The weather outside Hoosac is frightful - a hard rain's a-gonna fall, lightning crashes – so you’d best take shelter from the storm. Anthony and Miss Eells can’t help notice that the wild weather happening across Minnesota has started soon after their mostly-uneventful visit to the old Borkman estate outside of town. And the estate’s name? Weatherend. Don’t that beat all.

As the story progresses, Miss Eells’ brother, Emerson, finally thinks he’s figured out what’s happening when he stumbles across an old book with an engraving of “a ring of standing stones in a field of long, rank grass" near Carmarthenshire, Wales. According to the old English legend:

...somebody drilled holes in [the stones] and inserted little packets of beeswax wrapped in paper. Imbedded in the wax were clots of human blood, fingernail pairings, snippets of hair, and little pieces of bone. The packets were inserted in the stones to setup magical lines of force, influences stronger than the strongest electrical field. Then, I imagine, some rather picturesque rituals were performed, and incarnations were chanted. The result was that certain things started to happen...[until]...the angry townsfolk tipped over the stones, extracted the little packets, and burned them" [79-80].

Emerson Eells hypothesizes that what once happened in Wales is now happening in Hoosac. It’s seems possible since, upon hearing the tale, Anthony thinks back to the strange statues he saw out on the Weatherend estate: gray, half-finished lumps identified only by their names: Wind, Snow, Hail, and Lightning.

There are approximately 1,000 stone circles and 80 stone henges, or prehistoric enclosure, in Britain and Ireland. Often oriented on sight lines for the rising or setting sun or moon at certain times of the year, it is possible that, for their builders, the cycle of seasons was very important. The best known is probably Stonehenge near Wiltshire, while the largest stone circle in Britain is at Avebury.

There are no stones in Wales that are identified as the Weird Sisters. While the name is merely an allusion to the Three Witches found in Shakespeare's Macbeth (they of the oft-quoted lined, “Double double, toil and trouble”), there are many rings of stones in the Carmarthenshire area and Bellairs may have seen such stones (or even Stonehenge) during his overseas visits.

Frank Olding, the assistant Inspector of Welsh Historic Monuments, says the two better-known sets of rings in Carmarthenshire are Meini Gwyr ("the Crooked Stones") and Pen y Raglan Gwynt ("the End of the Wind-break").

C. Houlder and W. H. Manning, in Regional Archaeologies: South Wales, write the stone circles of South Wales are smaller when compared with the monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury, but, none the less, they are in the same tradition:

About a dozen circles are known in South Wales, normally formed of small stones, rarely more than 3 feet tall, and usually with some of the stones now missing. Sometimes they are enclosed within a low earth bank, as at Ysbyty Cynfyn and Meini-gwyr. In two cases (Trecastle Mountain and Nant Tarw, Traianglas, both in Brecknockshire) a pair of circles stand side by side, while at Cerrig-Duon, also in Traianglas, there is a standing stone and a short avenue formed of two parallel lines of stones as well.

These circles often lie on the barren moors and hills where many of the Bronze Age barrows are also to be found. We must remember that in the Bronze Age the climate was warmer and drier than it had been in Neolithic period or was to be in the Iron Age, which meant that the moors and hills were less forbidding than they are today.

Phil Dunn notes that the rituals Bellairs wrote of may well be based on local folklore from various parts of the British Isles. "Holes in standing stones are fairly common. Whether they were drilled or have just formed over time is debatable but it's certainly true to say that where holes do occur they are often used as receptacles for offerings. On visits to a range of circles I have often found offerings of fresh woodland flowers or grain left by practicing pagans to this day." He adds, since no written records exist, it's impossible to confirm whether or not stones were used with the aim of controlling the weather.