England's lesser-known stone circles (part two)

To Cornwall next, to take a look at another stone circle! This one can be found a couple of miles to the south-east of St Buryan which is off the A30 after you’ve gone west of Penzance. This circle is called the Merry Maidens and consists of nineteen granite megaliths, all of them roughly four feet high arranged in a circle that’s about 78 feet in diameter. They’re said to date back to either the Neolithic period (the late Stone Age) or the early Bronze Age.

They’re easy to get to, being located in a field that’s easily accessible (and sign-posted) from the B3315. The access-point to the field even has a convenient lay-by for parking, and the footpath from the lay-by goes right through the circle itself.

As is apparently the case with most British stone circles, there’s a notable gap between the stones at the circle’s eastern-most part. It’s also worth noting that the size of the stones varies, decreasing slightly in size from south-west to north-east; this, archaeologists reckon, may well have been deliberate so as to mirror the cycle of the moon. Nearby are a pair of much taller standing stones called the Pipers, two of the largest standing stones in Cornwall which due to their alignment with the Merry Maidens are indelibly associated with said circle.

Like the Rollrights, the Merry Maidens are the subject of a ‘petrification’ legend which is where they get their name from. The story is that the stones were nineteen young ladies who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday (the stones’ Cornish name is dans maen, which means ‘stone dance’ although it has given the stones their alternative name of the Dawn’s Men). The Pipers are said to have been the two men who were providing the music for the girls, but they heard the bells of the church at St Buryan striking midnight and tried to run away, which supposedly explains their distance from the Merry Maidens. The Maidens and the Pipers are not the only Neolithic remnants in the vicinity; there’s also the Tregiffian Burial Chamber not far away, as well as a lone standing stone called Gun Rith which is reckoned to be also linked with the Merry Maidens, by proximity if nothing else.

Of more recent vintage is the Boskenna Cross, Medieval a way-marker located at the junction with the road to or from St Buryan to the west; this was unearthed in the nineteenth century, having probably been buried at the time of the Reformation.

The Merry Maidens probably owe their survival in part to a nineteenth-century landowner who, obviously recognising their significance, ensured that they weren’t removed so the field could be ploughed and the stones broken up for building material – a fate that befell many stone circles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western Cornwall, though, does have a rather high concentration of ancient monuments – as well as stone circles, there are also various standing stones as well as cairns, hut circles and holy wells – which has led the area to be described as a ‘sacred country in miniature’. Worth keeping an eye on the road-signs, then.

England's lesser-known stone circles (part one)

There’s more to stone circles in England than Stonehenge and Avebury. It’s just that the rest are smaller and as such they don’t tend to get much of a look-in. Today, though, I’m going to take a closer look at one of the smaller, lesser-known ones. The Rollright Stones can be found in the Cotswolds and are reckoned to date back to the Neolithic period. The reasons behind their construction have been lost in the mists of time (our Neolithic ancestors lived in a pre-literacy age) although the stones themselves were sourced locally – from within a few miles of the circle, archaeologists reckon. The lack of a reason for building a stone circle has created a void that’s been filled by a ‘petrification’ myth (the stones are people who were turned to stone) which has been used in times past to explain how they came to be, with the myth having become part of the story (for, as the man once said, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend). The Rollrights are by no means alone in having a petrification myth attached to them.

They’re located high on the eastern edge of the Cotswolds (around 220 metres, or just over 720 feet, above sea level according to the Ordnance Survey map which covers the area) just off the A3400 on the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border. The stone circle, known as the King’s Men, is just over a hundred feet in diameter and consists of some 77 closely-placed stones (oolitic limestone, this being the Cotswolds – that’s the material that forms the bedrock of the Cotswolds and which has been used as the local building material of choice for centuries; to this day it is still quarried as Cotswold stone) although legend has it that it is supposed to be impossible to count them all, and if you manage to do so and get the same number three times you get to make a wish!

The location is almost nondescript, or perhaps the word should be modest – parking is in a lay-by on a minor road just off the A3400, and within yards from the road just to the south you’re confronted with the circle which seems almost discreetly tucked away to the side. The private charity that runs it, the Rollright Trust, doesn’t have anyone there to meet and greet but there is an honesty-box next to the gate (it’s £1 per adult). There’s nothing stopping you from touching the stones should you so desire, although sitting on them is frowned upon as it would add to the erosion of the stones. Every now and again, a visitor is confronted with the sight of the occasional neo-pagan who’s gone there for some meditation (pagan groups can book the site for ceremonies, and the Trust apparently stages an annual Shakespeare production in the circle).

As well as the circle, there’s also a free-standing monolith called the King Stone which is located on the north side of the road, which at this point also serves as the border between the counties of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. This is likely to have been erected as a marker for a burial area, for archaeologists have found much by way of evidence of cremated human remains having been buried in the immediate vicinity. Its strange shape can be explained by the fact that it suffered at the hands of nineteenth-century souvenir-hunters (who, as was the case with Stonehenge, often came to visit with a hammer and chisel at the ready), and not long after legal protection was introduced for ancient monuments in 1882 the King Stone was encircled by railings to prevent further damage.

Finishing off the ancient monuments that make up the Rollright Stones is a portal dolmen – a Neolithic burial chamber which is several hundred yards east of the circle. It consists of four upright stones (plus a capstone which is now lying on the ground) and is known as the Whispering Knights. They make for an interesting stop if you’re in the area; the Cotswold towns of Chipping Norton and Moreton-in-Marsh aren’t far away, and nor for that matter is Hook Norton with its brewery, while they’re located just over half-way between Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon. So, if you’re going for a drive around the Cotswolds, why not take a look?

The names given to the various component parts of the Rollrights relate to the ‘petrification’ myth attached to them. The story goes that a king was riding across the country with his followers when they were stopped by a witch (sometimes credited as Mother Shipton) who challenged the king to walk forward, with the promise that if he could see the nearby village of Long Compton he would be King of England. However, his view was blocked by the rising ground, at which point the witch turned him to stone. She then promptly did the same to the king’s followers, who’d gathered in a circle to discuss the challenge, and then she did likewise to four of the followers who had lagged behind, quite possibly to discuss a plot against the king; they became the Whispering Knights.

An interesting story, for the King Stone does indeed stand just below the ridge from which you can see Long Compton which is on lower ground to the north (and a lovely view it is too). 

Another story about the stones is of a more recent vintage and comes from Doctor Who, for the Rollrights were used as a filming location for that show, back in Tom Baker’s day. In it, the stones were used as a worship-site by modern-day druids but they (the stones, not the druids) turned out to be blood-sucking aliens in disguise!

Interesting things in Wiltshire pubs (part 1)

Back to Wiltshire, that county in Southern England well-known for its ancient stone circles, Salisbury Cathedral, several Army bases and the fact that the M4 and the A303 go through it. In recent years it has played host to the reintroduction of the Great Bustard, a species of bird which became extinct in Britain in the 1830s (it’s Wiltshire’s county bird; more on that in the unlikely event of my actually seeing one). What is perhaps less well-known is that a couple of pubs in the county have some rather odd things in them…

First up is the Red Lion in Avebury. 

That’s a fairly common pub name, the most common in the country in fact. It’s one of those pub names that has more than one origin. A a red lion was the personal badge of John of Gaunt (the “time-honour’d Lancaster” who does the “this scepter’d isle” speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II, in real life a younger son of Edward III and the father of Henry IV). It was also the Royal arms of Scotland, which were merged with the Royal arms of England when King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. But then again, the Red Lion in Avebury could derive from the coat-of-arms of an eighteenth-century lord of the manor, Lieutenant-General Williamson, which can be seen on display in the local church.

Anyway – the pub. The Red Lion in Avebury does have something that makes it unique, for it claims to be the only pub in the world that’s located within an ancient stone circle. Since I cannot think of any other ancient stone circle which has part of a village inside it, they’re probably right. So if you want to go for a pint in a pub that is truly unique, this one’s worth a visit.

Inside, there’s more. A mural on the wall shows a map of southern England, with the Line of St Michael marked out. This is probably the most famous ley line in the country, running diagonally from Cornwall to Suffolk, passing through such places as St Michael’s Mount, Glastonbury, Avebury and Bury St Edmunds, among others. Its saintly dedication derives from the fact that there are several churches or places dedicated to said archangel on its length – for example, the hilltop church at Brentor in Devon and the ruined tower atop Glastonbury Tor, as well as the afore-mentioned Cornish island. Some people get very excited by this; occasionally at Avebury, you may even run into someone who’s brought his divining-rods with him. Although I regard the notion of ley lines with a degree of cynicism, a journey along this one would certainly make for an interesting travelogue. Reading up on this, I note that I’m not the only cynic, for Geoffrey Ashe (in Mythology of the British Isles) refers to them as “modern myth” although he does note that “Avebury is at the point where it [the St Michael Line] cuts a parallel of latitude distant from the equator by exactly one-seventh of the earth’s circumference”; make of that what you will, if anything.

Of more tangible interest in the pub, though, is the well. Yes, the village well in Avebury – 86 feet deep, dating back to around 1600 and “believed to be the last resting place of at least one unfortunate villager” – is located inside the pub. How many pubs can claim to have a well inside them? And even if they do, how many of those wells have had a glass top put over them so they can serve as a table?

The presence of the well would seem to indicate that there wasn’t always a pub on this site – and there’s evidence for that, in the form of a map of Avebury drawn up by the antiquarian William Stukeley in 1724. His main purpose was to mark the locations of the stones themselves, and the locations of spots where stones had once stood, but he marked out other key points as well – his map shows a pub (“The Inn”) that is located on the other side of the road to the present-day Red Lion, although crucially (as far as this particular study is concerned) he didn’t mark the location of the village well.

To be continued...

More on Avebury

Writing about Avebury some time ago, I noted that the eighteenth-century antiquarian William Stukeley had theorised that the two stone avenues radiating out from the stone circle had formed a ‘solar serpent’ pattern. He got this idea because the route taken by said avenues (only one of which still partially exists) can be interpreted, and indeed was interpreted by Stukeley, as being representative of the body of a snake, passing through Avebury itself and ending at the head – which took the form of another (smaller) stone circle called The Sanctuary which is located just under two miles from Avebury itself (there are no stones left there, and nowadays their positions are marked by concrete blocks).

I happen to go to Avebury rather a lot, and I’ve found a reference to this notion in an old building in the vicinity of the stones. St James’s church in Avebury dates back to at least the seventh century although the nave of the current building dates back to around 1000, with the aisles, chancel and so on being added later. Rather tellingly, the church itself is located outside the stone circle (after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, stone circles came to be seen as the work of the devil while many have local legends attached that state that they are people who were turned to stone for dancing or playing music on Sunday), but who knows if any of the masonry that now makes up the church came from smashed-up stones that once formed part of the circle? 

Quite a few old English churches have some special features, and the church at Avebury is no exception. It has a rare example of a medieval rood screen, an installation intended to separate the nave from the chancel; most of these in English churches were done away with during the Reformation, although in the case of the Avebury church it was hidden and later restored. There is also a hagioscope – also known as a squint, a small hole in the interior wall dating back to the fifteenth century, used to ensure that the mass taking place at a side-altar could be synchronised with the mass at the main, central altar (priests back then would have had their backs to the congregation). On the wall under the tower is a Royal coat-of-arms, which all C of E churches were once required to display by law. Quite a few older churches still do; the Avebury one dates back to the reign of George III.

And then there’s the stone font, reckoned to be Norman or perhaps even Saxon, upon which is carved the image of a serpent-like creature being stabbed in the head by a human figure. Perhaps this symbolises the coming of Christianity in the Dark Ages, or perhaps it hints at the notion of the old stone circle being part of a larger, serpent-like structure. Perhaps that’s where Stukeley got the idea from, for although he’s not listed as having been a former vicar of that parish, he was a C of E priest who spent some time in the area, so he must have been aware of what was, and still is, on the font.

Avebury

The county of Wiltshire has long been noted for its ancient landmarks and monuments – there’s much more to it than just Stonehenge. To the north – just off the A4 as opposed to the A303 – is a village called Avebury, and that is home to the largest ancient stone circle in all of Europe. It may not have the immediate impact of Stonehenge – the number of stones has over the centuries been greatly reduced – but it has a distinct charm of its own, which is helped by the fact that part of the village actually lies within the stone circle. Plus, unlike Stonehenge, it’s free to visit and you can actually go up and touch the stones.

In fact, it could be said that the stone circle at Avebury, which dates back to the third millennium BC, is more of a circular enclosure with various arrangements of standing stones (including two smaller circles) inside, and that it’s merely a part of a whole complex of ancient structures in the vicinity, “one of a cluster of major prehistoric works,” according to the book Mythology of the British Isles by Geoffrey Ashe which I have been dipping into recently. Other stones form an avenue leading away from the Avebury circle towards a smaller site known as the Sanctuary, an easy-to-miss site close to the A4 which is not far from the burial mound that is the West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill, which looks man-made because it is (it’s the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, similar in size to the smaller pyramids at Giza); it dates back to around the same time as Avebury and apparently took several centuries to make.

The stone circle at Avebury, which as well as various other standing stones also encloses part of the village (including the pub, the Red Lion, which can therefore claim to be the only pub to be located within an ancient stone circle), is itself enclosed by a henge – a ditch and earth bank which would appear to have served as a means of restricting entrance to the site to certain key points (rather like, I suppose, the doors of a cathedral).

Quite a few of the stones are no longer there. Over time, some were broken up for use as building materials while others were removed to allow for cultivation of the land. It’s also been noted that even though there has been a Christian church at Avebury since the seventh century (it is located outside the stone circle), superstition about the stones led to the removal and burial of quite a few of them in the fourteenth century. It was this removal of the stones that led to the only known death to have been directly associated with them. “About 1320,” states Ashe, “a man who was helping to smash one of the stones was crushed to death when it keeled over on top of him. In 1938 his skeleton was found, with the tools of his trade – he was a barber-surgeon.” One imagines an itinerant tradesman unexpectedly getting roped into helping out with some heavy lifting while he was passing through the village, with fatal results.

As for what it was built for, that is a mystery that continues to fascinate – and the Neolithic people who built it left us no clues, as they were of a pre-literate age. The lack of human remains that have been unearthed precludes the notion of Avebury having been a place of death or sacrifice, and the best guess is that it was a temple used for ceremonies of some sort, in which the path of the sun played a key role, for the stones’ astronomical alignment has been remarked upon (light-heartedly as well as seriously; in 2014, the National Trust claimed that they were planning to move one of the stones at Avebury in order to align the circle with British Summer Time – a claim that was, of course, made on April Fools’ Day). What can be in no doubt is that this was clearly something of great importance to our Neolithic ancestors; even though the rocks/blocks are local (they are sarsen, a type of sandstone) it would have taken a long time to drag them over several miles before erecting them in pre-determined positions. To make the whole thing would have taken years, if not decades or even centuries (much like the building of cathedrals in the Middle Ages).

In the eighteenth century, the antiquarian William Stukeley pioneered archaeological investigative techniques at Avebury – taking notes, making drawings and doing careful measurements in a bid to unlock the mystery of the stones (at the same time as some of the local farmers were busy removing some of the stones, not out of superstition but in order to obtain building materials and clear the land for the plough). Stukeley figured out that there were two stone avenues extending out from Avebury – one, the Kennet Avenue, heading south-east to the Sanctuary and another, the Beckhampton Avenue, heading south-west (few stones from the latter had survived even in Stukeley’s time, and for many years archaeologists reckoned he’d got it wrong although buried stones have recently been unearthed along its route). He theorised that Avebury had been built by the Druids (who actually post-date the construction of the site) and that the avenues formed a ‘solar serpent’ and he reckoned that to be similar to symbols used in ancient Egypt. 

Wishful thinking, probably (as Ashe states, a “past guess at serpent-worship had no basis but the fancy that the Avebury-Avenue-Sanctuary formation was serpentine”) – although in Stukeley’s favour he was right about the Beckhampton Avenue, and by studying Avebury at a time when quite a few of the stones were being dismantled his contribution towards our understanding of the site is invaluable. He also seems like a fascinating chap, as antiquarians often do, being from a time when men could get away with having multiple scholarly interests (as well as digging around at Avebury and Stonehenge, he was a biographer of Newton, no less, as well as being a C of E priest who was obsessed about the Druids).

Further theorising came in the early twentieth century with the development of the notion of ley lines, the idea that prehistoric and not-so-prehistoric sites are not located at random points but are arranged in straight lines. Avebury plays a part in this. “One of the longest and most impressive leys in the country,” state Janet and Colin Bord in their book Mysterious Britain, “cuts through the southern edge of the Avebury circle … This ley or ‘dragon line’ stretches from Land’s End to Burrow Mump and Glastonbury Tor, thence on to Avebury, and eventually reaches Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, touching en route many hills and churches dedicated to St Michael”. Mysterious Britain is a work from the Seventies which focuses on Britain’s ancient monuments with a strong emphasis on the weird and the wonderful, and seems to take a lot of the mythology at face value (I suspect that Stukeley would’ve loved it). Ley lines are a good example of people making way too much about what is essentially a couple of coincidences, and in the case of the example mention it falls flat when you look at a map and realise that several the places mentioned aren’t really aligned on a straight line, although I guess it depends on how thick said line is (a mile, perhaps?), while Ashe hedges his bets by stating that the St Michael Line (as he calls it) is “not perfectly straight, but good enough to be significant”.

More seriously, the early twentieth century saw an archaeologist by the name of Alexander Keiller working at Avebury. His excavations led to the reconstruction of some of the stone settings, for he was able to find quite a few of the stones that had been buried and re-erect them in their original positions (or as close as possible); in addition, he marked the positions of stones that had been lost for good with concrete posts which he’d designed specially for this purpose. It was he who found the remains of the unfortunate barber-surgeon. It’s also thanks to Keiller that the site is the way it is today, for he was a wealthy man who purchased much of the land in Avebury so that he could carry out his excavations, and he later sold it to the National Trust – which runs the site today. It is most definitely worth a visit.

Stonehenge and the A303

For many years, I have always associated Stonehenge with going on holiday. This, quite simply, is because it’s located right next to the A303 and as such is passed, and seen from the car, while driving down to the West Country.

A true wonder of the ancient world, Stonehenge is one of Britain’s oldest and most mysterious sites. Reckoned to date back some 5,000 years, with the construction phase spanning over 1,500 years (so it’s reckoned), no-one knows why it was built – it was the product of an ancient culture that left no written records – although the some of stones themselves are known to have been quarried from some mountains in Wales, 250 miles away from where it stands on Salisbury Plain. Did it have an astronomical function, or was it a religious site – a place of pilgrimage, a place of healing or maybe a place of death (there’s certainly plenty of evidence for people having been buried in the vicinity)? Archaeologists continue to be fascinated by the site and the surrounding area, and some of the theories as to how Stonehenge came to be built and what it was for go back centuries (it’s even been linked to the King Arthur legends, of which more in a later post).

What we do know for sure is that by the Middle Ages, the Stones and the surrounding land were owned by a local abbey, while following the Dissolution of the Monasteries it was owned by various aristocratic families, the last of which sold it in 1915 when their only heir was killed on the Western Front; by this stage, the Royal Flying Corps had established an airbase nearby. The man who bought it in 1915 donated it to the nation three years later, and following that a gradual campaign to save the monument from encroaching modern buildings got under way. Today, Stonehenge – a UNESCO World Heritage site that’s managed by English Heritage – stands majestically amid chalk grassland, with the modern age mostly in evidence courtesy of the traffic on the nearby A303.

Quite a few people have a favourite road, and the A303 is mine – probably because of its obvious holiday associations. Running from the M3 near Basingstoke until it joins with the A30 just outside Honiton, it passes through five counties and follows ancient routes such as the Harrow Way which pre-dates the Romans. The modern road dates back to the nineteenth century when the New Direct Road was built for stagecoaches travelling between London and Exeter; when Britain’s roads were numbered in the early twentieth century it clearly wasn’t thought of as being particularly significant, although nowadays it’s much busier than the A30 which runs parallel to the south (that’s the one to take if you’re heading for Salisbury or Yeovil). Even though a few parts of the A303 are still single-carriageway, many drivers heading west seem to prefer it to the motorways (it’s less boring, what with getting to see Stonehenge en route) and it has even been the subject of a TV documentary in which it was called the ‘Highway to the Sun’.

Recent developments in the vicinity of Stonehenge, which is where the A303 is single-carriageway and a bit of a traffic hotspot partly because it’s single-carriageway (the notion of a dual-carriageway running through a World Heritage Site is a controversial one) and partly because people slow down to look at Stonehenge, have focussed on returning this ancient site to the haven of tranquillity that people might expect to find. The A344, the road that branched off from the A303 just before Stonehenge and ran right past it, was closed in 2013 and grassed over; the visitor centre that had stood on that road was taken down and a new one was built some 1½ miles away. Now, visitors heading west on the A303 have to drive past Stonehenge in order to get to the new, state-of-the-art (and environmentally sensitive) visitor centre, from which the monument itself cannot be seen – you can either get a shuttle-bus there or walk to it, just as pilgrims presumably did for millennia.

Nowadays, if you’re an adult who didn’t book in advance, a visit to Stonehenge will set you back £18:20. For this, you get the shuttle-bus service and the chance to walk near (but not among) the Stones (the access visits, where you get to go into the Stone Circle itself, are over £30 for adults and are only available outside usual opening times, meaning that access visits only take place early in the morning or late in the evening; these have to be booked in advance). Having visited recently, I’ve found out that if you walk from the visitor centre and don’t mind seeing the Stones from a bit further away then you don’t have to pay.

Future plans for the area involve redirecting the A303 into a tunnel that will run underneath Salisbury Plain, meaning that it won’t go past Stonehenge. This idea has been mooted for years and quite frankly I’ll believe it when I see it, but I can’t say I’m keen on it. In fact, I think it’s a bad idea. Sure, Stonehenge itself will be a bit more peaceful without the sound of nearby traffic once the construction work on the tunnel has (eventually) finished, but for many the chance to briefly catch a glimpse of this historic and magnificent monument, one of few links we have with the prehistoric world, will be lost; only those willing to stop and pay will be able to lay eyes on it. And that, I feel, would somehow be wrong.