The Monumental and Domestic Architecture of Neolithic Scotland

Tristan Hughes goes on a road trip of a lifetime to discover more about the mysteries of prehistoric Scotland.

In Part one, Tristan heads to Orkney to investigate its astonishing 5,000 year old Stone Age remains.

In Part two, Tristan sees the beautiful carvings of adult red deer, the first animal representations in Scotland. This is just one of the remarkable finds in one of the most extraordinary prehistoric landscapes in Scotland: the magical and mysterious Kilmartin Glen.

In Part three, Tristan ventures across Scotland to investigate prehistoric skyscrapers - brochs.

Included in the documentary is the absolutely incredible Maeshowe. Maeshowe (or Maes Howe; Old Norse: Orkahaugr) is a Neolithic chambered cairn and passage grave situated on Mainland Orkney, Scotland. It was probably built around 2800 BC. In the archaeology of Scotland, it gives its name to the Maeshowe type of chambered cairn, which is limited to Orkney.It was not only constructed for contemporary spirtual and social reasoning. Maeshowe was intended to last forever, giving us an indication for a conceptual relationship to time held by the builders of Maeshowe.

Witches: New Fashion, Old Religion (1977)

<
An in-depth exploration of several covens' and practitioners' Witchcraft traditions in 1977.

A businessman who studies witchcraft as a hobby and a businesswoman who heads a coven are interviewed about their beliefs and practices. Shows the initiation of new members into a coven and the attempt by a "circle" to heal a member.

Play For Today - Pendas Fen (1974)

ginally broadcast in 1974 as part of the BBC's Play for Today series, Pendas Fen was directed by social realist director Alan Clarke and written by David Rudkin.

"I am nothing pure, my race is mixed, my sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure. I am mud and flame."

"Penda’s Fen is perhaps the most significant film to be made during the rural turn that, as William Fowler has noted, British cinema took in the early 1970s. A decline in manufacturing had led to the shrinkage of many urban centres, and that, combined with a post-sixties vogue for communes, free festivals and pre-industrial ways of being, inspired artists such as Derek Jarman (Journey to Avebury, 1971), William Raban (Colours of This Time, 1972), and Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo (Winstanley, 1975) to explore the submerged histories, altered states and radical possibilities of the British landscape.

Rudkin shows the English countryside as a place, not of becalmed continuity and ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’, but as a historical battleground and in constant turmoil. It offers wormholes and geysers, faultlines that fertilise, ruptures that release energy. It’s a philosophy of pastoral – and of what makes a nation – that sloughs off Little Englandism and Middle Earthism in favour of something less self-satisfied and more attuned to its lurking darknesses."

Hvíti víkingurinn (The White Viking) (1991)

Norway in the 10th century. Askur, son of the powerful Thorgeir marries Embla, daughter of one of the few remaining landowners in Norway, in a pagan ceremony. King Olav, a ruthless Christian, wants to remove all traces of non-Christian beliefs and captures the two of them during the ceremony. In order to free Embla, Askur must go to Iceland and convert the people there to Christianity.