Druids and Stone Circles It was John Aubrey, writing in the 17th century, who first thought it a "probability" that stone circles, such as Stonehenge, "were Temples of the Druids" and called his text on stone circles the Templa Druidum. This idea was picked up by William Stukeley, in the early 18th century, who subtitled his first book, Stonehenge, published in 1740, "a Temple Restored to the British Druids, and his second, on Avebury, published in 1743, "a Temple of the British Druids." Although later, in the 19th century, Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) dated Stonehenge to a period much earlier than the time of the Druids (that is, to about 2000 B.C.E., whereas the Druids don't appear in the historical record until 1800 years later), nonetheless the view was maintained by a minority that Druids were pre-Celtic inhabitants of Britain and that the religious beliefs and practices for which Stonehenge was first built are ancestral to those of the later Celtic Druids.  <OFNT size="3" face="arial">A Druid, holding a sickle and mistletoe, stands in a grove of sacred oak trees with a Stonehenge-like 'temple' (18th century)
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