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.

Looking out over Oxford

To Oxford, the city of the dreaming spires – so-called because of the number of religious establishments in said city. Each college has its own chapel, you see, and there are some churches as well. Funnily enough, one of the churches is designated as the university’s church, even though the colleges have chapels – one of which, the one at Christ Church, doubles up as Oxford’s cathedral. That makes for a lot of spires.

It was to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, located on the High Street, that I went. There has been a church on that site since Anglo-Saxon times, and in the early days of Oxford University it became an important building, being used for lectures and as a meeting-place for the university authorities, as well as having an upstairs room used as the university’s first library. In the 1550s, it was the location for the trial of the Oxford Martyrs – bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and archbishop Thomas Cranmer, leading figures in the Reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI who found themselves on the wrong side when Henry’s daughter Mary became queen. Her attempts to turn the clock back and make England Catholic again have given her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. She had those three churchmen charged with heresy, and – this being the sixteenth century – they were found guilty. Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake on nearby Broad Street in October 1555, with Cranmer suffering the same fate five months later. The church was also used for the awarding of degrees, until these increasingly rowdy ceremonies met with disapproval by the church authorities in the seventeenth century (which, after the Civil War, resulted in Christopher Wren – who’d studied at Wadham College – being commissioned to build the Sheldonian Theatre; henceforth, graduation ceremonies took place there instead). Samuel Johnson is known to have attended services at St Mary’s while he was a student at Pembroke College. In the nineteenth century, the Oxford Movement – calling for the reinstatement of older Christian traditions in the C of E, eventually becoming Anglo-Catholicism or High Church Anglicanism – was kick-started at St Mary’s by the likes of John Henry Newman and John Keble (while the former ended up going all the way and converting to Roman Catholicism, the latter did not and would eventually have an Oxford college and a church in Mill Hill named after him; I should know, for that is the church I was baptised in).

But it was to the tower that I was drawn. It’s the oldest part of the church, dating back to the late thirteenth century (the main body of the church having been substantially rebuilt in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while the porch dates back to the 1630s – the statue of the Virgin Mary above it was considered so scandalous that you can still see the bullet-holes from when Cromwell’s soldiers shot at it after they’d captured Oxford during the Civil War). I, of course, wanted to climb the tower for a view of Oxford’s dreaming spires. I like climbing towers. I’d previously looked out over Oxford from the tower of St Michael at the North Gate (the City Church, as opposed to the University Church) and from the Carfax Tower, and I reckoned it made sense to complete the hat-trick by going up St Mary’s too; if nothing else, it is reckoned to be the one with the best view over Oxford.

So I paid my £4 and made my way up the narrow spiral staircase. 

Through a window on the way up, I could see the chapel of Exeter College – a college best known by me and doubtless many others as the college where, in the final episode of Inspector Morse, the titular inspector suffers his fatal collapse after figuring out who the murderer was in his last mystery.

Once out in the open, I was confronted by the statue of a bishop which, funnily enough, I’d seen before – on the cover of an Inspector Morse novel (I forget which one). I’ve not been able to find out which bishop it represents; this being Oxford, it’s not like there’s a shortage of candidates.

Looking out to the north, I had the Radcliffe Camera – as in camera being the Latin for ‘room’, this being the reading-room of the Bodleian Library – before me; Exeter and Brasenose Colleges to the left, All Souls College to the right. 

Interesting one, All Souls. First of all, it has no students. That’s not actually true, of course – it has no undergraduate students, and those graduates and postgraduate students who do get to be at All Souls (they have to take a famously hard exam in order to do so) are Fellows of the college. Not students. It’s also home to one of the more bizarre of Oxford’s many academic traditions – a ceremony which consists of a torchlit parade, led by a man carrying a wooden duck on a pole, which takes place once a century (the last one was in 2001, so it looks like I’ve missed out on that).

Moving to the south side, the view takes in Oriel College (with its statue of Cecil Rhodes) and Christ Church, the college that doesn’t call itself a college and which is unique in being the only higher educational institution in this country that’s also a cathedral. 

That particular quirk goes back to its foundation. Or rather, its second re-foundation. Cardinal Wolsey had wanted to establish a college on the site of a priory which he had suppressed, but was prevented from doing so by his own fall from grace. This led to the suppression of Cardinal College while it was still being built; it was re-founded by Henry VIII as King Henry VIII’s College (that king not being short on modesty) although in 1546 it was re-founded again thanks to a re-organisation of the Church of England which led to the creation of the Diocese of Oxford; henceforth, the college chapel – built on the site of the priory church – would be the Cathedral Church of Christ, with the college attached to it going by the name of Christ Church (not ‘Christ Church College’, for the word ‘college’ does not appear in its title). Charles I stayed there during the Civil War (since he had been kicked out of London when the war started, Oxford became his capital until it fell to the Parliamentarians in 1646). Its clock tower, the Tom Tower, is another Wren creation.

Looking at the tower itself, I noticed that there was some old graffiti carved into the brickwork. 

Not exactly surprising, as there are quite a few old buildings where someone’s taken a knife to the stonework to carve their initials for posterity. ‘AR’ was here in 1676, and ‘WF’ in 1762. Who, I wondered, were these people? Had they come to the church intending to carve their initials in the tower, or just spotted the chance to do so once they’d climbed it and noted that there was no-one else around? Did they wonder if they’d be found out, maybe getting them into trouble with the vicar or the university authorities (assuming, of course, that they were students)? Who knows? I wondered, as I have done before, about the point at which graffiti stops being an act of vandalism and becomes historically significant, as witness, for example, the Parliamentarian soldier who carved his name onto the lead lining of the font in the church at Burford when he was being held prisoner there in 1649 (one for another time, that one).

Satisfied with the view, and by now in need of a cup of tea (for it was although the sun was out, it was a cold and windy day), I made my way back down.