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!

A visit to a ruined manor house in the Cotswolds

In the Cotswolds, the ruins of a medieval manor house can be found by the banks of the Windrush, a tributary of the Thames. Minster Lovell Hall is located behind St Kenhelm’s church in the Oxfordshire village of Minster Lovell (located between Burford and Witney) and it’s a pleasant place to visit and wander among the ruins if the weather’s nice. The place was built in or around 1440 and was used as a manor house until the mid-eighteenth century, after which is was partly dismantled and abandoned. The ruins are listed and administered by English Heritage, but there’s no charge to visit.

The original owners, after whom the hall and the village are named, were the Lovell family. The most interesting member of this noble family is the last of them, Francis Lovell, the ninth Baron Lovell who lived at the time of the Wars of the Roses. He was a friend of Richard, Duke of Gloucester – to whom he was also linked by marriage, their respective wives being cousins. Richard had him knighted in 1481, and when he seized power and became King Richard III two years later he upgraded the Lovell peerage; it was as the first Viscount Lovell that Francis held the Sword of State at his friend’s coronation. Lovell’s closeness to the King resulted in him being mentioned in a famous piece of doggerel which was posted on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral by a Lancastrian supporter in 1484:

“The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.”

To explain: the ‘hogge’ refers to Richard himself, his personal badge being a white boar. Lovell is of course ‘Lovell our dogge’, his coat-of-arms having included a silver wolf. The ‘catte’ and the ‘ratte’ were two of Richard III’s other principal supporters, Sir William Catesby and Sir Robert Ratcliffe.

Naturally, the fates of the King’s main followers were intertwined with his own. Richard III, as is well known, was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire on 22^nd August 1485 – the last King of England to die in battle; what happened to his body afterwards would remain a mystery until 2012, when his remains were found underneath a Leicester car park. Ratcliffe died on the battlefield with his king, while Catesby survived, only to be captured and subsequent executed by the victorious Lancastrians (a notable descendant of his was Robert Catesby, one of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot).

Lovell also fought at Bosworth, following which he was able to evade capture. He went on to become a leading figure in the Yorkist revolts that plagued the early part of Henry VII’s reign. He’s reckoned to have been behind an attempt to have Henry murdered at York in 1486, and a year later he played a leading role in the attempt to put the pretender Lambert Simnel on the throne – an attempt that came to an end at the battle of Stoke Field in June of that year. Lovell survived that battle too, but after that he disappears from the pages of history.

Some said that he lived in hiding for many years afterwards – and it is at this point that the history of Minster Lovell Hall crosses into legend. In 1708, the skeleton of a man was found in a secret chamber at Minster Lovell Hall, and it was assumed that that was the skeleton of Francis himself – who, so the story goes, hid out at his ancestral home with only one faithful servant who knew that he was there; the plan was that Lovell would be kept under lock and key with the servant bringing him food. Unfortunately for him, the servant died without letting slip about his master and so Lovell, locked in and with no-one left to bring him food, starved to death. It’s an interesting tale but it does seem unlikely, as Francis Lovell’s estates were forfeit after Bosworth, with the hall being given to Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor. Hardly somewhere for a Yorkist fugitive to go into hiding.

I was also interested in the place because the hall also has a literary association, playing a key role in John Buchan’s 1931 historical adventure The Blanket of the Dark which is set in the Cotswolds during the reign of Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII. This story, not one of Buchan’s better-known works but still highly readable if you like historical fiction and can get hold of a second-hand copy (I got an old Penguin one, original retail price 2s 6d), concerns a young Oxford scholar by the name of Peter Pentecost who is told that he is in fact the son of the Duke of Buckingham (Edward Stafford, who in real life was executed for treason in 1521). Buchan was always a master of describing the countryside in which his stories were set, and with The Blanket of the Dark he showed that he was as at home in rural Oxfordshire (for many years he lived in Elsfield, about three miles north of Oxford; his ashes are buried in the churchyard there) as he was in his native Scottish Lowlands. The ordinary people who appear in the novel – beggars, small farmers, foresters and suchlike – are treated with a high degree of empathy and, as is the case with Katrine in Witch Wood, there’s an intriguing but ultimately elusive love interest (as they usually are in Buchan’s novels; in this case, she’s called Sabine and one contemporary of Buchan’s was moved to comment that the one quibble he had with The Blanket of the Dark was that Buchan didn’t spice things up a bit with Peter and Sabine, but one can hardly have expected the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister to have done that).

Like many a fictional character before and since, Peter gets caught up in events that he cannot hope to control; at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he becomes the subject of an ill-fated plot to put him on the throne which climaxes when king and pretender meet face-to-face at an abandoned Minster Lovell Hall after the latter has rescued the former from an over-flowing Windrush. Henry is portrayed in less-than-flattering fashion, with Buchan adding some compelling descriptions of him: “the face was vast and red as a new ham, a sheer mountain of a face ... this vast being had the greatness of some elemental force ... power of Mammon, power of Antichrist, power of the Devil, maybe, but someone born to work mightily in the world.” The Blanket of the Dark is a really good, perhaps even great, work of fiction that, although Henry VIII does make an appearance, focuses more on the ordinary people of rural England (the Cotswolds, specifically) than on high intrigue even though there is something of that; this is at heart a story of what Buchan succinctly called “a world of which there has never been a chronicle; the heaths and forests of old England”, and it’s the better for it.

Broadway Tower

To Worcestershire, where I was keen to indulge my love of climbing towers with Broadway Tower, an eighteenth-century folly located on the top of Broadway Hill, the second-highest point in the Cotswolds (it’s 1,024 feet above sea level, whereas Cleeve Hill in Gloucestershire is 1,083 feet).

Built to resemble a castle at a time when follies were all the rage among the landed classes, Broadway Tower is 65 feet tall and was the brainchild of the famous landscape gardener Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown although it designed by James Wyatt. It was completed in 1798. The money for the project was provided by Lady Coventry; the second wife of the sixth Earl of Coventry, she was curious as to whether a beacon atop Broadway Hill – a hill on which beacons were lit on special occasions – could be seen from her home in Worcester (22 miles away). The story goes that a fire was lit on the hill and, after noting that she could see it from Worcester, Lady Coventry celebrated by bankrolling the building of the folly (as you do).

In the nineteenth century, Broadway Tower played its part in early moves to preserve historic buildings. In the early part of that century it was owned by Sir Thomas Phillips, a book collector whose ambition was to own a copy of every book in the world; he didn’t achieve that but he was able to amass a collection of over 60,000 manuscripts and printed books, some of which he kept at the tower along with his printing press. Later that same century, it was used as a retreat for people involved with the Arts & Crafts movement like the writer and textile-designer William Morris; even though Broadway Tower wasn’t particularly old, he was so impressed by the place that he founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877.

It’s sometimes described as being built in the ‘Saxon’ style, but I find that a bit dubious as stone castles only really started to be built in this country after the Norman Conquest. Up close, it’s a three-sided (and three-storey) structure, and the views from ground level are pretty good. I was there on a particularly windy day, but that didn’t really matter too much; more importantly, there was no rain and the sun was poking through the clouds – a lovely November day, in other words. On the way up (there are two narrow spiral staircases, one designated as ‘up’ and the other as ‘down’), the first and second floors have little exhibits dedicated to William Morris and also to the Royal Observer Corps (nearby there is a memorial to the crew of a Whitley bomber that crashed close to the tower in 1943, and there’s also a Cold War nuclear bunker close by).

From the top, the views are amazing – it’s said that at least a dozen counties can be seen from it (sources vary, though, but that’s probably more to do with local authority boundary changes over the years). As well as the cities of Birmingham and Coventry, you can see as far west as the mountains of Wales and as far east as the Chilterns. My only regret was that I hadn’t bought my binoculars.