I fear this poor stone has been moved / smashed up in the name of more efficient agriculture. It’s not on the map any more though it was in the 1960s.
Giving preference to the meadow paths, we presently happen upon a huge block of stone, as big as a good-sized cart, lying stranded in the middle of a grass field. How it came there is the puzzle, so we take counsel with an old fellow breaking stones by the wayside, a furlong farther on- ‘Oh, ’ says he, in reply to our questions, ‘they ‘ud used to tell us, when we was childern, as the Devil fell lame one day a-walkin, by here, and throwed that there old stwun out of’s shoe, and then fled away up to Stiperstones yander. But that was afore my time, like, and behappen there’s never a one now as can tell the rights on it.’ And the country folk have a saying that the Lea Stone, as it is called, turns itself around ‘every time the clock strikes thirteen.‘
From ‘Nooks and Corners of Shropshire’ by H Thornhill Timmins (1899).
