Aldbourne Blowing Stone

Not the more famous Blowing Stone at Uffington, but another similarly holey sarsen. According to Katy Jordan (in ‘The Haunted Landscape’) this one lies near the Crown Inn in Aldbourne, on the pavement east of the village pond. It has a small deep hole at one end. Apparently it was ‘powerful enough to really get on villagers’ nerves when small boys repeatedly sounded the stone’. I was interested to read that the local blacksmith was hired (at some unspecified time) to plug the hole (a perfectly reasonable request, but it brought to my mind the mythological aspects of the blacksmith). Although the plug was (allegedly) later removed the stone is now silent. When KJ asked about it at the pub, no one seemed to know anything about it (her information originally came from a 1975 book by local author Ida Gandy).