The Rollright Stones

It was a grey and windy day as we drove through the winding country lanes of the Oxfordshire countryside. Despite the light being dull and lifeless, my heart warmed at the green and leafy view, the bucolic charm of rolling hills and fields of sheep.

My friend and I parked up and made our way through the gate, to what we had come to see, the Rollright Stones, wreathed in myth and legend for millennia. Formed of three separate megaliths, they are a part of a wider ritual landscape here in the fertile heartlands of southern England.

The Whispering Knights stand huddled together, while the King’s Men stand in a circle apart from them. The King Stone is on its own, now separated from the others by the busy road, ploughed through the heart of this ancient place.

Legend has it that these stones came to be as the result of a witch’s curse. A king and his men were making their way across the country, when the witch of the area, known as Mother Shipton, stopped them in their tracks. She prophesied to the king;

‘Seven long strides thou shalt take,

And if Long Compton thou canst see,

King of England thou shalt be!’

The king, feeling confident and arrogant as most kings do, particularly if they are just local petty chieftains, took the seven long strides towards Long Compton. But as he did so, a hill arose in front of him, blocking Long Compton from his sight. Seeing him enraged, the witch laughed and said;

‘As Long Compton thou canst not see, 

King of England thou shalt not be! 

Rise up stick and stand still stone, 

For King of England thou shalt be none; 

Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be, 

And I myself an elder tree!’

With this magical pronouncement by the witch, the king became the King Stone, his knights the King’s Men, and off behind them, unbeknownst to the doubly unlucky king, were the Whispering Knights, already plotting against him.

We went first to the Whispering Knights, the most ancient of the megaliths. I circumnavigated the fence, trying to tune into the ancient nature of these stones, set here so long ago, by people we have no name for, no idea of their beliefs, a yawning gap of millennia separating us. And yet, they were people, just as we are people. They fell in love, had children, worried about food, had spats with their neighbours. Despite the passage of time, there are always ways to find connection with our ancestors. 

I pulled out a little pouch of dried herbs and berries that I brought with me, sprinkling them on the venerable, rough stones. I laid a small copper crescent moon charm I had made, a way of honouring those people that had first built something permanent here, in a landscape so very different from the one we see today.

The Whispering Knights are actually a Neolithic dolmen from some time between 3800-3500 BC. It has been debated what they were used for, and in what way. Some dolmens, or chambered tombs, contain a lot of human remains, often cremated. Some contain the remains of just a few individuals, and some dolmens contain nothing at all. The Whispering Knights is one of the latter. 

These wide differences have caused debate, with the scholar Ronald Hutton calling them ‘tomb-shrines’, a good term to reflect the possible multifaceted nature of their use. The beloved dead could have been laid here to be excarnated, it could have been the focus of rites and ceremonies. The dolmen could have been a way of establishing roots in a landscape that at the time was host to transhumant bands of pastoralists, herding their animals to different seasonal grounds. It could have been all of the above, and much more besides.

Next we walked slowly onto the King’s Men, carrying the weight of deep time with us. Coloured ribbons and bright wishes were tied from a tree that overhung the stones on one side of the circle, fluttering prettily in the wind. We started out around the inside of the circle, determined to count the stones. Legend has it that the stones are impossible to count, every go round will leave you with a different answer. If you can manage to go round the circle three times and get the same answer each time, it will bring good luck, and I could really do with some luck. The first time around I counted seventy-four. The second I counted seventy-six. 

I gave up, and just sat with my back to a stone, imagining the ceremonies and rituals that must have been conducted inside this ancient circle of stones, the energy of voices, drums and feet weaving with the energy of the land, flickering flames in the deep of night, or clear, bright sunshine, people adorned with garlands of leaves and summer flowers.

The King’s Men form a wide circle, low grey pitted stones of officially seventy-two in number, dated to 2500 BC, the crossover point between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. People at this time were moving from a more pastoralist life, to one of mixed arable and livestock farming, being more settled in one place. The circle would originally have looked more continuous, with the stones touching each other, smooth and pale surfaces facing inwards. The effect of fire in the dark of the night, making the stones glow and reflect their flickering flames would have been entrancing.

I eventually rose and made my way onwards to the King Stone alone, this strangely shaped monolith. I walked around it, fingers itching to reach through the bars and touch its surface, to feel the same stone that fingers many thousands of years ago felt. It seemed lost in solitude, as was I, on this grey and cloudy day. Its odd shape made it seem as if it had been caught in the middle of some strange and twisted dance, frozen in stone as the long years passed. The King Stone actually obtained its strange shape due to 19th century cattle drovers chipping off bits to use as wards against the Devil, drawn instinctively to the eerie standing stone.

The King Stone is thought to have been erected around 1750 BC, as a marker for a Bronze Age burial ground, with a variety of burial practices found around the stone, clustering at about that date. During Saxon times it was an important meeting place, seen as marking a boundary, and they created their own cemetery by the stone, adding layers of depth to veneration of the dead and the ancestors. 

The continued use of the site from 3800 BC-AD 700 as a focus for spiritual activity related to the dead is astounding. Over 4000 years of occupying a special place in the mythic imagination of those who dwelled here, even though those people and their culture changed drastically over that time. I think this is due less to some kind of unbroken line of spiritual thought from the early Neolithic, and more due to the recognition of the site itself as special, a place in the landscape that calls to the soul. You don’t have to have ancestors here to feel that in your bones.

There are many pieces of folklore associated with the Rollright Stones. The Whispering Knights are said to go down to the river, Little Rollright Spinney, apparently to have a nice wash. Perhaps all that lichen is itchy. It is also said that if you stand and listen to them carefully, then they will tell you the future. The King Stone is said to be a fairy dancing ground, and the stone itself comes to life on the stroke of midnight.

The King’s Men have the most folklore. A particularly famous story is about a farmer that decides to use one of the stones as a bridge across the Little Rollright Spinney. It took twenty four horses to drag the stone down the hill, with accidents along the way that cost the life of two people. Every day, the farmer would go down to the river, and the stone would have flipped itself over onto the bank. The farmer would place it back over the river, only to find it back on the bank the following day. As it became apparent that the stone would never cooperate, the farmer decided to return the stone to the circle. What had taken twenty four horses to bring down the hill, only took one horse to take back up.

The King’s Men are said to dance in the air at night, and return to life with the King Stone on certain saints' days. They also became the focus of fertility beliefs in the 18th and 19th centuries. Local girls would dance naked around the circle at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve in the belief that they would see the man they were destined to marry. Childless women, aching to be mothers, were said to have rubbed their bare breasts on the King Stone, hopeful that their bellies may soon swell. Whether or not this worked is not recorded.

Some of the folklore may have a root in folk memory, reaching back deeply into the past. In 2015, a metal detectorist discovered the burial place of Rita, a young Saxon woman of 25-35 years, buried sometime in the first half of the 7th century. The interesting thing about Rita is that she was buried with a bronze skillet, based on a Roman design used in hand-washing rituals. She also had an amethyst crystal spindle whorl, a large amber bead and a perforated antler disc. 

With such enigmatic accoutrements, could she have been the real Rollright Witch? Some kind of wild shrine keeper of a sacred site? A spirit-worker that tended the dead and the spirits? Perhaps the story of the king and his men is a memory of Rita standing up to a pompous and irreverent petty king, acting disrespectfully to this hallowed place. Long may the spirit of Rita protect the Rollright Stones.

© Elena Tornberg-Lennox 2023

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