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I was hiking in Radnor Lake and came across this little display that someone, or someones, had put together. A miniature Stonehenge, I thought, although Stonehenge is made up of single giant rocks arranged in a circle and probably built to make astronomical calculations and, by the way, isn’t really a henge according to the completely arbitrary definition of henges, but that’s another story.

It also reminded me of Avebury, which is a henge, and also a stone circle that completely encloses a British village which is cool and depending on your disposition a little unnerving. Or a lot unnerving if, like me, you were one of those kids warped by the British miniseries Children Of The Stones. In Britain it was only shown in 1977 and 1978, but on the States side of the pond then fledgling Nickelodeon picked it up as part of its series The Third Eye and ran at least three times between 1983 and 1984. Much of it was filmed in and around Avebury, and the stone circle—in fact the stones themselves—is so integral to the plot it’s practically a character in itself.

Even as an adult it’s a lot of fun for me to watch the series (it’s available on YouTube and with seven half hour episodes is shorter than the last Avengers movie), but not in a nostalgic hey-there’s-that-thing-from-my-childhood way. For a show mainly aimed at younger viewers Children Of The Stones is surprisingly dark and intelligent, which is why it holds up so well. There’s no sex and only a little very mild violence, and it’s hard to describe the plot without giving too much away. The teenage Matthew Brake comes to the village of Milbury with his father Adam, who’s an astrophysicist studying the stones. Each one has a powerful magnetic field. Together with a small group of locals who are also mostly new arrivals they realize something is going on. People within the stone circle change. They become happy all the time, which seems idyllic, but could just as easily be entrapment.

The series writers adapted it into a novel which I found in my school library at about the same time I was watching the show. The novel sticks to the story, but lacks a lot of what makes the broadcast so powerful: the haunting soundtrack and the excellent acting.

What made it so great is, of course, also why Children Of The Stones is fondly remembered—Stewart Lee talked to some of the producers and actors in a 2012 look back—but fortunately it’s never been remade. And it would be a terrible if it were.

Although it holds up well and even though most of the action was contemporary Children Of The Stones is very much a period piece. The period may be more recent than, say, Downton Abbey, but there’s still something about it that’s removed in time. In the first episode Mr. Hendricks, the local lord of the manner, offers up his “usual toast,” saying, “Old times and new.” Even at the time that sort of very English formality, not to mention lords of manors, was starting to disappear. The world was changing, and the changes were even reaching rural places. Trepidation about the vanishing past was captured in series like Upstairs, Downstairs, and the Kinks album The Village Green Preservation Society.

The mystery of Milbury is, of course, that it’s a place more or less stuck in time. It may not quite be William Blake’s Jerusalem, but clinging to the past in Milbury isn’t entirely futile because it’s caught in an endlessly repeating cosmic cycle.

Stone circles and other ancient monuments, and even modern monuments, served or serve various purposes, but the one purpose they all have in common is that they are reminders. The past may slip away from us but the stones of Stonehenge, or Avebury, or a pile of stones placed on a stump in the woods are all someone’s way of saying, I was here.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about eyes in art and only realized afterward that I’d missed an opportunity to talk about my favorite Edgar Allan Poe story, the one that was my first introduction to Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart. My first encounter with it was the animated film narrated by James Mason, which I saw on TV, and it terrified me. I also loved it and went to the library and checked out a book of Poe’s stories the next day, so don’t let anyone tell you TV is a bad influence, kids, especially if they’re the sort of people who think you shouldn’t be reading stories about death and murder and drug use and incest—which is exactly what you’ll find in Poe’s works.

The title of The Tell-Tale Heart is, of course, misleading. Only the nameless narrator hears the heart so it doesn’t really give anything away, but I’m getting ahead of the story. One of Poe’s main sources for The Tell-Tale Heart was Daniel Webster’s prosecution of John Francis Knapp, who was one of the killers of a wealthy man. In a courtroom speech Webster dramatically described the murder:

The face of the innocent sleeper was turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, showed him where to strike. The fatal blow is given, and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death!

Webster then goes on at length about how a guilty conscience can’t stay quiet, inspiring Poe’s denouement, although Knapp was driven by greed while Poe’s narrator is driven by something else. He displaces his own internal torment onto an old man whom he lives with, and, in spite of the story’s emphasis on sound, what first sets off the narrator is what he sees:

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture –a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees –very gradually –I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

And he looks in on the old man sleeping night after night, but each time the eye is closed. It’s only on the eighth night that the old man wakes up and sits up in bed, “listening; –just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.” This is incredibly creepy. Deathwatch beetles, which chew through wood and can damage houses, communicate with a distinct six to eight clicks, and in folklore they’re harbingers of death. Some scholars think what the narrator may be hearing is actually a booklouse which keeps up a longer, steadier beat, but then we’re also talking about a guy who, right from the beginning, tells us, “I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.” Just before the murder he hears the old man’s heart beating, “a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton,” which suggests maybe the old man was more hard-hearted than the narrator’s willing to let on, and he hears the beating get steadily louder. I think Poe makes it pretty clear that the only thing we can be sure of is that we can’t be sure of anything the narrator says. I’m not sure I even trust his confession.

It’s a fun story that starts quietly and builds to a devastatingly loud end, which is why it’s even better read out loud. Once on a Boy Scout camping trip I read it to my fellow Scouts around the campfire, but don’t let anyone tell you I’m a bad influence. Everyone really enjoyed it, even Blake who got so scared he shit himself, and people came over from other campsites to see what all the screaming was about. I really put my heart into it.