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The King Stone

Standing Stone / Menhir

Folklore

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.
Holes in hedgebanks eh. A terrible cynic might think of something more furry than a fairy as culprit. From: The Rollright Stones and Their Folk-Lore, by Arthur J. Evans, in Folklore, Vol. 6, No. 1. (Mar., 1895), pp. 6-53.
Rhiannon Posted by Rhiannon
30th September 2006ce
Edited 30th September 2006ce

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