The Rollright Stones

Friday 3 June 1994. We left Stow-On-The-Wold having booked a guest house in nearby Bourton-On-The-Water and decided that instead of going straight there we would do a bit of a detour and try to find The Rollright Stones.

I've got a bit of a thing for stone circles and henges and hillforts and I'd never been to the Rollrights. I had an Ordnance Survey map and by following that we easily found this. The King Stone, part of the Rollright group. No chunk of hard granite like you find in Cornwall but a more porous type of rock, weathered and eaten by acids in rain. Apparently though, the strange shape of this rock has more to do with passing tradesmen battering chunks off it to use as lucky charms against the evil of the Devil.

We spotted what we thought were the Rollrights on the other side of the road and on reaching the road, turned to our left until we reached a well-formed track that took us to the next group. This group was obviously too small to be the Rollrights and in any case reminded me more of a cromlech or tomb. And so it turned out to be when I researched it much later.

These are The Whispering Knights, so called because the way that the five stones lean in towards one another suggest a whispered consipracy, the knights plotting against their king. They were probably covered by earth originally, one of several tumuli in the area. Why was this one uncovered? It had to be the tomb of someone important - lesser folk didn't move people to hump gigantic stones to build a large monument to them. Perhaps it was simple grave robbery or attempted grave robbery that caused the destruction of the earthworks.

So where were the Rollrights themselves? On the Rollright Stones website there is a simple map showing how we turned the wrong way from the King Stone. It looks obvious on the map but the main circle is screened by trees and it simply wasn't visible to us. The scale of the Ordnance Survey map we had with us didn't help as the entire group was just shown under one symbol.

In the event, we decided they must be further down the path from the Whispering Knights and after a long walk we had to admit defeat and head back to the car. We wouldn't find the Rollright Stones and take any photographs until Thursday 30 May 1998, almost four years later.

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A Deathly Game of Quoits

Wednesday 7 August 1996. Dad and Fran left me at Chun Castle and I walked a couple of hundred yards to Chun Quoit, pronounced "choon", a megalithic burial chamber. This was older than the nearby hill fort by two or three thousand years.

It was originally built to house the bones of one or more of our earliest farmers who had learned how to grow their own crops and maybe raise domesticated cattle rather than be perpetually on the move as hunter gatherers.

It's one of around eight such surviving quoits (also known as dolmens or cromlechs). The name quoit came about due to early local superstition that the capstones (often the only feature showing above ground) may have been thrown there by giants, playing a game of quoits. They may either originally or at some point in their past have been covered by a mound of earth, a kerbstone suggests at least some form of surrounding structure.

I walked all the way around it a couple of times, enjoying the atmsphere that comes with places that you know were once of some great importance to those who built them, but that some of the purpose may have been forgotten or even misinterpreted by modern scholars. It could easily have been a place where on propitious days / nights / seasonal changes, the holy men of the community may have come here to talk to the spirits of their loved ones or guardians, perhaps inhaling smoke to put them in a trance, perhaps sitting in a circle with their equivalent of a bag of chips, singing Gin Gan Goolie, Goolie, Goolie, Goolie... It must have come from somewhere...

I set the camera on the ground and used the self-timer to take my own photo for posterity.

Turning away from the quoit for a moment this was the magnificent view from the site. Then I braved the gorse spines again (Gin Gan - OUCH! Stop yer warblin', mind yer...) and returned to the car and we drove about half a mile to another quoit, Lanyon Quoit.

Easily found in a field just at the side of the road this quoit was originally tall enough for a man on horseback to ride underneath the capstone without bending his head. My sense of humour would like to say that this is because the horse's head would have crashed into it first, but in truth it was indeed possible to ride beneath the capstone! A violent thunderstorm in 1826 caused the quoit's collapse and it was re-erected, but with the supporting stones sunk deep into the earth. The people of 1826 were taking no chances... "I'm not lifting yon bloody stone again and that's for sure!"

The cromlechs or quoits of Cornwall are as mysterious and atmospheric as you can make them. Lanyon is a bit too close to the roadway to have an atmosphere. At Chun Quoit you can be quite alone with this mysterious chamber of the dead. Would you dare go at night to see if any spirits remain?

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