The Rollright Stones

Thursday 30 May 1998. Having come out of the Motor Museum we saw this excellent chop-topped half-cab single decker bus waiting to pick up passengers for a trip.

The Cotswolds Tour bus wasn't quite ready to leave Bourton-on-the-Water but we were and made our way back to the car to find our last stone circle of the week, the Rollright Stones.

The Rollright Stones are so called because they are close to twin villages of that name.

There are two circles of stones and one monolith. This is the larger of the two stone circles and is known as the King's Men. Legend has it that these are the petrified figures of knights who come to life once a year at the dead of night.

The stone is of limestone, a softer substance that those at Stonehenge and Avebury, and thousands of years of wind, rain and the acidic sweat of curious fingers have eroded the stones leaving them in the gnarled twisted shapes that we can see today.

A bit like me really, but in my case it's a dodgy back rather than the sweat of curious fingers... sigh...

A short distance away is a smaller circle of larger stones that lean towards each other in a tight group. Not surprisingly, these have been given the collective name, the Whispering Knights.

Nobody seems sure whether it was a small stone circle or is a collapsed chambered tomb - what they call a quoit in Cornwall.

Across the main road from the circle is the King Stone - supposedly the very king who the knights were commanded by. The railings prevent further damage by sweaty fingers but do not add much to the mystery and atmosphere!

Speaking of quoits, we saw a tumulus marked on our map - we were using one of the official tourist maps published by Estate Publications. They show just about anything of interest whether it's an ancient ruin or a one-man marmalade maker.

This turned out to be a half-collapsed burial chamber: a barrow, quoit, tumulus - whatever you want to call it. Unfortunately, although there was a small obelisk with a notice from the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works which used to be the government department for preserving these old artifacts, it fails to give the tomb a name. So if anyone recognises this and can provide me with a name, I'd be grateful for any information. I can't be certain now just where it was, even with the aid of the map which I still have...

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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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