Latest Posts — Folklore

Near Enstone is a ruined cromlech known as the "Hoar Stone." The villagers say that "it was put up in memory of a certain general named Hoar, who was slain in the Civil War. It was put there, as that was a piece of land no one owned. A letter signed ZWn in the Oxford Times of March 29, 1902, mentions this story, and adds that "there was a battle over there, Lidstone way." Lidstone being a hamlet of Enstone, about one and a half miles to the north west. Mr W Harper in 'Observations on Hoar-Stones,' printed in Archaeologica (1832) xxv., 54, speaks of the "War Stone at Enstone. This conspicuous object is said by the country people to have been set up 'at a French wedding.'"

Near Steeple Barton is another ruined cromlech, also called the "Hoar Stone," which is now only a confused heap of small stones, having been broken up by an ignorant farmer. Some fifty years ago it was much more perfect, and two of the side stones were standing about four feet out of the ground. "They used to say that whenever they tried to drag them two pebbles away with horses, they would roll back of their own accord. Them two pebbles growed out of little uns: at least that's my way of thinking." (From George Nevill, of Yarnton, aged 74, March, 1901.)}

Beacon Hill is a very conspicuous landmark, just above Eynsham Bridge, on the Berkshire side of the Thames, about two and a half miles in a straight line from the "Quoits." [..] The devil was playing quoits on Beacon Hill on a Sunday, and in a rage at being told it was wrong, he threw these three to where they are now.
One of the quoits standing in Walker's Field was once taken away and put over a ditch called the "Back Ditch" in the "Farm Close" to make a bridge; but it was always slipping, and although often put back, it would not rest, and they were obliged at last to take it back to where it now stands. Wheel marks can still be seen on it - (From Chas. Batts, labourer, of Stanton Harcourt, aged 35, who had it from his father. January 1 1898).
{Mr. Akerman, in 1858, records a rationalised version of the same story, as follows: "There is a tradition in the neighbourhood that the northernmost stone was once removed by an occupier of the land, and laid across a watercourse, where it served as a bridge over which waggons and carts for some time passed, and that it was restored to its old locality at the request of one of the Harcourt family. A grove in this stone, eight inches from the top, seven inches in width, and about three inches deep, is believed to have been caused by the wheels of the vehicles when it lay prostrate."}

{Joseph Goodlake of Stanton Harcourt (now of Yarnton), aged 63, in March, 1901, gave me the following particulars which he had from his father: "When the war was in England, the fighting ended at Stanton by those stones, and from there across to Stanlake Down by Cut Mill. Harcourt was the general; he was Emperor in England; he is buried in the church with his sword and gun and clothes." Further: "When the war was in England the officers used to hide behind them" (the Devil's Quoits) "from the bullets," and the men used to pick the bullets out of them when my informant was young.}

{The legend connecting the Quoits with a battle is confirmed by a story told by Tom Hughes [Scouring of the White Horse, 1859]: "An old man in that village" (Stanton Harcourt) "told me that a battle was fought there, which the English were very near losing, who was in the thick of it, and called out, 'Stan' to un, Harcourt, stan' to un, Harcourt,' and that Harcourt won the battle, and the village has been called Stanton Harcourt ever since."}

..the dolmen has become to the young girls of the neighbourhood a kind of primitive oracle. At least it has been so used within the memory of man. Old Betsy Hughes.. informed me that years ago, at the time of the barley harvest, when they were often out till dusk in the fields near the "Whispering Knights," one of the girls would say to another, "Let us go and hear them whisper." Then they would go to the stones, and one at a time would put her ear to one of the crevices. But "first one would laugh and then another," and she herself never heard any whispering.
Another old crone told me that the stones were thought to tell of the future. "When I was a girl we used to go up at certain seasons to the 'Whispering Knights' and climb up on to one of the stones to hear them whisper. Time and again I have heard them whisper - but perhaps, after all, it was only the wind."

The fairies dance round the King-stone of nights. Will Hughes, a man of Long Compton, now dead, had actually seen them dancing round. "They were little folk like girls to look at." He often told a friend who related this to me about the fairies and what hours they danced. His widow, Betsy Hughes, whose mother had been murdered as a witch, and who is now between seventy and eighty, told me that when she was a girl and used to work in the hedgerows she remembered a hole in the bank by the King-stone, from which it was said the fairies came out to dance at night. Many a time she and her playmates had placed a flat stone over the hole of an evening to keep the fairies in, but they always found it turned over the next morning.

There is a Long Barrow on the roadside at Walmsgate, in the Wolds; locally the name is pronounced Wormsgate, and it is said that once, long ago, three Dragons lived in the neighbourhood, devastating the land. An unnamed hero took arms against them. He slew one, and it is buried in the long mound - this accounts for the name Wormsgate. Another Dragon flew away towards the Trent, but did not succeed in crossing that river. It settled down in Corringham Scroggs, a flight of some 35 miles; the place was known as Dragon's Hole ever after; in fact, it is mentioned in the late Enclosure Award of 1852. The third Dragon was fatally wounded, and crept away and died at the next village of Ormsby, which they say was once Wormsby.

..the account of the practice at Pudding Pie Hill in which a knife is stuck into the centre in order to hear fairy speech.. [is the something like the reverse of how a knife is used in] a story concerning Dun Borbe on South Harris, in the Hebrides. The fort was believed to be a fairy abode, and on one occasion:

a sailor of Harris.. sat down to rest on this fairy knoll and heard great lamenting therein. He was curious by nature and also kindly, so he set out to try to find out what was causing the Little People such distress. Being a practical man he decided that the best way to find out was to go into the dun and ask, and he set off walking round it slowly and carefully seeking the entrance. No sign of a door could be seen, but the cries and piteous sobbing continued, indeed seemed to grow more hopeless. He stood wondering what to do next, when he noticed a knife plunged to the hilt in the earth. Without thinking, he pulled it out; instantly an unseen door opened and out rushed the Little People, to surround him and, with cries of joy and welcome, to hurry him into the dun to their Queen. As soon as he saw here he asked what had been wrong. He felt very sorry for the Little People, who still showed signs of having been in great trouble; nevertheless, he wisely held fast to the knife while the Queen explained. She said that a man of the dun had loved a Harris maiden and they met and spent the long summer days together while she herded her father's cows. But her father had found out, and, being very angry, he had learnt from his daughter how to find the entrance to the dn and had then come and stuck his fisher's knife in the door frame, and they, unable to touch or pass cold iron, were prisoners in their dun, expecting to starve to death. He had saved them.

[Chanctonbury's] traditions have been extensively reported and collected by Dr. Jacqueline Simpson. The earliest example which she reports occurs in Arthur Beckett's The Spirit of the Downs: 'If on a moonless night you walk seven times round the Ring without stopping, the Devil will come out of the wood and hand you a basin of soup.' [1909].
Others substituted a glass of milk, or stated that Satan will 'offer you porridge from his bowl' after you have run thrice round the earthwork. Several variants of this versioin have been collected from newspapers and from oral informants during the past fifteen or so years.

'If you run round seven times while the clock is still striking midnight, the Devil will come out. There's something about porridge, but I cannot remember what."

"If you run round backwards seven times at midnight, the Devil will give you a glass of milk."

"It is said that if you run round the Ring three times at midnight on Midsummer Eve, the Devil comes out from the trees and offers you a bowl of soup."

Other versions of the circumambulation also involve raising the Devil; thus, a teenage girl reported that seven circuits at 7.00am on Midsummer morning would raise Satan. Another informant stipulates that the circling is to be 'three times anticlockwise on Midsummer Eve,' while a more earthy variant calls for the practitioner to circumambulate '17 times stark naked on a night of the full moon.'

[..]The Devil, however, was not the only one being raised - three circuits brought a view of 'a lady on a white horse,' while twelve rounds at midnight on Midsummer Night conjured up a Druid. In the 1940s, some people apparently feared to circle the Ring at night 'lest they should meet the old white-bearded ghost that walks with bent head, seeking his treasure.' Finally, a 50 year old teacher reported that circling seven times at midnight on Midsummer Eve would mean that 'all your wishes will come true. We all believed that when I was a girl.'

This was recorded by Francis Wise in 1738:
"All the account which the country people are able to give of it is 'At this place lived formerly an invisible Smith, and if a traveller's Horse had lost a Shoe upon the road, he had no more to do than to bring the Horse to this place with a piece of money, and leaving both there for some little time, he might come again and find the money gone, but the Horse new shod."
(Letter to Dr Mead concerning Antiquities in Berkshire, Oxford, 1738, p37).

The stone tomb is usually called 'Wayland's Smithy', but Wise and other early writers call it simply 'Wayland Smith'.

The neolithic long-barrow on the Berkshire Downs known as Weyland's Smithy is mentioned by that name in a tenth century land charter. Between White Horse Hill and Weyland's Smithy is a prehistoric earthwork now known as Hardwell Camp, but in the ninth century called Tilsburh, that is 'Til's Castle'. Til is the same person as Weyland's brother Egil the Archer (the prototype of William Tell). *

The names of Beadohild and Wittich which also occur in the bounds of local Saxon charters are thought to refer to the princess seduced by Weyland, and his son by her, and there are some other place-names less certainly identifed which could be fitted into the same story.

Tumuli and Buried Treasure. - On the opposite side of the road to the Longstone, in what was also once part of the Common field, is Gatcombe Tump, a long barrow, of which the following story is told. I got it from a middle-aged woman who keeps a small shop; her mother, from whom she heard it, knew the heroine of the story.

"There was an old woman in Minchinhampton who used to charm ailments; she was called Molly Dreamer, because her dreams came true. She dreamed she would find a pot of gold in Gatcombe Tump and she and her husband dug there many times. Once she actually had her hand on the pot, and was saying,- "Come up! Labour in vain!" when a spirit rose up and frightened her. At another time a spirit appeared to her husband there, and asked him to name five parish churches, [apparently as a condition of getting the gold], but he could remember only four."

One old inhabitant, who lived as a child at a farm quite near, lays the scene of Molly's search at the Longstone itself, and adds that, just as she was lifting a stone that hid the treasure, there came a flash of lightning on to it, and Molly was never the same again. Some say, however, that she did find the gold..

In Avening parish, about half a mile south of the Longstone, is "Tinglestone," a menhir crowning a long barrow; Mr. Frost of Avening tells me that it too* "runs round the field when it hears the clock strike twelve."

That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness. It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge. There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages. He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them; likewise, that any one who counted them three times nine times, and then stood in the centre and said, "I dare!" would behold a tremendous apparition, and be stricken dead. He pretended to have seen a bustard (I suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner following...

..at St. Nicholas, near Cardiff, a man told me that his mother took him to 'Castle Corrig' (a cromlech near St. Nicholas, perhaps the biggest existing in Britain), when he 'had a decline' as a boy, and she spat upon the stone, rubbed her finger in the spittle and rubbed him on the forehead and chest.

... I feel convinced there is a good deal of this sort of thing, but I cannot get it out, or else it exists among a residuum which feels such a gap to exist between student and peasant that freedom of speech becomes impossible. But I have felt the sort of thing to underlie many ordinary stories, from certain turns of expression.

.. I found some five years ago that there were [magical rites] connected with Arthur's Stone (Gower), though denied by my informant. But she "did hear that gels went and walked round it to see their sweethearts - a long time ago - and if they didn't see him they took off their shawls and went on their hands and knees - nobody is so fulish now." This from a young girl at Port Eynon.

..the inhabitants of the villages around Coldrum once believed that a battle was fought there, and that a 'Black Prince' was buried in the chamber.

A somewhat similar story [to that at the Countless Stones] is that Kits Coty House cannot be measured for as fast as the imprudent surveyor takes his measurements he is made to forget them even before he can commit them to paper.

Up to the last generation there was a widespread belief that [megalithic] monuments could not be measured, nor the stones which composed them counted. Hence the name of "The Countless Stones" for the destroyed Lower Kits Coty, and as proof of their uncountability the story is told of a clever baker who placed a bread roll on each stone, thinking that when he collected his rolls again he would have the hidden number. His ingenious trick was in vain, however, for the Devil ate some of the rolls and then sat gibbering at the discomfited baker.

As the Lower Kits Coty [the Countless Stones] were destroyed about 1690 it might be thought that this legend [of them being countless] arose after their dispersal, but this is not a necessary inference, sinceI was told many years ago by a countryman that the stones of Coldrum were 'difficult' to count, and that no two persons got the same number.

..the building of Kits Coty House is attributed to the magical work of three witches who lived on Blue Bell Hill. Having raised the huge wall-stones, they found themselves unable to lift the capstones, and had to call in the assistance of a fourth member of the sisterhood, by whose help they were enabled to raise the immense stone into the air and lower it gently upon its walls.

It is a persistent tradition that if a personal object is placed upon the capstone, and the donor thereof walks around the monument three times, then the object will disappear; this ritual must be carried out on the night of the full moon. Interested persons have carried out this ritual at intervals right up to this year when the activities of a local investigator were fully reported in the local press.

The insistence that a personal object must be used suggests a substitute sacrifice by which the worshipper buys his own immunity from the Otherworld powers, or, possibly, that the received gift is a reward for favours granted or to be granted, although there is no hint that the ritualist must make a wish when making the circuit.

Another curious story is that if a person climbs on to the capstone, again at full moon, and thrusts his hand into a natural cavity in the stone, he will withdraw five iron nails. The five iron nails (without doubt for a horseshoe) will irrisistably remind readers of the legend attached to Wayland the Smith's Forge, in Berkshire, which is the ruined dolmen of a Long Barrow like Kits Coty House. The story attached to this megalith is that if a traveller places coins upon the capstone he will have his horse shod by an invisible smith. Bearing this story in mind there is thus the further possibility as regards the Kits Coty rituals that they have become confused and separated, and that the object which disappears is really payment for the nails.

Between Maidstone and Blue Bell Hill the 'Pilgrim's Way' crosses the Chatham-Maidstone road, and in the north-west angle there once stood upright another huge sarsen called variously 'The Kentish Standard Stone' or 'The White Horse Stone'; but this was broken up about the beginning of the nineteenth century, but another stone, still existing, but standing in the opposite north-east angle of the crossing, has inherited the name, and is today marked on the Ordnance Survey maps as 'The White Horse Stone'. It is a huge monolith standing upright and very similar to the great rectangular wall stones of Kits Coty House and Coldrum, having at one end the crude outline of a face caused by the natural configuration of the rock.

..... in 1834 we are told the legend of the (original) White Horse Stone. Upon this stone, it was written, fell the White Horse banner of Horsa when the Teutons were routed, hence its name of 'The Kentish Standard Stone'. This stone was soon afterwards destroyed, and the present 'White Horse Stone' inherited the legend.

...Since the names of Hengest and Horsa mean 'gelding and mare' it has been suggested that they refer to the war standards or war effigies of the invaders, and not to actual persons. It would be interesting to trace the origin of the story that Horsa bore a White Horse emblem, for it fits in remarkably well with the other implications of the legend. We cannot digress here into the subject of the Horse-Cult, but readers will doubtless be aware of the ancient sanctity of the animal; alike among Kelts and Teutons, white horses were considered sacred, and only a priest among the pagan Saxons could ride a white mare. Carvings of horse-heads on the gables of roofs in Denmark are still called Hengest and Horsa, and represent the guardian deities. Thus the fall of a White Horse banner at Aylesford would represent the death of Horsa. It should be emphasized that we are dealing here with legend, for history has yet to be satisfied as to the acutality of the Jutish invasion of Kent.

An old man of Newchurch, near the Gaerlwyd Cromlech, told the writer that Jackie Kent and the Devil threw the stone forming the Gaerlwyd Cromlech at Newchurch West - the same tradition as that about the Trelech maenhirs.