Board Thread:WARNING - SPOILERS and FALSE INFO AHEAD/@comment-173.169.143.12-20130709062158/@comment-58.111.72.76-20130728005239

From the 18th century, England and Wales experienced a revival of interest in the druids. John Aubrey (1626–1697) had been the first modern writer to connect  Stonehenge and other  megalithic monuments with the druids; since Aubrey's views were confined to his notebooks, the first wide audience for this idea were readers of  William Stukeley (1687–1765). [76]  It is incorrectly believed that  John Toland (1670–1722) founded the  Ancient Druid Order however the research of historian  Ronald Hutton has revealed that the ADO was founded by  George Watson MacGregor Reid in 1909. The order never used (and still does not use) the title "Archdruid" for any member, but falsely credited  William Blake as having been its "Chosen Chief" from 1799 to 1827, without corroboration in Blake's numerous writings or among modern Blake scholars. Blake's bardic mysticism derives instead from the pseudo- Ossianic epics of Macpherson; his friend Frederick Tatham's depiction of Blake's imagination, "clothing itself in the dark stole of mural sanctity"— in the precincts of Westminster Abbey— "it dwelt amid the Druid terrors", is generic rather than specifically neo-Druidic.