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

Davidd Keoghan is a former olympic kettlebell lifter who is singlehandly reviving the ancient Irish tradition of stone lifting Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre Finds Out, and I have chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese. 100% fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, hand-topped onions, plus cheese and pickles in every bite, and right now, you can get one with medium fries and a drink for just $8, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.

• 1:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Squint at the withery princess, you gelded Emmets. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. We're well into the middle of February. February. Fucking February. I love Feb... 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.

• 1:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Lupercalia, so there was a god called Lupercus, and Lupercus was a wolf. So during Lupercalia, people would sacrifice a wolf, but catching wolves was really difficult because wolves are wild and they're tough. So what people would do is they'd find a poor dog. They used to kill dogs, then they'd skin the dog and they'd make it like a whip,

• 2:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, with a whip made from dog skin to get horny. And this dog skin sex whip was called a februus, a februus. And that's why February is called February and that's why there's an R in February, February. Like, imagine April was called Cat Vibrator, cause people in the Stone Age shoved a load of bees into a cat's skull and sat on it for the laugh.

• 3:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, the respect that it deserves and pronounce that R. Cause that's a well-earned R right there. Like, I, I 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, you were allowed, give yourself your own nickname. But depending on the name, you had to earn every single letter of that name

• 3:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 thirteen, one of the 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 decide it. And this fella, his name was Rye.

• 4:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  His father, his father drove a flower delivery van called Lawless Flowers. Cause that was, that was just the name of the family. That was the name of the family was Lawless. Lawless is an actual name in Ireland, but you saw this van going around the place. Lawless Flowers. Like they're fucking renegade illegal flowers. They're not, they're just regular flowers. Well, this fella, Rye, his dad drove that illegal flower van. And so Rye wanted to be called Spanner, probably because his dad delivered flowers.

• 5:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, he wasn't willing to earn, to earn that name. And there was another fella. I'd never met him. I'd only heard him spoken about, right? And this fella's name, his actual name was, I think it was Kennet Imbush. But I'd never met him. I'd only ever heard him spoken about. But because of the, the nature of the Limerick accent.

• 5:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Whenever anyone I knew was talking about him, they'd be like, Kennet Imbush was down there, Kennet Imbush, Kennet Imbush down there, Kennet Imbush. You're not Kennet Imbush. Kennet Imbush. And I heard Kennet Imbush 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 wanna 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, that means you beat up twelve lads. That's the only way you earn a name in Limerick,

• 6:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, that's why. It's the only reason. 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 a name like Fanta. Fanta was a few years older and I didn't know him. Never met him.

• 7:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  The only reason we knew Fanta's name, because my friend,

• 7:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  he looked into his sister's diary and she wrote, "I got fingered by Fanta down in Kilkey."

• 7:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's how we knew there was a fella called Fanta. Kilkey, Kilkey is like a seaside village, a seaside village out in County Clare, which it's gentrified now. The world's first submarine was invented there. But it was a seaside, seaside village where everyone in Limerick went to at summertime. And I just remember every year someone was bitten by an eel, except my friend's sister who got fingered by Fanta and wrote 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

• 8:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  obviously a freezing cold December, Christmas day, freezing cold. And he had, he'd 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 with a bottle of Fanta full of his own piss to keep his hands warm.

• 9:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, and years later then, yeah, he fanged with my friend's sister and she wrote about it in her diary. It was 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. Feb. It fucks with my head. My mouth feels full.

• 9:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's like I'm gargling on the testicles of a month. Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's, maybe that's the point. But anyway, we're nearly, we're nearly done with February, all right? 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 familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. All right? I have the giggles. The giggles this week. I fucking love my new office. I mean, 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.

• 10:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  A decent big window to look out. I'm, 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 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.

• 11:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they were trying to charge me to get a light switch put in, but I put in, I, 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 gonna 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 coworkers don't have to deal with, then you're entitled to a reasonable accommodation. Laws exist, laws exist to protect

• 11:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  that because it's not fair. It's, 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, in school,

• 12:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  young me in school, who I was tormented by my itchy school jumper. I was tormented by having to literally be in a classroom every single day with tons of people. And I was tormented by having to sit still, by having to sit still. And all of these things led to me not having a leave insert, not having a fucking leave insert, which if you're Irish, you know, that's not good. We, we don't, in Ireland, maybe things are different now, but when I was doing my fucking leave insert nearly 20 years ago, if you failed your leave insert, you were fucked. That was it. And there was huge shame around it. And I've done all right for myself despite not having

• 13:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  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

• 13:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have my capacity to work and write and deliver this podcast impacted because a giant corporation won't pay for a fucking light switch. But now they have to pay for the light switch under the Equal Status Act. And if they don't, that's considered discrimination against a person with disabilities. I don't have the light switch yet. What 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

• 14:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  about because I, I like to be able to pace around. But because this office is small, I have to keep it tidy. I have no choice. Clutter literally can't exist in this space or else I can't move. So the tininess of this office is actually forcing me to be very neat and efficient and to have things in their place. And that small little morning ritual of making sure that my office is really tidy and everything is in its place, that small morning ritual of taking responsibility and accepting responsibility for my environment, that tiny act actually builds my self-esteem a little bit in the

• 14:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  morning and sets me up for the day, for the next task ahead, which again, I have many neurodivergent listeners, we struggle with, um, 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.

• 15:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Actually doing it and then completing it. These things can become very overwhelming. And when I begin my day with something as small as, there's a bunch of books on your desk that you were reading yesterday. Put them on the shelf where they belong. Identifying that, initiating the task, doing it, completing it, that tiny thing, is a little mindful self-esteem builder that then makes it easier for me to open and answer emails. And then, once my emails are answered, that's another little boost in self-esteem. And then it's like, okay, sit down and write. Do the creative part of your job. That now becomes a lot easier as opposed to,

• 16:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 fellow's doing some of the most fascinating work in Ireland at the moment, because I don't know how to label it.

• 16:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 17:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mainly as a result of the famine of the 1840s. This tradition was completely lost, forgotten, culturally eroded. And during the pandemic, David Kean, who was an Olympic kettlebell lifter from Waterford. David Kean found one of these ancient Irish lifting stones and lifted it. And for the past two years has travelled up and down Ireland, finding buried, long gone, ancient Irish lifting stones and lifting them. And he's finding these stones through folklore and through stories.

• 18:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Kean 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.

• 18:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Kean 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 12 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 tried to create like a type of an intimacy, a conversational intimacy on stage where

• 19:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  it's a bit like a play that's unfolding in real time via conversation. And I felt that energy in the room when I did this podcast. So without further ado. Here is the chat that I had with David Kean. He's Indiana Stones on Instagram, by the way. And this is, this is a long chat. This is, I think it's over 90 minutes. Because I couldn't cut anything out. It was too much crack. And, but it's a podcast. This is a fucking podcast. This is the beauty of podcasts. I can put in a 90 minute chat. You don't have to listen to all of it today. You don't have to. Listen to some of it today, listen to the rest tomorrow. Like when I get a, if I'm listening to podcast and there's a banger,

• 20:19Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 20:41Speaker 03

  That's it. I mean, it's, it's a strange hobby, isn't it? You know, as pastimes go like, tis a, tis a strange one. But to me, it's all about bringing back something that we lost, you know?

• 20:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can I try and briefly describe it and you tell me if I'm wrong?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Go for it.

• 20:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  So we used to have a, not just Ireland, but many countries used to have a tradition where there was a, a, a very heavy stone in a village or whatever. And this stone was lifted as, as a test of, 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?

• 21:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they might go, yeah, my great grandpa. And you could you go and find the fucking stone? You dig them up and then you lift it.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 21:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  How cool is that?

• 21:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  But I love, 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?

• 22:10Speaker 03

  It is, but like I said, it takes a lot of boxes, doesn't it? I mean, what I love about this is it's not just strong men going doing this thing, 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 by by, they're stories. That's what I love about them. You know what I mean? This is a stone that has been lifted in this village for 500 years, maybe, right?

• 22:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the mad fucking thing.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  That's the thing. That stone in particular was picked out maybe 500 years to a thousand years ago in the village because it stood out maybe for its beauty and its shape. And the men and the women used to go and test themselves on these stones. Say like on a Sunday before after mass, this is cropping up all over the place. Before after mass on a Sunday, pre-GAA times, the lads would say, right, what are we going to do? There's the stone, let's see who can pick it up and place a few bets and have a bit of crack.

• 23:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like the other thing as well, when you're dealing with anything like this, you have to go, there's no internet. Like, but say, like, when I, when I started this part, like, you, you went looking for dead rats as a kid, yeah?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Of course I did.

• 23:23Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Totally, I mean, like, in the pre-fucking internet days, the heady days, like.

• 23:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  What were you gonna do?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Fucking, there was nothing to do.

• 23:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  What did you throw stuff? Like, I, I, the one of the good things that I, like, I'm shit at athletics, but I, I was actually famous for having a really good throw at stones. I was great at throwing stones and I'm going, like, there was no internet. I saw a shoulder and I was an adult because, and when anyone asked me about the shoulders, like, yeah, I was class at throwing stones as a child.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  We have a lot in common, so.

• 24:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you got bad shoulders as a result of lifting stones?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  No, I don't, thank God, because like, well, the stones I'm lifting are pretty fucking heavy, but I'm. I'm okay, I'm looking after myself, you know.

• 24:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  How are you of, like, these stones are no fucking joke, right? Uh, you'd lift a stone that's the size of that table, wouldn't you? Uh, in, in, not circumference, but that, the oval bit.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  So like I said, the, the average Irish lifting stone is a hundred and seventy kilos, average.

• 24:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, fuck me.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Right? Now, that's a decent deadlift, like.

• 24:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  But you're a deadlift, you're in a fucking gym, you're inside with something that's ergonomic, it's made to be lifted, it's equally weighted, and you have chalk and a belt, right? You're lifting a stone, you're out in a field, you're in mud, you're in grass, it's Ireland, it's piss and 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?

• 25:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I love too is, from the last time we chatted, right? And, 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? There, i- i- it's a bit like, 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.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something you told me, which I hadn't considered, was, like, we said, 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'll suck your feet in, or it's just a queer shape.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 25:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, that's amazing.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  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 my 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, in Newell. We went to Clare, which is the closest stone, it's only about an hour away. And the man's lifting stone there is a hundred and sixty-two 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.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  But the lads were asking me on the way up, you know, how much does the stone weigh? I say it weighs a hundred and sixty-two kilos, they're. Hundred and sixty two kilos, I can deadlift four hundred kilos, you know, I can squat three hundred kilos. Sure, you know, this is gonna be a piece of biz. 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.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Give it a go. So he had eight men there who, some of them would have like a thousand kilo total in powerlifting. And out of the eight men, I say two of them lifted a stone, but that much off the ground.

• 27:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And each stone as well, it's, it's about where you can lift it, isn't it?

• 27:09Speaker 03

  There's different centres 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.

• 27:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, how many new stones, so when I spoke to you two years ago, like the, the, the way that I found out about yourself as well. I love how I found out about you, which was, there's an incredible Irish writer by the name of Liam O'Flaherty, right? And I, I, his work is out of print, I can't understand why, this, this is a deeply important Irish writer. He grew up on the fucking Aran Islands, he was writing from about, I think nineteen ten up until the nineteen sixties. An incredible short story writer, that story I read out there, The Donkey, you know? Liam O'Flaherty inspired that because he, he just writes stories about animals, you know?

• 28:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what I find particularly powerful about the short stories of Liam O'Flaherty is, it's, it's depressing as fuck, right?

• 28:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  He lived on the Aran Islands, he, he was born in nineteen ten, right? When Liam O'Flaherty speaks about the animals around him, he would talk about a lake and he would say, the lake was so full of fish that it was glistening silver. The biodiversity and the amount of animals that Liam O'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.

• 29:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's the beaut, that that's the sad beauty I find in Liam O'Flaherty's work. It's like the thing with fucking art.

• 29:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 fucking delicious, they're green, they're lovely. If a, 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, diversity with the apples.

• 29:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  So there's people who study old Renaissance paintings from Italy to try and see, oh, what's that fruit, what's that fruit? Because there's a lot of things that people are misidentifying as pears and they're actually extinct Italian apples. So people are trying to bring these back so that we have genetic diversity in, in case there's a disease. That's what happened with the fucking famine. You know, why, 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, and it's not natural to Ireland. So that's why I love O'Flaherty's work. His short stories, reading about the variety of different animals that we had,

• 30:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  was like these Italian people looking at the fucking paintings for different types of extinct apples. But one story that Liam O'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, it's about.

• 30:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Aran Islands and he's about ninety 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 a tradition.

• 31:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then this cunt

• 31:47Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, come here. I mean-

• 31:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  He found Liam O'Flaherty's fucking stone in that story and it-

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And-

• 32:02Speaker 03

  I mean, it's amazing.

• 32:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, tell us about, tell us about going from a fucking short story by Liam O'Flaherty that's out of print to finding the fucking stone, like-

• 32:12Speaker 03

  It was, it's my favourite stone and my favourite story. I found forty-four. Remember you said, I found twenty-four the last time I was talking to you, but we're forty-four 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 birthed, it has death, it has renewal, it's 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 Aran Islands was picking up a stone. Right? Now, we're talking about, again, cultural board.

• 32:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  The clout.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  But it's-

• 32:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was like having a million Instagram likes.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  I was there, he said, right? And we were there at the wedding and all the men there were like famed for their strength and beauty. And the women said, okay, if you're also strong, go down and lift a test and stone 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 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.

• 33:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  This was the middle of lockdown.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Right in the middle of lockdown when everyone was going fucking mental anyway.

• 33:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you were, you were, up to this point, you were lifting kettlebells.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  I was, I was lifting kettlebells. I was competing.

• 33:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  You have a world record for kettlebells.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  I do, I do have a world record that still stands, yeah. Competed for Ireland for six years.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  And have a world endurance record for two hours, non-stop lifting, two sixteen kilo kettlebells. Clean and jerk, six hundred and thirty-four reps unbroken. So still stands, it's absolute lunacy.

• 33:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  No fucking injuries.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Thank Christ.

• 33:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fair play to you.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  So that was, that was that. But I said, I went looking for the story, right? So I started researching lifting stones and I came across a man called Dr Connor Heffernan, who I believe is here tonight, actually. And 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 ten years previous.

• 34:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go away. So Connor Heffernan was going, I think these stones might exist, but we, oh my god.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  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 I was like, okay, we have Connor Heffernan saying they're there. We have Limo Flaherty talking about the story on Inishmore. So I started researching Inishmore. 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 what I'm doing here for Ireland. 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 Vale on Down to Gortmocapple. I believe it's still there and I hope this helps somebody. That was written ten years ago. So I was like, fuck off.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? It's real, it's actually real. So that weekend, I grabbed me mates into a camper van, up the Galway, across on the ferry to the Iron Islands. Rent a bike, cycle to this place and started looking for a stone. Now, if you've never been to the Iron Islands, right?

• 35:23Speaker 03

  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 gonna know which rock is the rock, right? Doesn't say what, what size it is, it doesn't say what colour it is. Actually, no, it's sorry, I'm saying it does say what colour it is.

• 35:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, Flaherty mentions a pink.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  He does. What he said was, it sparkled as the sunshine shone upon the particles of mica in the surface. So I was thinking, mica 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 hands. I'm, 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 as it are sparkling in the sunshine. I'm walking down blind bike and I swear to Christ, it's just grey limestone, sheets of grey limestone.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  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 into her 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, eh, the Malone Port Vale I'm doing, he said. I was like, what? The Malone, he said, that's the name of the stone, the Malone. And it's in Port Vale I'm doing.

• 37:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Malone mean it has a little dip?

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Malone means round granite boulder.

• 37:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  Now.

• 37:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that what it means?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  I was researching this.

• 37:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Prefer one word.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  One word. So, do you know the way like the Finnish people went have like fifty words for snow?

• 37:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  The Iron Islands people have fifty words for stone. Because what the fuck else is over there? Only stones anyway.

• 37:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Mulan, Moolin, Mauiler, Ulan, Lak, Kluk. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. But this particular word means round granite boulder. So, I was like, yeah, that's it, he said. That's the stone that Limo Flaherty wrote about. Sure, there's this house right there. And he just pointed at the house. It was only a hundred yards away.

• 37:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, Limo Flaherty's looking only way to Whattler right about today.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  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, in the, in the story of the stone then. It just blew my mind. That's the Limo Flaherty stone there. There it is.

• 38:05Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Um, but there's, there's that second part of this that I haven't talked about. Go on.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  It gets out that I found a stone. The Limo Flaherty Society, who do fail in the Flaherty Talk on Inishmore every year, phoned me up and say, look, we can't believe you found the stone of the story of the stone. Would you come over to the Fale next year? This is like a year and a half ago. Lift the stone for us in front of the islanders and the Limo Flaherty Society.

• 38:43Speaker 03

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

• 38:53Speaker 03

  So, we went back in the meantime and weighed it at a hundred and seventy-one kilos exactly. And it's granite. It is a tough, tough stone. It's round, very hard to grip. So, I put in sixteen months of training.

• 39:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you try and make a replica stone at home?

• 39:08Speaker 03

  What I done was, I have a stone, now listen, this is just mad, I have a stone out the back garden that's flat, it's ninety kilos even. And I have kettlebells and what, they're only kettlebell training. And I just stacked 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 a hundred and seventy to a hundred and eighty kilos, then I'll be able to lift that stone up.

• 39:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your neighbours were looking, they're like, wow, he really cares about training to be a waiter.

• 39:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on. Sorry.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  You should see the back gardeners and shit, there's just, it's just a mud pit now this day. But um, I don't, I done the training, I trained for sixteen months and I went back to Inishmore. Now, in the meantime.

• 39:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a lot of pressure, man.

• 39:46Speaker 03

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

• 39:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  An academic and a strong man.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  This is what this, my life has been.

• 39:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm actually getting arrested with the guards. Where are you, I'm going to the Aran Islands with an academic and a strong man.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  To lift a stone.

• 40:04Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Oh, so stops over we fucking go, right? Over we go. I didn't even know where the fuck I was going with that now.

• 40:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sorry. You were going over to the Aran Islands, right? With an academic and a strong man and a boss.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Now, the week before Truburree went, both of the guys had been cancelled. So now, oh fuck, both have been cancelled and through very, very legitimate reasons. So I had to go over and now give a talk for fifteen minutes in front of the Limo Flaherty Society.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  And lift a fucking stone myself. Nation Idol coming over, TG Carver coming over, two documentary teams are coming over. There was four cameras, four boom mics and about a hundred islanders there and the Limo Flaherty Society.

• 40:54Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 40:56Speaker 03

  It hasn't been fucking lifted by anybody, right? No pressure lad. So.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  I go over and I didn't even plan that, I just went over and I just talked like I'm talking now. And I came across great, everyone was delighted with it. I gave about a five or ten minutes to chat about finding the stones and about Fiona on the island who started my whole journey, okay? Then a young lad came out and read the story of the stone at the stone itself, which was extremely emotional. Because you're sitting in the stone.

• 41:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 03

  You become, you become the story then, you know? And then I was sitting there and it was drifting away and there was like, right David, you're gonna lift it now. So get up, shake out your legs and pick up a hundred and seventy-one kilos of granite. So I leaned over it and I was thinking about the story, I was thinking about the last time I came here, the first time I came here, nobody gave a shit about stone lifting. Nobody cared. It was the first stone I'd found and now look at me. I have a hundred to a hundred and twenty people here, four cameras. Stone lifting is back, you better lift the fucking thing lad, you know what I mean? So I blow out my breath, I grab the stone, I lift it up to my lap. And the shout from the islanders.

• 42:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Up to your fucking lap.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Up to my lap. And they said, if a man could lift it up to his lap, he was a champion, equal to the best. So I could lift that stone to my lap. You.

• 42:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Lot of training, put on a lot of weight.

• 42:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah, you did, you, you, but. Like, okay, you, you mentioned at home, like, you've got your own stone and the kettlebells on it, but how do you prepare for the shave?

• 42:29Speaker 03

  See, I'm, I'm just out the back in the motor, I'm not using chalk, I'm just lifting this awkward stone. And there's kettlebells on it, which are awkward. So it's all shaking and moving.

• 42:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's why you're using the kettlebell.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it's all moving and shaking. It's silly, but it's like, no, you're, this is a balancing job here.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  You're fighting the whole thing as it's coming up. So it builds that.

• 42:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's fucking brilliant.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Like you say, you make do with what you have, you know? So the best part of this whole thing was I lifted that stone upright and I put it down. And everybody gave a big roar and was like, that's like the story. And this woman walks up to me in a red jacket and sunglasses and she gives me a cold and she's crying. I was like, are you okay? David, you know what you talked about Fiona, she said at the start. I'm Fiona, she said. I'm Fiona O'Flaherty. You're talking about my great grandfather. 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.

• 43:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, go away, yeah, fucking hell.

• 43:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And.

• 43:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause what, what I want to fucking. I love his bloody writing, but you're like, you, you can't really go out and buy a Liam O'Flaherty book. There's like, there's one little collection of shorts. This is like, you might have studied fucking a short story called The Sniper in, in the junior cert. And that's the only kind of one Liam O'Flaherty story that everybody knows, but. He founded the Irish Communist Party, like a, yeah, really fucking interesting person, really interesting. I don't know why. Like you, you just bring him up and not, not, you, you want to be deep into your Irish literature for people to know who he is, but he's incredible. I still like David Attenborough before David Attenborough as well, like his nature writing, fucking hell. But what I find so.

• 44:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's 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.

• 45:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they, so the, the memory, the, the state of Israel has done such a good job at erasing these people's history. That's they're struggling to find proof of these globally fame. 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 dad, who was only born in the 1930s, right?

• 45:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  My dad had an Uncle Jimmy who'd managed to travel to fucking England, right? And Jimmy had eaten an orange, right? And when they were kids, they, because it was Ireland, Ireland was, there was no fucking oranges in Ireland in 1930s, not down on West Cork. They used to go to, they were like five, six years of age and they'd go to their Uncle Jimmy and go, tell us what an orange is like. Tell us what it's like. And he'd be trying to explain this fruit that they'd never seen. Until eventually, eventually he just said, he took out his pocket watch and said, this is an orange, this is an orange, leave me alone. And then he fell asleep on the chair.

• 46:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, 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 on the ships and it wouldn't bruise. And that's the Jaffa orange and it's a Palestinian invention. And that's been erased. And the people in Palestine now, they had an old building and they took the facade of it. And underneath was this huge sign that was just Palestinian oranges and all the destinations that it was being sent to, you know? Yeah. Like, culture and erasure does happen.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  It does.

• 46:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's really, really sad because if you think.

• 47:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  First off, you have to, no, you're not picking up a fucking hundred and seventy kilogram stone if you're dying.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  But you can barely pick yourself up, exactly.

• 47:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  It's just gone.

• 47:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's gone.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  What I'm finding is there's 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 fifty years ago, but I just hit it now. And I'm after saving, like I said, forty-four stories. I can guarantee you, there's another forty-four at least out there that maybe we'll never find again. Because when I was over at the Limo Flaherty Stone, the first time, the man was like, I know the name of it, but there was an old lad living there. He's dead six months, he was ninety-two. He knew everything about that stone. He knew the genealogy, he knew the lineage of people lifting it. He knew everything about it, but he's dead now, so the stories are gone. So what I'm doing is I feel like I'm always part of the National Folklore Collection now. I'm going out, I'm finding these stories, I'm writing them down.

• 48:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, you're the part of military wing of the National Folklore Collection.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  That's the best description I've ever gotten, so thank you.

• 48:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're out there fucking, yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  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 probably noticed. And it's kind of a meaningless, shallow kind of society at the moment. Have you found that as well, like? So, social media is kind of.

• 48:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thing is, 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.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 gonna lift it, like you.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Everything else goes away.

• 49:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Saint Anthony works?

• 49:19Speaker 03

  It does, actually.

• 49:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  What? 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, I've since gotten an app called Tile, so he can go fuck himself. But before I got Tile, this podcast is sponsored by Tile, imagine that. Fuck Saint Anthony. But it used to work. If I lost something, I'd go for the Saint 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, now you asked Saint 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 restart into it.

• 50:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what actually happens is, is that when you go for the Saint 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.

• 50:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  But when I do the Saint Anthony, oh, Saint Anthony, please. And I'm using the complexity and the imagination to imagine some cunt called Anthony up in the clouds with wings. The practice of doing that actually fucking calms me down just enough where I get to go, ah, there it was, all along. And that's why the Saint Anthony thing works. Well, how the fuck did it get into this?

• 51:11Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 51:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hold on a second, I had a good point, man.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  It was mindfulness about the stone.

• 51:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, jeez, that storm is awful. So I decided.

• 51:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  You all know about the National Folklore Collection, dukas dot E D E. So this wonderful website, dukas dot E E, and it just, it contains all of our collected folklore. So when I'm bored, I type a word into it. So I type storms into dukas and then I'd never seen so many fucking responses. One particular storm called the, the big wind.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  The big wind, yeah.

• 52:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Night of the big wind, eighteen forty nine. Fucking loads. I had never seen such a huge result of folklore, because I've typed in fucking UFOs, uh, 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 nineteen fifty, the government went to every school child in Ireland and said, go to your village, speak to a really old person, ask him shit and write it down and we're gonna save it. So I think it was up in Cavan,

• 52:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  this girl went to a woman who was about ninety years of age and said, do you remember the night of the big fucking wind? And she's like, I don't, but my granny told me about it. And what she said was, the storm was so great that we were inland in a forest, miles away from the sea. But the storm was so great that the next day, the villagers, we all went up and we could lick sea salt off the bark of the tree. Now that's fucking beautiful because the thing is, I'm thinking now, I have Instagram, I'm not licking a fucking tree. Seriously, if a storm happens, I'm not going, oh god, that storm was great. I wonder what the trees taste like.

• 53:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  But if it's eighteen forty nine, like, you don't even, you don't even have a light switch. Of course you're licking the trees. What the fuck else are you gonna do? So the people are off licking the trees going, it tastes like the sea. It tastes like the sea. A beautiful, mindful thing to notice. Do you know what I mean? And, barracks anyway, I had a fucking pint.

• 53:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I had a fucking pint.

• 53:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Shit. That was good enough. You got a good fact there about licking salt off fucking trees.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  But what I want to say to you is, did you ever type in stone into Duquesne?

• 54:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  You get twenty-five thousand references to stone in Duquesne.

• 54:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I'm, Duquesne I'm assuming is a place that you go to, I'm conscious of time now, these people need a pint and a piss.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, let's let them have a pint and a piss before we start talking about folklore because it's too big.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  Sounds like a plan.

• 54:21Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 54:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Drain the devil's arse gland, you handstand anthony's. Um, I think now it's time for a little Ocarina pause. We'll throw in some, some adverts. I don't know what you're, I don't know what the adverts are. They're algorithmically generated. Everyone might get a different advert, but nonetheless, I'm gonna 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 tyres? Are you purchasing tyres? Mortgage arrears? Mortgage arrears? Whatever the fuck. You don't need that loud shit. So here, here's an Ocarina pause.

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• 57:15Speaker 01

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• 58:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 in- 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.

• 59:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you distraction, mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting the podcast directly. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is literally my job and I pay all my bills. I feed myself. I do everything from the money that I earn from Patreon. I rent out this office. If you support, if you subscribe on Patreon, you're literally paying for this podcast to get made.

• 1:00:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:00:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Advertisers have to do so at my discretion. I can tell advertisers to go fuck themselves. No advertiser can come in here and tell me what to speak about. They can't come near my content in any way whatsoever. I can say, no, you're not welcome. Go away. The most important thing for this podcast is that whatever I'm speaking about each week is what I'm genuinely passionate about. I'm not trying to think about how many listens I have. I'm not trying to think about the podcast going viral or being popular or any of that shit. This is a 90 minute podcast. Longer, it's probably gone into two hours. This is a long podcast where I'm speaking to

• 1:01:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  a man about lifting stones. I am genuinely fascinated by what David Kean is doing. I adore it. I love it. I love speaking to him and as you can tell by him, he loves doing it. You're just not going to get that on the radio or on television. You're not going to get it because an advertiser will come in and fuck it up. So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. Listen for free. You listen away for free. No problem. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a

• 1:01:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  living. It's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. Patreon.com forward slash the Blind Boy Podcast. And if you are contributing money to the Patreon, don't do it through the fucking Patreon app on your iPhone because Apple will take 30%. Go into the browser and access Patreon that way. Upcoming gigs. 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 Drahada, so come along if you're near Drahada. 28th of this month, I'm up in Belfast at the Waterfront Theatre. Very nearly sold out up there in

• 1:02:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  fucking Belfast. Then in March, Killarney, in the eye neck of a cracker of a guest for Killarney. You don't want to miss that. I don't want to say who the guest is. Then March, Cork Opera House on the 13th of March. Don't have a guest for that yet. All suggestions welcome. Who would you like me to speak to in Cork? Then my, my Australia and New Zealand tour, right? That's all sold out in, is that April? That's the end of March and the start of April. That's completely sold out, right? But Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth.

• 1:03:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Please suggest any, any, 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, 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.

• 1:04:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'd, I'd, I'd be worried about putting a gig on in Limerick, about selling it out. But fucking hell, Limerick Concert Hall, which is the biggest Limerick gig I've ever done, that's pretty much sold out now. So I'm looking forward to doing that. And then in June, my big giant tour of Scotland and England. So that's Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, Norwich, and Edinburgh is in there too. I know that tour is in June, which is a good few months away, but that's really setting 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

• 1:04:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  for tickets and you can get those tickets on fan.co.uk forward slash blind by. Like the podcast, subscribe to the podcast always on whatever app you're using. Leave a comment, leave a review and most importantly, tell a friend about the podcast. I've stopped remind, I haven't reminded people about this shit now it's in about a fucking year. I'm shit at self-promotion and plugging gigs, but any creator you like, independent creator, podcaster, whatever, musician.

• 1:05:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  One of the best things you can do is to simply tell a friend about that creator, just fucking WhatsApp them. My podcast is pure word of mouth. I think that's where most of my listeners come from. A friend told me. So let's get back to the chat with the magnificent David Keown. The second half, the second half is really, really interesting of this chat. Something I'd like to chat about too would be the, 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

• 1:05:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  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. The ditches, yeah. And you, you, the priest who was illegal, like Cromwell sent over lads whose job was called priest hunter, 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, 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,

• 1:06:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 we're trying to turn this into lamb land. So he sent over wolf hunters to kill all the wolves, but also.

• 1:07:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Irish rebels at the time would hide in the forests and they used to use the wolf as a guerrilla warfare symbol. You have these fearsome Irish animals that hide in the woods and strike and they would base themselves on these wolves. We're like the wolves fighting Cromwell's army. So Cromwell was like, a psychological warfare, I'm gonna 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 you 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.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  There was, there was one I found up in Denn, up in County, County Cavan. And it's called the Flags of Denn is the name of the stone in, in, in Ducas. If you type in D E N N in the Ducas, you get about 25 stories about this, these particular stones in Cavan. So this stone started off as a pagan cursing stone. If anyone ever know or heard of a cursing stone, a cursing stone was, and there's still loads of them around there and heaps of them. If you could turn this stone anti-clockwise, or if you could flip it over, you could lay a curse or a pitch oog against someone you didn't like. So like voodoo like, you could curse someone, you know?

• 1:08:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And did it require the strength?

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  This stone does because it weighs 251 kilos.

• 1:08:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  That's all, you wanna curse someone, get the strong lad down to do it literally for you at first, but.

• 1:08:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a bad one now, witches or something, not fucking Joe Rogan.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 1:09:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, that's what they did. That was like, consecration is a wonderful concept, like.

• 1:09:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, it's not the correct word. Pagan was, 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 manmade spaces.

• 1:09:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And within these manmade consecrated spaces, demons cannot enter. So in Ireland, what you see is holy wells. That was the whole crack in Ireland was 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, what's underneath the earth, only loads of fucking minerals. And this thing brings it up. So a lot of wells in Ireland are shool wells, so eye wells.

• 1:10:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  So there'd be a well in their 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 around wells?

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  Yes, there's a stone in County Kerry, down in Caoisveen, that I found. It was actually the first lifting stone found in County Kerry. I know there has to be heaps in Kerry, but this is the only one I've 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 Eire, the smallest of the Aran Islands, the lifting stone used to be beside the Holy Well as well.

• 1:11:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 Kookoan was lifting, didn't you?

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  I found one at Fionn McCool.

• 1:11:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of Fionn McCool?

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love this one. It's up in Seafin. Now, what I love about Irish is, right, Seafin literally translates to Seafin, Finn, Fionn McCool. So it's the seat of Fionn 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 Maherfelt up in Derry. So this used to be where Fionn McCool would sit and watch the hunt. So he'd sit up on the top of the mountain, and he'd watch Branagh School on gathering the deer for him. So this is where he used to be. So what I said was that from a sleeve galleon, Fionn McCool had thrown this massive stone in a fit of rage, and it landed up on top of, which is now called Seafin Hill, and it's called the Seafin Stone. So up on top of this

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  hill, which is just this green mound, and there's just garce bushes and mud, there's no stones anywhere, there's this pillar stone the size of me up on top of this hill. And the chieftains, back in the day, the old Irish chieftains, you used to have to ascend that hilltop with the clan, put their hand on the stone, and announce their 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 Fionn McCool threw it with it in magical properties. Now, I got up there at six o'clock in the evening, by right, and the sunlight was shining through, the golden, now they call it. And this stone is called a shist stone, it's silver. The sunlight was hitting this stone, and it was glowing amber. I was like, this thing

• 1:13:02Speaker 03

  is fucking magic. It's a magical stone. And it said, in O'Donovan's letter, it 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?

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  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 foot tall. It's about a foot and a half take each way. So you had to bear hug it.

• 1:13:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it liftable?

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  Yes, I lifted it, I said, fuck off.

• 1:13:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:13:37Speaker 03

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

• 1:13:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you put anything on your arms there or?

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Oh, my arms were tore off, but my arms are just, I'm just scars, legs, arms, I mean, fucking bits. But that's the price you pay for it, you know? But I went up with a film crew and I tried three times to lift it. Do you want your, I tried and I was like trying to lift a mountain, couldn't pick it up. And do you want someone gives you that kind of sideways kind of, I don't think he's going to do it. You see everybody can 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 Fionn McCool's hill, you're lifting Fionn McCool's stone. And I just felt this power coming through me. I went back, turn on that fucking camera. Picked up the stone about three inches off the ground and put it back down again.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  The people, they 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 my two days after that. But I lifted the fucking thing, didn't I?

• 1:14:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's fucking mad. And when you got sick there, is that, I've heard of a thing called squat flu. If someone squats too much, the next day you can experience like a flu like symptoms.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  It was like, yeah, just to see an S just shut down. It was like, you shouldn't have been able to lift a weight that big. Like 257, like.

• 1:15:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  No.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  It's an, it's an, it's over a quarter of a ton when you think about it, you know? So to be able to get that thing off the ground was. Like you said, I think I summoned the strength from somewhere else.

• 1:15:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was your psychological state that did that.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  Purely mental, because physically I tried three times and it wasn't happening. Psychologically, it just happened. I can't explain it.

• 1:15:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  How were you managing to do this without hurting yourself yet? Like, I mean, like you had, like.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  I know, I mean, I'm not a young man. I'm forty five 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.

• 1:15:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  But you must have savage fucking form and you must look after nutrition. You must try and look after sleep.

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  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 eleven to twelve hour sleep, this time of the year especially. I'm absolutely desperate, but the best recovery is nutrition and sleep. It's the best recovery. So that's what I do and it's, it's, it's working. I work on a lot. I, 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 Nile in the engine, you know? So mobility, sleep and eating and it seems to be working so far.

• 1:16:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And do you ever worry about, uh, your, the, the, 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?

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a lot of emotion present.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  Massive.

• 1:16:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, uh, a year basically on his back because he was doing this particular type of exercise with a barbell called a good morning.

• 1:17:07Speaker 03

  Another one's.

• 1:17:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. So he did that and he was overconfident and he went to that ten of them with no fucking warm up and nearly paralyzed himself.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And. When he was writing about that, he was like, emotion did that to me. I wasn't thinking, I just fuck it. I went at it and nearly paralyzed himself. How do you navigate that?

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  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. Now I could have paid a hell of a lot.

• 1:17:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  A much heavier price, yeah.

• 1:17:34Speaker 03

  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 up something that you can't pick up.

• 1:17:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are you making an argument for basically where you have something like a barbell that's man-made?

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  This natural, organic thing, you have to find a way first. So it will actually keep you a little bit safe.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's like I said, stones are self-regulating, barbells aren't, especially when you use straps. You're, you're picking up something that's actually heavy and you can grip it.

• 1:18:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or even the straps that the lads.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  I wear those, I wear those, yeah.

• 1:18:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's, what's the point of that?

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  It just, it kind of keeps your insides from coming on the outsides, you know?

• 1:18:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't find a fucking prolapse in your rectum.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  No, because you can't be, because if you, if you think, like anything, if you think I can't do it, you're not going to fucking do it, are you? If you think you can and you think you can't, you're right. So like, if you're going to think that's going to come up and there's no two ways about it, I'm just going to do it. And then it does. But you always know, if it's too heavy, I'm just not going to be able to lift it.

• 1:18:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  How much of this is your, your cognitive assessment of the stone? Your, your mind looking at it and going, I reckon, or, or can you?

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Straight away.

• 1:18:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just, no, that's, that's risky, that's risky.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Straight away. Cause I train on the beach. I train in Ben Vai Beach at Waterford.

• 1:19:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you ever just look at any old stone?

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  All the time. I'm stone mad, just.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  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 crackly. But I train on the beach and you know straight away because Benway 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. I'll 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, I get a lifting stone and it's happened. I've gone to lifting stones and I can't lift them. There's only two mine out of 44.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Has there been, ever been a stone, right, where you learned how to lift this by listening to stories from the locals?

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  I'm trying to think. Yes, yes. I went to a stone in Carna, which is in West Galway. Stone called Cluckna Arkeen and the Arkeen is a cove, a closed cove where a crump on would be an open cove. So Cluckna Arkeen. So the men used to come off, when they used to go to the islands, bringing out turf and they'd bring sea beet back. So the fishermen used to lift this stone as a test of strength. Now it's shaped, what I love about it is a fisherman's stone and it's shaped like a whale's back. So it's kind of tapered at the end and it comes up and down like that. Like a, 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 fur. But where the stone is, all that's chopped away and the stone's like an egg in a nest just sitting there.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  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 grandad lifted it.

• 1:21:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he looks after the stone like a grave.

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  Exactly. There's a slash hook on the back of the wall. And he said, when that starts getting overgrown, I just cut all that away. So the stone is just sitting there on 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 a stone because he was like, I was trying to lift it from the back. I was trying to lift in the middle, but because it's all the, the weight is at the top of it, because it's shape. No, he said, you have to lift it almost at the very, very top because I was just going wrong.

• 1:21:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  What age was this man when he was talking to you?

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  Seventy-six.

• 1:21:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he's talking about when I, when I could lift this stone.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  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 all, and 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 garage car and everyone just stood around watching. So, and then he showed me how to lift it because I was lifting it wrong. And it was just to get the wind under it, because this stone, it's a huge stone. And I said, all you have to do is get the wind under it or get the guefui 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, mahan far, you know, man bukal.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:22:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Isn't that beautiful too?

• 1:22:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because.

• 1:22:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  And again, it's, it's, thinking about tradition. You'd imagine that man would be like, fuck off, I lifted that, this is my legacy.

• 1:22:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it could have been.

• 1:22:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the thing is, that's, that's a very selfish, capitalistic way of looking at things. And that community might not have had that, like, like, there's a thing in Ireland called Mehl, it's Mehl, isn't it?

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  It's a Mehl, yeah.

• 1:23:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when you have that, you tend to have cultures that are a little bit more considerate of other people. It's, you saw it during the fucking pandemic. Countries where rice was being grown, they were just good at wearing masks. But then you go to the West for, but I'm serious. When you had potatoes and you had wheat being grown, it's like you can grow that yourself. So you tend to get a little bit more.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  Insular, yeah.

• 1:23:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  A selfishness. And in Ireland, we had this mel thing. And especially in communities around the west of Ireland where everyone gets stuck in. So that fella there, you're not a threat.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:24:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're not taking anything from him.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  You're passing, he's passing that to me. And I'm reaching out to the next person to pass it on to them.

• 1:24:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you have to go and clean it now, though? But that's the.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  It's a five and a half hour fucking journey. I think he's two hundred yards away, he can do that himself.

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  But you were talking about the mel, was the mel done around kind of harvest time then, was it?

• 1:24:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think, does anyone know about mel? I probably shouldn't ask a room of fucking twelve hundred people that.

• 1:24:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:24:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Was it Tarf, was this? Tarf.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  Tarf.

• 1:24:40Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  Because I was thinking like, the reason I asked for harvest was, there's a stone attached to the harvest festival of Lunasa up in County Tyrone. It was only lifted once a year on the Feast of Lu. So that goes, you think like Lunasa, you think Charlton 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 a hundred and twenty seven kilos there recently. But I said, no one has lifted this in living memory.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  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 McGork. Come up, he said, I've got a great story for you. So he went and he told me all about this harvest festival, the Feast of Lu. I went into the coffee shop to meet him and the coffee shop was packed, right? Packed with people. So jeez, this place is doing some business on a Saturday, like, right? So it's like, we got to chatting, but he came in and it was like, uh, I said, jeez, there's some other people. 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're on blind, but I said, I was, yeah. Can we come up and watch you lift it? Yeah. So whole, the half the fucking villagers are coming up the side of the hill to watch me lift this stone because it hadn't been lifted in living memory. And this old lad, the farmer was there. So I remember my granddad telling me about men lifting the stone, he said.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  But he said, I'd never seen it lifted. So he just, when he was in his eighties, 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 smigay, he said. You had to smigay the stone, he said. Smigay means chin it, 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.

• 1:26:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, fuck me.

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  Isn't that unbelievable? So if you could. There you go. And it's still alive and the language is still there through it. So I picked that stone up, up to my chin and they were absolutely fucking delighted. And now I've been told by Daniel that there's people going there every week to go lift that stone now. And all it took was someone like, like a mad fucking lunatic like me going finding these things just to light the touch paper. And now every week I'm getting fifteen, twenty photographs, videos of men and women going lifting these stones every week. The culture is back. It's back and it's flying.

• 1:27:30Speaker 03

  Cause.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Cause 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. And I was like, yeah, they are and they're loving it.

• 1:27:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something I said backstage that I want to talk to about, uh, out here was, so like, it hasn't gone mainstream yet, but when Brazy starts talking about it.

• 1:27:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I haven't thought, I'm surprised.

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  You're fucking tonal about it.

• 1:27:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know, but I'm surprised. I know, but Bresy's got a different ear. Bresy has a different ear. I've got, I don't think any fucking NCAD students are gonna go up and start lifting the fucking stone. But the people who listen to Bresy will. But at some point, right, it's, it's competitive. You know what I mean? It's competitive. It's simple. It's traditional. This is going to go fucking mainstream with the type of people who are going to the fucking, it's influencers. Influencers, give it two fucking years, influencers in Ireland, they're going to be doing this and they're gonna Peaky Blinders this. Okay? But the thing is, I don't think it should be policed.

• 1:28:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  As in, the temptation is to go, ah, don't do it like that. No, no, don't do, don't do it like that. Um, you have to let it, you have to let it be organic. If, if they wanna fucking do it and they wanna Instagram it and they wanna 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.

• 1:29:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  You tell the story whatever way it 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.

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  Now, I don't care about someone Instagramming or speaking in a South Dublin accent. If that's what they wanna do, that's grand. The only thing I, I'm worried about is lift the stones with respect. Lifting 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 your head and let them drop and fall down and break because you're breaking a national monument. Lift them with respect and after that, lift them anywhere you like.

• 1:30:02Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:30:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  If this, if part of the story of this stone doesn't say, put it above your head, there's probably a reason because people have been doing this for 500 years. So you mean that there's a story, like you were talking about with the fellow who came down and said, you have to lift it this way.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. There's that part of it and you just don't want to break it. It happened in Scotland 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, I can't forget, I can't remember the name now, but it was one of the Wallace, I think it was the Wallace putting stone it was called. So it had massive history attached to it and then it's broken and it's fucked, it's 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.

• 1:30:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And none of these stones are protected. You can just like, you know what I mean?

• 1:31:00Speaker 03

  No, you can just rock up and do it, 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?

• 1:31:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I have to ask, like, someone tried to lift one of these stones when they were drunk.

• 1:31:21Speaker 03

  Hundred percent, because loads of them were outside pubs.

• 1:31:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Really?

• 1:31:28Speaker 03

  There's one in Kilkenny called The Bulk, right?

• 1:31:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  The stone is called The Bulk?

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  The Bulk. What a name, right?

• 1:31:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Brilliant.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  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 has kind of sailed into the roundabout. But so what used to happen was the men had come out of, because the church is there, right? They come out of the church, they go to the pub, they'd have about five or six bottles. Then it'd be like, I'm going to lift the fucking stone. No, you're not. Yes, I fucking am. He'd come out and a fellow tried to lift the stone and he could fuck himself up because he's full of bottles, right?

• 1:32:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:02Speaker 03

  So what happened was they actually put the stone and panted it into the roundabout so no one could lift it because the lads were just getting too drunk and rowdy. So thankfully I got that thing taken out by the lad who panted it, actually his, his son. And he said, I'll let you lift it under supervision. Not full of bottles, I was thinking that makes a lot of sense. But what this, this stone tradition was, and it's the only one in Ireland, you had 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 was a hundred and, it was a hundred and twenty five kilos. It's kind of like the Húsafell stone up in Iceland. Um, you had to walk it around the gold pen.

• 1:32:46Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  Oh hugely so, the Basque, they still do stone lifting festivals, um, multiple times a year.

• 1:32:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the Irish came from the Basque region?

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  We have to have, I mean, the Basque region, you have, it's in Wales. There's a guy called Callum Stott who's starting to find it now in England as well, in North England. It's massive in Scotland, you have the Clockwood, the Manwood stones. They're a little bit lighter, but it was buys a fourteen to sixteen year old, had to lift a stone to become a man. I love that.

• 1:33:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But I'm assuming too, like Stonehenge, right? In England, so someone was lifting stones.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  How the folk to back it up there?

• 1:33:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Exactly. But like, this was very widespread, I'm imagining. Anytime, because the other thing you said to me too is that this, there was also a very practical, uh, 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.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  Oh totally.

• 1:33:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  This was like your job interview.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  The stone, the stone mason's test on Irish man was the job interview. If you could pick that stone up and put it on the wall, you're, you're strong enough to be amazing.

• 1:33:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what is that stone like?

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  It's, it's a granite stone against a pink granite stone again. And you had to be able to put it up onto this dry stone wall. And I went out there recently and brought a tour out there, we'd, we'd eighteen men went out. And I think all of us, bar two or three, done that.

• 1:34:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it a difficult stone?

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  It, well, it, it, it's, it's one of the lighter ones, but it's still like, the lighter ones in Ireland is a hundred and twenty five kilos. It's, it's still big, you know? So, and you're in the grass and it's pissing rain because it's an Irish man. So up it goes onto the wall and then you, then you could learn to be amazing. There's wonderful ones over in Iceland called the Dritvik stones, which were the fisherman's stones. There was four stones. If you could lift, say, the second stone was like fifty four kilos, if you could lift that, you got a quarter of she had a catch. If you could lift the, 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 the full stoker. Full strong, you're a full strong man, at a hundred and fifty four kilos, then you get a full share to catch.

• 1:34:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  So everyone goes out on the boat, they cast a net, they catch a lot of fish. And then the amount of fish you get, depending on how well you could lift a fucking stone.

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  Yes, because you're strong. So the stronger man was put in the middle of the boat.

• 1:35:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they need more fish.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  He needs more fish and he's stronger or so he's put in the middle of the boat. There's always reasons. There you go.

• 1:35:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, would you go away? So how do you decide on a boat, who's the str- well, if he can lift that stone, then he rode better than you, so shut up, he's getting more fish.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  Exactly, what are you gonna do then?

• 1:35:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's brilliant.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  So there's all of these, there's the same as.

• 1:35:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sounded unfair, but now it's like, no, this is the way of figuring out.

• 1:35:30Speaker 03

  He's working harder because he's in the middle.

• 1:35:33Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  I'm sure there's always ways around everything. But yeah, so like there were job interviews, there were rites of passage, you know? The same thing in Sweden, you had the farm man hands testing stones, so whatever stone you could lift, you got more money. So it was just these, in these simpler times, without any mechanical aids, it was a way to show your power and your strength was your worth.

• 1:36:01Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Definitely, because that stonemasons testing stone, I was like, because I knew about the stones in Tredvik. 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 we went over to Inishman, and just through pure fluke, by being on the boat, I'd heard there was a stone in Inishman. 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 Inishman. We don't know, he said, but you see the lad asleep down the back with the dog across his lap? Meehol, yeah, we called him the king of the island. Go down and ask the king, he said, and he'll know.

• 1:36:57Speaker 03

  So I went down on it, he was sitting asleep, I said, I'm not weighing him up. So the cabin fellow goes down and gives him a poke in the arm. Meehol, yeah, so, you know, your man here looking for the stone. Oh, I know where that is, he said, yeah, sure, I'll give you a lift. So I would hop off the boat, get into this strange man's car. Don't do this at home, kids.

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  And he takes me to this lifting stone and he's like, this is the stone that the stone masons used to lift. And he gave me the whole story and it was just pure fluke that I met this guy. In the, 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's just seems to be just flowing and flowing and flowing. Cause when I was on Inishmore, 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 lifting stones. Can you please help me?

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Two days later, I got a call about Inishman. And then it's just been 44 found from a tradition that was dead. So I really feel that that small act of humility and asking permission has had to kind of guide me along the way, if that makes sense.

• 1:38:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  And your job is you, you, you.

• 1:38:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:38:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  You, you have a shop.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  I don't have a shop. I work in a shop.

• 1:38:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  So how do you manage to lift stones around working in the shop?

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  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 or strength on this fucking island.

• 1:38:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, fucking fair play, you know what I mean?

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  So imagine what I could fucking do if I was doing this for a living.

• 1:39:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:39:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because it's the type of thing that's, 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.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  I'd fucking love it.

• 1:39:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  I'd love that, to be honest. It'd be my dream to just say, look.

• 1:39:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you ever considered doing it as a master's or a PhD, a practice based?

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  I was looking about, actually, Irish mythology.

• 1:39:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, down in UCC?

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah, fucking hell.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  I was looking at that.

• 1:39:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  But practice based, I don't, is that an MA or an MSC?

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  It's an MA.

• 1:39:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if you do an MA, you could probably do it as a practice based MA.

• 1:40:00Speaker 03

  Couldn't do.

• 1:40:00Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:40:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, like, that is just the best day ever for me. The best day ever for me would be to go out. Because that's what I've done, I've written a 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 with that. I'm delighted, I'm actually, because for me, it's about getting the stories out there. That's all I want to do. I've become kind of de facto, getting a little bit of fame and notoriety through this as well, which is weird. Because I still work in a fucking shop, you know? Lads come in, like, there's 20 people buying paint and then one of us saying, are you Indiana Stones? I said, yeah.

• 1:40:47Speaker 03

  Makes me a buck in a magnolia, will you? You know what I mean? But it's weird, it's a weird double life, you know? During the weekend, 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.

• 1:41:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know how it is, man, I have a bag in my head.

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  It's been mentally weird to jog it, to be honest with you. Um, 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, forty-four and two and a half years, part-time. Imagine what you could do.

• 1:41:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, completely, completely. Um, just to have some infrastructure behind it, to be recording it.

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what I mean? And the, the, the thing is too, you're in a race against time in a sense because

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 1:41:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  there's going to be older people and they're going to die with knowledge of stones.

• 1:41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, that's really what you're up against.

• 1:41:42Speaker 03

  That's what you, you ask.

• 1:41:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Some of the people you're speaking to are very old.

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  Oh, look, there's nobody who has lifted these stones is under seventy, you know?

• 1:41:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Jesus.

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  So you're running out of time, like you said, you're at the tail end of this. In another ten years, it would have been gone entirely and it would have never been talked about again.

• 1:41:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you have any, like, we spoke about the impact of the famine, okay? But clearly it didn't disappear completely.

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:42:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  There was something happening maybe sixty, seventy years ago, more. When do you think it really disappeared?

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  Well, like I said, we, we could hammer on the English a lot and they fucking deserve it, right? But, um, I think industrialization, modernization, the widening of roads, especially the tarmac of the roads. Because a lot of these stones were crossroads, loads. I've only found one crossroad stone and I've, I've read about thirty-five stories in the uk of crossroad stones. But because they were just widening the roads, they either break the stone up and put it into the road or fuck it over the hedge and just forgotten.

• 1:42:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  You know, so.

• 1:42:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because of where they were.

• 1:42:46Speaker 03

  So that's why I'm not finding stories all over Ireland. But ninety percent of the stones are middle of Ireland going west, purely because of the landscape and because of the land itself. If there's more arable fertile land over here, it's just going to be turned into farmland. And all of these old stones, it's always just going to get fucked away. Whereas the stories over here, it's just another stone in the field of stones. So it's generally left alone, you know?

• 1:43:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's amazing. Um, fucking hell. Just thinking there about the roads. Cause the, the, there's a, there's a small positive with the roads in Ireland, which is. So obviously you're looking for stones. Yeah. There's other people looking for forests. Like Ireland was once a fucking forest. It's hard to believe we were once a rainforest. You can see it in the fucking names. Dera, dairy means loads of fucking oak. Yeah. Uh, Mayo means plain of, uh, yew. Yeah. 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, like Mancon.

• 1:43:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mancon goes up and down looking, where can I find a little patch of forest so that I can, cause the import, the import, you can't just fucking plant trees. You can't just guess Irish oak and Irish yew and plant this. You kinda need the, the mycelium that's in the soil as well. It's not just the fucking tree. Yeah. So you have to try and find a little untouched bit, bit of ancient forest. That's kinda 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 battered their fucking hole to go near. If you go looking in there, it's like, ah, this could be maybe nine hundred years old. I found one in Ireland. Did you? Yeah.

• 1:44:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Beside a hotel called the Absolute Spa.

• 1:44:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, I did a whole pocket, man. So listen, during the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, right?

• 1:44:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was researching, during, during the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, we had a few nightclubs, right? There were so many nightclubs, like fucking Jordan. Jordan had her hen party in, in, in Limerick, like. Um, that's some fucking boats. You're up to say.

• 1:45:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dublin with your Lewis. You know, Jordan, man, she, she had a fucking hen party in Limerick in 2002. But during the Celtic Tiger, you remember the nightclubs? I do, mate. 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 gonna have a spa in it as well.

• 1:45:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, Limerick were just, no, no, no. No. We're not having a fucking hotel called the Absolute Spa. So it lasted, like, it was there for, I'd say for about two weeks and they just were so sorry. 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, what I do is. I understand, don't worry. Yeah. I was, I was following the old, um, I love old city walls.

• 1:46:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  So the thing is with ancient walls of any city, you almost 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. So they got the bodies and they fucked them over the, 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. Yeah. There it is, just tiny little patch.

• 1:47:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this led me then to. What I saw in the middle of it was a piece of fucking giant hogweed.

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  Oh, that dirty hogweed.

• 1:47:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, the stuff that can blind you.

• 1:47:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it led me to a fucking interesting theory. So another website that I love, you've got dukest.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 of wolves in Ireland was sometime around, I think it was seventeen oh nine. 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.

• 1:48:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  You've got very, very old sightings of wolves. And then as the Brits colonize, it's thi- this town was massacred, some wolves were sighted eating corpses. When people caught the wolves, they were gone because they were hidden away.

• 1:48:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that was fascinating because we're seeing this pattern. But then I went looking for giant hogweed. So giant hogweed, it's it's massive. Um, if you touch it, like it will blind you, like 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.

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Fuck.

• 1:48:58Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Go away.

• 1:49:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I I started calling giant hogweed Protestant footsteps.

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  Lover.

• 1:49:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's because in in um, there's some indigenous American tribes. So we have a. What's the fucking yellow shit that makes you piss? The, the yellow flower?

• 1:49:27Speaker 03

  Dandelions.

• 1:49:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dandelions?

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  So dandelions all over Europe, right? They're, 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, is near. So they started to call dandelions white man's footsteps.

• 1:50:01Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 1:50:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, it's a marker of wealth. So what happened with giant hogweed is that the Protestants colonized around fifteen, sixteen hundreds. But everywhere they colonized, they had quite a bit of money and estates. So in the Victorian times, they brought this hogweed over from Afghanistan because it looked beautiful. But then they put it on their lands because they had the money and there, that's how you see it. But then they figured out, oh, this thing is actually great for keeping people away. So instead of building a fence, let's do chemical warfare.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  Fucking hell.

• 1:50:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  But another, it led me on to a fucking mad one. Have you heard of, um, what's it called? Is it Japanese knotweed? What's that?

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:51:01Speaker 03

  Fuck.

• 1:51:02Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:51:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 i- 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.

• 1:51:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:51:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it grows everywhere, right? But here's the thing. Japanese knotweed only started becoming a, an invasive species and a serious problem from about the nineteen seventies onwards, right? Everywhere in, 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, and all these toxic metals. But Japanese knotweed grew in the toxic metallic soils of, of volcanoes. It loves it, that's what it does. People in Japan eat it. But what did Reagan and Thatcher do?

• 1:52:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  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, where they had the, the Olympics. This is where Japanese knotweed is growing. Japanese knot, knotweed is confusing farmer 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.

• 1:52:38Speaker 03

  I love your brain, I love your brain, to be honest.

• 1:52:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thank you, it's called autism.

• 1:52:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  But um, yeah, it's nuts, but the, 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 you, if there is, it's a cunt, like if you, if you get Japanese knotweed, you're not getting rid of it. Like it's, you gotta get professionals in. But it does clean toxic metals from the soil, you know? How the fuck do we get into this?

• 1:53:14Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:53:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what? You were telling me backstage, right? Cause you were saying that you've got, you've got kids, right?

• 1:53:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:53:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you were saying your oldest is nineteen.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:53:23Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:53:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  But you told me he wants to be a microbiologist.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  He does.

• 1:53:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when he gets into microbiology, then he's gonna start getting interested in stones.

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  I hope so.

• 1:53:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, stones and, and like I said, the holy wells.

• 1:53:46Speaker 03

  The minerals.

• 1:53:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 cured of properties as a result of some bacteria that's living in the soils.

• 1:54:05Speaker 03

  I've come across this on Duke's a good bit as well.

• 1:54:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go away, really?

• 1:54:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, the balon stones, the balon stones are the cure to properties as well.

• 1:54:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's the balon stone?

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

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

• 1:54:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are some lifting stones also balon stones?

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  There was only one, there was one I found, but I mean, I don't want people out there lifting balon stones. They're not meant to be lifted, they're, they're national monuments. It's like, don't fucking lift them, just go and have a look at them. But there was, there was one on Inishboffin that was a balon stone that was lifted. That was the one I said was lifted onto the altar, remember that one?

• 1:54:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, fuck, yeah. Tell us about that.

• 1:54:41Speaker 03

  So there was like in, in a monastery, there's an old monastery on Inishboffin. And it's, it's a ruin, but there's this big balon 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 like a conduit to deities for thousands of years, up onto the Catholic altar. They're looking through the window back at Cro 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, Cro Patrick, you know? And then I was thinking Cro Patrick wasn't always called Cro Patrick, it was called Cro Crom, wasn't it?

• 1:55:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Crom was like a, an evil god of the sea.

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  You cro, 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 would say it must be fucking pre-Christian.

• 1:55:40Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:55:52Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:55:53Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:55:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're during the fucking big freeze that happened a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:56:18Speaker 03

  Worship site, yeah.

• 1:56:19Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, but then as soon as I saw the fucking tomato bridge in Drumcondra, I started going, I wonder if there are any holy wells nearby and there fucking is three minutes up the road in Drumcondra.

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  Go away.

• 1:56:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause Drumcondra is a fucking housing estate.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  So there was a holy well there called Saint Catherine's Well. And you know how they know it was pre-Christian? Because it's a curative well that cures coughs, but it only works when you drink the water from a human skull. So up in Drum, but this thing could be thousands of fucking years old because the thing with Drumcondra, there was five roads that led out of Tara and Drumcondra was on a one of them. So there's this, 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.

• 1:57:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And now they've covered it away now. So when you go to Saint 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 pegged. And 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.

• 1:57:55Speaker 03

  It comes out, like I said, it comes out in cycles.

• 1:57:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Doesn't it? We're kind of, it's kind of a cyclical nature. And what I'm finding as well is that there's this whole kind of teleuric, like from the earth upswelling of love for Irish culture. Coming back now, I don't know if you're all feeling that, 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.

• 1:58:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  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'd 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, and, 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, and 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.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  The stones are the same way.

• 1:59:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  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.

• 1:59:18Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:59:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  No.

• 1:59:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um. I think it's half ten, it's a Monday night, these people have got beds to go to. I'm gonna open up the floor for some audience questions. Uh, can we bring the house lights up slightly?

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  Hello, um, I'm from Scotland, so I'm really interested in what's your favorite story of a stone from Scotland? And what's your favorite stone that you've visited in Scotland? My favorite story of a stone in Scotland is the Fianna Stone. So the Fianna Stone, to become a member of the Fianna in Scotland, you had to be able to lift the Fianna Stone to chest. Walk at the length of your kilt with just 10 feet and put it onto a plinth. You also had to be able to run under a sword held at chest height without breaking stride. And you had to be able to jump, broad jump at the length of your kilt. So agility, strength and balance. But the Fianna Stone is there in Glen Laine in Scotland, it's a beautiful, beautiful place. And you can go lift, anyone can go lift and visit that stone.

• 2:00:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are the Scots better at hugging on to this stuff than we are?

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  Peter Martin went and found this culture 15 years ago. Before that, there was only two lifting stones known in Scotland. There were the Dilly Stones and the Inver 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.

• 2:00:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's the same crack. He went and spoke to the people.

• 2:00:59Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:01:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you ever speak to, because you know too, like there's people who do this with music.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:01:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, I mean, an important thing with like, Ireland used to have a fucking, a classical music on the harp. The harp was banned sometime in the 1500s.

• 2:01:25Speaker 03

  And the pipes, yeah.

• 2:01:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the pipes. And you lose song. And then what comes out of that, when you take the instruments away, that's where you get lilting. That's where you get diddly diddle do. It's, I don't have my fucking 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.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  That's wonderful.

• 2:01:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a tough one.

• 2:01:46Speaker 03

  It's absolutely.

• 2:01:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, the beauty of what you're doing is, it's hard to get rid of a stone.

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  They're remarkable.

• 2:01:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's so much out there.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  They're there.

• 2:01:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  You lose the stories, but you want.

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  The story's gone, but all you need to do is find the person with the story.

• 2:02:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  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?

• 2:02:10Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  It has to have a story attached to it. Other than that, it's just a stone.

• 2:02:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you ever come across a stone going, come on, I know you're a lifting stone. I know, but it looks at you.

• 2:02:24Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:29Speaker 03

  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, oral culture, the story is the important.

• 2:02:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  I wonder you're gonna get a few bullshitters.

• 2:02:52Speaker 03

  You can guarantee it. There's a fellow tried, a couple of people have tried and you'd know straight away. There's a fellow had a lifting stone down in a caravan, so I didn't make sure. And literally, he was after rolling it and the, the grass was bent where he was after rolling it. It's been here for thousands of years.

• 2:03:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just taking the piss.

• 2:03:11Speaker 03

  Just taking the piss, 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. Cause it was a story written 90 years ago, but I think their people were more genuine.

• 2:03:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it's a tall.

• 2:03:25Speaker 03

  You're going on faith, you have to go on faith.

• 2:03:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, that's the thing, like when you're reading folklore as well, like I, I, I found stories about fucking UFOs and Conor MacNeice and the like. Someone was having the, had taken the piss, you know what I mean?

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  Maybe there was.

• 2:03:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, there could have been. Um, any other questions? Yonder, hold on.

• 2:03:47Blindboy Boatclub?

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

• 2:03:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Charming beard.

• 2:03:59Speaker 06

  I, um, I know in Irish mythology, the two that did it on, they brought like, one of the gifts was like a big stone that stood at the hill of Tara.

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  That's the lea fall, yeah?

• 2:04:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. And would that have been one of the lifting stones as well? Cause I know it spoke to the person, so it was one of the.

• 2:04:13Speaker 03

  I don't, I, I've been to visit that stone and I put my hand on it. I didn't cry out. I was very fucking disappointed. But, um, it's massive. I'd say it must weigh maybe 1500 to 2000 kilos. So Sean McCool might live to buy, certainly fucking won't.

• 2:04:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I'm thinking as well though, right? Cause 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 and they do it.

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the fact that it's so big and so impossible is part of, cause what I love about Irish mythology is that the hyperbole, the massive big lies, the big, big exaggerations. So to go, that stone there was lifted by Kukulla. That's the size of a house. I know. So strong, the fucking rock of Cashel. You know, the rock of Cashel, it's like a mountain and there's a castle on it. There's a story there that's, I think it was Cú Chulainn, I think it was, Cú Chulainn got into a fight with the, no, no, no. There's the devil's bit. 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.

• 2:05:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the story goes is that Cú Chulainn got into a fight with the devil, beat the devil. And the devil was so pissed off that he went, fuck you, Cú Chulainn. 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.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  I fucking love all this.

• 2:05:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't care if it's not true. But isn't that, what a story.

• 2:05:43Speaker 03

  But it's brilliant. But see, there's, there's about thirty Fionn's throwing stones in Ireland.

• 2:05:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  What were his throwing stones?

• 2:05:50Speaker 03

  There were like these massive glacier erratic sitting in the field, totally out of place. So there's heaps of them. I think every village in Ireland has a, has a stone that was thrown by Fionn McCool.

• 2:06:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Actually, this is what I'm fucking, this is what's giving me a mind horn now. We once had a fucking glacier and I remember from junior science. About glaciers, I had a teacher called John Looby. The glacier used to come down, it would split the rock.

• 2:06:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the glaciers, the ice used to strip the rock and leave all, so, 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, 10,000 years ago. Humans were there and these humans were the exact same as me and you. They could, 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?

• 2:07:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, you know, the, the North Sea gas field?

• 2:07:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:07:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  So ju- just between the top of England and Denmark, there's the North Sea gas field, like.

• 2:07:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Nine thousand years ago, that was an area called Doggerland. That was a place, it was a forest. Nine thousand 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.

• 2:08:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 old?

• 2:08:23Speaker 03

  They were, because a lot of the lifting stones, all the stones on the islands are all glacial eratics. They're all pink stones that aren't native to the landscape.

• 2:08:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  That don't, that they belong where?

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  They were brought up.

• 2:08:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, wow.

• 2:08:35Speaker 03

  So they were moved. First of all, the glaciers-

• 2:08:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  The stone, and that's why the queer stone is here.

• 2:08:40Speaker 03

  That's why it's here.

• 2:08:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck.

• 2:08:42Speaker 03

  And that's why they stand out and that's why they were lifted.

• 2:08:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 2:08:45Speaker 03

  Isn't this what goes all the way back?

• 2:08:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the glaciers are like 20, 30,000 years old.

• 2:08:50Speaker 03

  And they moved it first. They lifted them first and now we're lifting them.

• 2:08:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ah, isn't that fucking brilliant?

• 2:08:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, I'm gonna take one more. I'm conscious of people's bosses, right? So I'm gonna take one more question up here.

• 2:09:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hi. Hello, sir. A question and a thought, I've got two questions, but just on the lifting- Greedy cunt, a question and a thought. Go on. Um, on the lifting of the stones, do you put-

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  Need to put it down slowly or do you just kind of drop it? On up. Like I said, it's all about the respect, you know? If you can lift it up, you can put it down slowly as well. Fair enough.

• 2:09:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow, okay.

• 2:09:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:09:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, cause you know the like, any gym you go to, there's a sign on the wall for the lads who fucking drop the bar.

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  Don't drop the fuck on barbed, exactly.

• 2:09:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that's the same with the.

• 2:09:50Speaker 03

  It's the same thing, just be mindful of them or I'll fucking hunt you down.

• 2:09:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what was the, what was the thought that you had?

• 2:09:55Speaker 03

  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. The experience, that's kind of thoughts. Exactly, and it's, it's wonderful to see it along the way, continue, you know?

• 2:10:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, and, on the subject of that, it's, it's, it's not just, uh, they tried to take this from us. It's like, none of that, there was a fucking famine and people died and it got lost and that, that, that's very sad, you know? So it, it's, it's wonderful to, to remember it and bring it, bring back something so class, you know?

• 2:10:33Speaker 03

  I should, I mean, it's an absolute honour.

• 2:10:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:34Speaker 03

  It's an absolute honour and to see it flourish is more than I could ever imagine, you know?

• 2:10:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I'm gonna let you go in peace and get your buses and go to bed. David Cowan, Indiana Stones, thank you so much for the wonderful night. Dog bless everybody.

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 2:10:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, I enjoyed that chat. I really enjoyed that. I have some, I have a few note 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 hurtling towards, we're hurtling towards nice fucking long evenings. Nice long evenings and decent weather. I'm dreaming about May. I think May is my favourite month.

• 2:11:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  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 burrow, but they do love to be under things, where you'd find woodlice.

• 2:12:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  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. Um, 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.

• 2:12:58Speaker 06

  The quarter pounder with cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke and hopefully a lot of napkins, all for $8. Ba da ba ba ba.

• 2:13:12Speaker 01

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  The