Fantasy also frequently features stone circles as portals or sites of supernatural concentration. Take the hugely successful book-turned-TV series Outlander, with its fictive Craigh Na Dun stones that plunge protagonist Claire Randall – a World War Two-era nurse – into 18th-Century Scotland. The stones are a porous place, allowing movement through time for those blessed or cursed enough to tap into their powers at charged times of the year (the TV pilot takes place over Samhain, the Celtic festival we have since replaced with Halloween). There are plenty of precedents for this, including Five Children and It author E Nesbit's story Accidental Magic (1912), which imagines its protagonist Quentin falling asleep on the altar-stone at Stonehenge, and waking up in Atlantis. It's the same fantasy that makes us hope for snowy forests at the back of the wardrobe or a Wonderland down a rabbit hole: a promise of unexpected escape, a mundane doorway to another world.
