Latest Folklore

Although the tunnel story is pretty fanciful, I discovered that there is an entrance to one of the numerous lead mines in this area in this field.

There’s a great legend explaining the existence of the chapel, and more interesting, the unusual markings in the cliff face. The information board at the car park above the chapel only tells part of the story:

Tradition says [St Govan] was pursued by pirates [or Vikings] to the cliff edge where the chapel now stands. Miraculously, a cleft in the rock opened for the Govan[sic] to hide in, closing again until the marauders had left.

The place where St Govan hid is now the anteroom at the back of the chapel, and the strange markings in the cliff show where his ribs were pressed against the rock when God hid him.

Regarding my folklore post (below) and the derivation of the Thor stone’s name....

TomBo reckons that this theory is incorrect. He believes that there’s an ancient deity (male) called Toar. It was he for whom the Tors (eg. Glastonbury Tor, Rough Tor) were named. His divine descendants include Thor and Taranus, the Keltic thunder god. The words “taurus” and “altar” (literally all-Toar) are also likely to be derived from his name. He was known in some places as Pen or Ben (for some reason), and in this guise he named Scotland’s mountains (Ben Nevis etc.), Italy’s Appenines and my own beloved Pennines.

Perfectly plausible, surely?

The Green Man Festival. A couple of miles from Bury Ditches lies the village of Clun. It’s a wonder to behold the dual-imaged Horned God and the Green Man challenging Winter on the old bridge, to make way for the May Queen. It is hard to put into words quite WHAT it is that strikes one so deeply about the Green Man, yet this man is so grateful to the people of Clun for keeping him alive. Russell Hoban in his novel ‘Riddley Walker’ captures the essence: “The look o’ that face saying so many different things only no words to say ‘em with. Never seen that face befor yet it wer a face I knowit....“.

U-Knowit!

clun.org.uk/greenman/

According to Chris Barber in his ‘Mysterious Wales’ the hill the cairn sits on is also known as ‘Bryn-y-Saethau’ – or the Hill of the Arrows, maybe from the stone arrowheads that have been found on its slopes.
The cairn itself is rumoured to be the grave of Boudicca (surely a bit out of the way for a girl from Essex?) or perhaps the resting place of a Roman general. Barber relates a referenceless anecdote (as he likes to do) about a local man walking past in 1938 who saw a field full of Roman soldiers and on the Gop the ghost of a Roman general on a white horse, brandishing a sword. Then ‘a cloud passed over the moon and the apparition vanished’. Personally I think I might have done the vanishing first if it had happened to me. Why do ghosts appear at night I wonder. And was this man on his way home from a local hostelry. We can only speculate.

In the book ‘Place Names of the Peak District’ the King Stone is referred to as being a flautist and not a fiddler, who was turned to stone for playing on the sabbath.

Moel Drygarn consists of three sizeable cairnes Bronze Age within the defenses of an Iron Age hillfort. According to Mr Barber (in his book More Mysterious Wales), the three cairnes are known as Môn, Maelan and Madog. They are named after the three Welsh kings that are buried underneath them (allegedly).

Fin Cop is another one of those places, Barbrook II another, where it’s reckoned that if you spend a night up there..........you’ll go mad.

As hamish mentions, there is a story that Jack o’ Kent hurled the stones from the top of Ysgyrd Fawr in a competition with the devil – I just thought I’d point out that this is the Welsh name for the anglicised ‘Skirrid’ – which links with the idea above that the stones may be aligned on this mountain.

The pilgrims in the past would come here in the Beltane weeks seeking cures,the locals were not too happy about this because it was their drinking water.

“Carlin” is a  corruption of “Cailleach” or witch; The Witches Stone.

“There ev’ry herd by sad experience knows,
How wing’d with fate, their elf shot arrows fly,
When the sick ewe her summer food forgoes,
Or stretch’d on earth the heart-smit heifers lie”

From
Flint Chips, A guide to Prehistoric Archaeology
by Edward T. stevens
1870

An elf shot is a flint arrow head.

Two of the longest ley lines in the UK cross close to the Lambourn Seven barrows – the St Michael ley line which courses across England from Carn Les Boel, Cornwall to Hopton on the Norfolk coast and the Belinus ley line, which courses from the Isle of White to Inverhope on its way to the Faroe islands. Both ley lines have serpentine earth energies assoicated with them, one is male and the other is female and these energies were known to ancient Chinese geomancers as Lung Mei, the Dragon’s Breath.

The Belinus ley line is the longest ley line in Britain and was researched by Gary Biltcliffe and his partner Yana. The Belinus line courses through St Catherine’s Hill, nr Winchester, and continues northwards and eventually targets Inverhope in Scotland. On St Catherine’s Hill, two ‘Dragon lines’ or earth energy currents that coil around the ley line can be located here. One dragon line is female [yin] and the other is masculine [yang] these earth energies were known to ancient Chinese geomancers as ‘lung mei’ the Dragon’s breath. The Belinus ley is similar to the St Michael ley line and its two earth energy currents, Mary and Michael, which were discovered by Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst in the 1980’s.

This is the legend surrounding the beginnings of Out Stack...

Herma and Saxa were giants: they quarrelled as they fell in love with a mermaid singing on the Flugga rock, throwing stones at each other which landed in the sea to become Saxa’s Baa. A large one thrown by Saxa became the Out Stack. To be rid of them she agreed to marry whichever would go with her to the North Pole. Both followed and were drowned as they could not swim.

In another version a passing witch settled the dispute by shrouding Saxa in turf to form the hill and turning Herma into a wreath of mist over the ness.

...taken from the Shetland Today website

This is a huge ice-scarred boulder, and traditionally it is held that the Gaelic bard Ossian was buried here.

Funnily enough, though, it may have marked the grave of someone previous even to Ossian. Seton Gordon writes in his “Highways and Byways in the Central Highlands”, quoting from an earlier source of the moving of the boulder by General Wade’s road-making soldiers:

“There happened to lie directly in the way an exceedingly large stone, and as it had been made a rule from the beginning to carry on the roads in straight lines, as far as the way would permit, not only to give them a better air, but to shorten the passenger’s journey, it was resolved the stone should be removed, if possible, though otherwise the work might have been carried along on either side of it.

The soldiers, by vast labour, with their levers and jacks, or hand screws, tumbled it over and over, till they got it quite out of the way, although it was of such an enormous size that it might be matter of great wonder how it could ever be removed by human strength and art, especially to such as had never seen on operation of that kind; and upon their digging a little way into that part of the ground where the centre of the base had stood, there was found a small cavity, about two feet square, which was guarded from the outward earth at the bottom, top and sides, by square flat stones.

This hollow contained some ashes, scraps of bones, and half-burnt ends of stalks of heath; which last we concluded to be a small remnant of a funeral pile.”

There follows some speculation that it was a Roman officer... Gordon also quotes from the Ordnance Gazette, on what happened afterwards:

“The people of the country, to the number of three or four score men, venerating the memory of the bard, rose with one consent, and carried away the bones with bagpipe playing and other funeral rites, and deposited them with much solemnity within a circle of large stones, on the lofty summit of a rock, sequestered and difficult of access... in the wild recesses of Glen Almond.

Glen Shee comes from Gleann Sith, the Fairy Glen. This site is traditionally held to be the grave of the Gaelic hero Diarmid, killed during a boar hunt.

One of this site’s alternate names is Na Clachan Aoraidh, which means ‘the stones of worship’. The site is just to the west of Edintian (another alternate name for the site), a local farm, whose now anglicised name in reality is Aodann an t-Sithein, ‘Face of the Fairy Hill’.

Glengorm was originally known as Sorne. In 1850, the new landlord, one James Forsyth, began to ‘improve’ his estate in the usual fashion in the Highlands – by clearance. The main house was replaced by a large and imposing baronial ‘castle’. Forsyth sought advice on a new name for the estate from one of the few remaining tenants of the land, an old lady, and she suggested Glengorm, meaning Blue Glen. Little did he suspect that the name would commemorate, for all time, the days when the glen was indeed blue with smoke from the burning homesteads.

A modern version of a classic folklore theme:

(from Katy Jordan’s Haunted Landscape)

Brian Davison as the Inspector of Ancient Monuments at Stonehenge recounted how a team from the University of Bristol came to take samples of the bluestones. There was a lot of mock apprehensiveness, because there are many stories of storms brewing up from nowhere / bad luck following the tampering with of barrows and other ancient sites.

“We joked and said, ‘Well, you know, even if people don’t see us, the gods will see us and we’ll be struck down’. Well, we finished our work about 9 o’clock at night, and cleared away, and said, ‘Well there you are, it’s all superstition. Nothing’s happened. No thunderbolts. No claps of thunder.’ But that was October 1987. Six hours later we had the hurricane.”

There might be a number of stones around here (the area is awash in barrows and mounds) – I hope this map reference is helpful. This sarsen (or is it a deliberately placed stone?) is near to Luccombe Springs. Katy Jordan (in The Haunted Landscape) tells of a conversation she had with a local woman, Jean Morrison. Apparently if you hold your breath and run round the stone 9 times, backwards, the devil will appear. Brave Jean had tried it as a child but alas was unable to hold her breath for so long.

The round barrow in Ogbourne St Andrew churchyard was said to be avoided by children (in 1938*) as there was “a well-authenticated legend that it is the abode of venomous vipers”. Perhaps it had a resident snake population – or could the idea possibly relate to serpents and dragons being symbolic to Christians of the devil?
(*from the North Wilts Herald of Aug 19, 1938, and mentioned in volume 50 of the Wilts Arch journal.)

Some might also take significance from the statement that the church (or the barrow itself?) is said to be one of the ‘nodes’ on the Michael/Mary ley line (the undulating ley line being likened to a serpent y’know) – see Miller and Broadhurst’s account of following it across the country, ‘The Sun and the Serpent’. The lines..

..converged again in the churchyard at Ogbourne St Andrew.. There, a prehistoric mound was, along with the church, located within a circular raised bank. In the middle of the mound was [a] node. Trees swayed and tall wildflowers whispered gently in the breeze in another of those secret magical places that understate their true significance. Mary ran directly along the axis of the church into the mound and disappeared off across the Marlborough Downs..

Near the church is Poughcombe Farm – which presumably (this is purely my own speculation I hasten to add) derives from ‘Puck Combe’ – more links with supernatural weirdness..

“This tale (Tunnels near Glastonbury) has quite a few local variants throughout Somerset. Most cogent here is the Mendip story told to Anthony Roberts by a fine old gentleman, the late James Barnard, who farmed between Wedmore and Wells and who traced his family back hundreds of years. This long distance tunnel myth is centered around two prehistoric standing stones that lie on the side of the Mendip Hills near Ebbor Gorge. The megaliths are called the Deerleap Stones and they mark at least one ley line running towards Warminster. Near these stones there is supposidly a tunnel entrance and a dog was said to have been thrust in, to reappear some days later from an exit at Glastonbury Tor. This is a distance of about eight miles as the crow flies.”

isleofavalon.co.uk/history/h-tunnels

This giant must have been killed twice! The info board at Warbstow Bury says that local tradition believes the internal mound is the burial site of the Warbstow Giant who was slain by the giant of Condolden Beacon, who lived near Tintagel. I suspect that this might the hill on which the Condolden Barrow stands.

This barrow is probably on the beacon hill that is attached by folklore to Warbstow Bury, via a story of two giants fighting (I love stories about giants!).