Gawton's Stone Natural Rock Feature View all content for Gawton's Stone

Visited 5th October 2013 I’ve been told about this place before, but its disputed antiquity, and the ever lengthening list of my must see sites had firmly pushed it to the back of my mind. Now with autumn's grip starting to discourage ventures too far from home, pleasant weekend weather inspired us to seek out somewhere to visit, and being as Knypersley was less than 30 miles from us, today seemed an opportune time to finally visit. Just south of Biddulph on the A527 we took the signposted right turn to the Greenway Bank Country Park. There are two car parks here, the first with a small visitors centre, toilets and coffee bar, but if you want a shorter walk just continue on down the lane to a further car park next to Knypersley reservoir itself. There are plenty of people out for walks today, and the reservoir is a tranquil site, surrounded as it is by a fringe of woodland. A group of twitchers with some serious photographic equipment, throng the dam wall, feverishly photographing a group of Great Crested Grebes out on the water as we walk by. Soon we reach Poolside Cottage, and the spot where we take the footpath that flanks the reservoir. Heading into the woods we soon pass a verdurous pond to our right, vegetation thronging its still waters, and hinting of the atmosphere of the woods to come. It’s quieter here, most people having opted to walk around the lakeshore in the sunshine, the forest canopy still retaining enough leaves to darken the day. Just down the path a handy signpost indicates we are heading in the right direction for Gawton’s Stone and Well, and looming out of the trees on an outcrop to the left, is the romantic ruin of the Wardens Tower, a folly built in 1828 and lived in as recently as the 1950’s. Continuing along the path we soon arrive at Gawton’s Stone, and it’s not something you can easily miss! Resembling a huge dolmen, like some cyclopean version of the Devil’s Den in Wiltshire, a giant boulder rests atop two smaller, but still pretty huge stones. Sadly it’s unlikely to be from the Neolithic, but that’s about as much as we do know. Various theories have been proposed as to how these stones got here. It doesn’t strike me as a folly, as firstly there are written references to it going back to the early 1600’s, (before the era when the building of follies became fashionable) and no records exist of a landowner having had it built. Intriguingly it also looks an unlikely natural arrangement of stones, particularly as the ‘capstone’ is of a different type of rock to the base stones. It is possible though that the largest stone had toppled from the nearby outcrop, which is the same type of rock, fortuitously ending up where it did, or indeed was pushed from the outcrop in antiquity. It all adds to the sense of mystery, as does the ‘face’ simulacrum of the rock if viewed from one side, and the folktales of the place being redolent with strange magical powers, and mysterious magnetic fluctuations. Sadly I forgot the compass today, so I can’t check if any weird magnetic anomalies were going on, but I didn’t pick up any strange sensations on touching the stone. The small chamber inside the stone doesn’t look like it would have provided much in the way of shelter for the eponymous hermit who was once supposed to have lived here, but it does appear some working has been made to the stone at the back of the chamber, and I imagine if you were hunkered down under the stone it would provide some solace from the elements (fortunately I don’t need to try it today!) We spend a bit of time taking in the place, the only sound that of the birds and the wind in the leaves, punctuated by the occasional bark of an overexcited dog getting a walk nearby. J.D. Sainter in his 1878 book suggests a Germanic route for the name of the stone, even going so far as to suggest it resembles an early type of Scandinavian dolmen, and I’ve got to say it does remind me in a way of the Gladsax dolmen we visited in Skane, a site which utilised a natural boulder in its construction, and which was established to be the earliest carbon dated burial mound in Sweden, so perhaps he has a point? There is also a reference on the Biddulph museum website to an excavation that took place in 1900 which indicated burials took place at the site, but I’ve not been able to uncover any more information about this yet. Stranger and stranger. All in all an enigmatic site, and well worth a visit, I’ll definitely be back knowing now how close it is to home, and so we leave the mysterious stone for the time being and continue our search for the nearby well…

Posted by Ravenfeather 8th October 2013ce

Comments (1)
Nice notes Ravenfeather. Don't know the site personally but felt you had taken me there. Good one.	Posted by Sanctuary 8th October 2013ce
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