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The Whispering Knights

Burial Chamber

Folklore

..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."
From: The Rollright Stones and Their Folk-Lore, by Arthur J. Evans
Folklore, Vol. 6, No. 1. (Mar., 1895), p25 in pp. 6-53.
Rhiannon Posted by Rhiannon
30th September 2006ce

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