgetting umbrellas & catching colds & sneezing all the time & their Empire had a lovely collapse so they went away....