Modern day druids have no right to rob science of valuable evidence

The National Trust and English Heritage have abdicated their clear responsibility to the nation by failing to turn down requests from the modern-day Druids to rebury ancient human remains presently kept at the Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury.

So says the National Secular Society in a response to a consultation on whether the human remains should be handed over to the Council of British Druid Orders (CoBDO) for reburial.

The NSS says that the CoBDO is an unelected and unaccountable group and its demands should not be permitted overwhelm scientistific opinion which sets out to understand and to spread understanding of the lives of our ancestors in prehistory.

The report says that these modern-day druids can have no real connection or understanding of the lives of the pre-historic people whose remains they now lay claim to. There is no agreement about what the significance of monuments or artefacts from those times might be, and it is disingenuous for the CoBDO to claim that they know what these ancient people would have wanted for their remains.

Read the whole response

6 February 2009