Patrick Ford

Patrick has spent the better part of his life involved in the music business, as a musician, songwriter, producer, band leader, and owner of his own record label, Blue Rock’It Records. Over the years he toured and recorded with many blues greats, including Brownie McGhee, Lowell Fulson, Charlie Musselwhite, and Jimmy Witherspoon. He also performed and recorded with his brothers Mark and Robben Ford and since 1988 Patrick has fronted his own band, The Ford Blues Band.

He has been intrigued by the European megalithic standing stones since he saw his first photographs of Stonehenge as a young boy. However, he did not get to actually visit any standing stone sites until 1986, when he was in his mid 30’s, and Stonehenge was the first one he visited. Over the years since, he has continued to make return trips to northern Europe to find and explore more than 150 stone sites in as many as six different countries. Many of those locations were returned to on numerous occasions.

Beginning in 2009, Patrick began what he called his “Stone Journeys,” with the explicit purpose of finding out what he could both about the stones, and from the stones. On his travels he took photographs and kept journals which provided the base material for his book, Stone Journals.

In this book Patrick attempts to involve the reader as much as possible, so that as they read the book they, too, become a participant in the journeys. The reader may find themselves walking among the imposing stones at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis, or being blown about in a storm on Dartmoor in a fruitless search for the Scorhill Stone Circle. They may climb to the top of Knocknarea to Maebe’s Tomb in Ireland, or just sit on a massive fallen circle stone, staring up at the white clouds forming patterns over Long Meg and Her Daughters Stone Circle in England.

Whether it is hiking across a moor, talking with locals, dowsing for energy lines, or conversing with a stone, the joy of this book is in the journey. Along the way the author challenges the “rational mind” to open to possibilities it might not normally accept, for as Patrick says, “There is much to be learned in the company of stones.”

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