It’s a crisp, sunny Sunday morning in Albion. Around us, fields stretch as far as the eye can see, while the clear blue sky above us is offset by a bracing wind. The bucolic corner of Wiltshire in which we’re standing is the embodiment of 18th-century artist and mystic William Blake’s vision of England as some kind of “green and pleasant land”. Birds wheel in the air hundreds of feet up, and it’s easy to imagine the sound of the feet that have walked these paths over the millennia.
Yet something more arcane and unsettling is woven into the natural beauty. Looming over us is a strange, striking arrangement of stones, each more than twice the height of a person: two vertical, one balanced precariously on top of it. This is The Devil’s Den, and the stones are said to be a dolmen, a neolithic burial chamber that supposedly dates back more than 5,000 years. If its age and physical presence are impressive, they’ve got nothing on the reputed supernatural properties that give The Devil’s Den its name. “You know,” says Tom Templar, frontman of Green Lung and British folklore enthusiast, “they say that if you put a glass of water on one of the stones and leave it overnight, the Devil will drink it.” Suddenly, the wind feels a little bit chillier.
