Text:

Informant: When I visited Stonehenge, I very much felt that there was something about that place that was charged with energy- it just felt different- more than any other place I had been to before. Unfortunately I was with a tour group so I couldn’t hang out. I would’ve loved to have been able to, y’know, hang out and feet that feeling.

…

Interviewer: Do you remember anything else that happened around the time you went to stonehenge? Like how the trip was, when you were going up there and when you were coming back and stuff like that?

Informant: We were on a tour group, I was in high school, so it was just a bus ride in, y’know, a walk around a little bit, and then a bus ride out. There was no dramatic lead up to it.

Interviewer: Do you still remember feeling that energy?

Informant: Yeah, I still remember feeling that there was something about the place, I would have loved to get closer, and like I said it just felt charged with energy. And when I asked the people around me, they didn’t necessarily agree. It was me picking up on that.

Interviewer: Do you think there’s any particular reason for that?

Informant: I don’t know, I can’t think of anything, it’s never happened to me in any other place. I don’t know if it was- what do you call it- a family memory? Genetic memory?

Context:

This account takes place during a time when the informant was in high school. They grew up in the United States, but note that they have Scottish, English, Germanic, and Norwegian ancestry.

Analysis:

As mentioned in the interview, there isn’t too much out of the ordinary regarding the lead up to the visit to Stonehenge, with it just being a school trip. This could very well explain the more nonchalant reaction to the site for the other students visiting, compared to the informant, as it may be harder to connect with a historical site personally when the reasons for doing so are more institutional. The informant themself mentions having some Scottish ancestry, so there is a chance that they were aware of such a connection before the trip. The “energy” which they felt could very well be the result of the informant being one of the few people there with an ancestry that connected them to this particular place.