Sir Charles Peers, the joint excavator of the site, described the folk lore and its curious confirmation by the post-War work. It was said that Wayland, the Farrier God, lived here and shod the horses of the wayfarer who left a silver groat upon the stones. Now in excavating the site two iron currency bars of the first century B.C. were revealed, as if in fulfilment of the story.
But the stones themselves are the remains of a 200ft. long barrow erected 2,000 years before the currency bars came into being, while the name of the Teutonic god could not have been attached to the site until four or five centuries within the Christian era.
From The Times, August 9th, 1932, p13.
However, dully, I have read elsewhere the suggestion that the ‘currency bars’ aren’t as old as they might be. But what’s the truth?
According to the Davidson article in the Folklore post above, the bars are mentioned in C R Peers and R A Smith’s article in Archaeological Journal, I, 1921, p188.