
I’m not sure what’s more bizarre – the oddness of the cup and saucer stone, or treaclechops doing ‘I’m a little teapot’ (for scale purposes, you understand)
I’m not sure what’s more bizarre – the oddness of the cup and saucer stone, or treaclechops doing ‘I’m a little teapot’ (for scale purposes, you understand)
On the right, treaclechops points out the cup and saucer stone standing in an aptly named street in Cropredy, Oxon.
The things you learn from this site.
I have been passing cup and saucer for about 23 years and have always thought what a weird name for a road, I had no idea there was a stone there.
It’s a bit forlorn all by itself surrounded by houses, it wouldn’t look out of place in a garden centre. It’s strange to stand by the stone look up and see a massive tv in the house opposite showing the football.
However someone loves it, the saucer was full of Daffodills on my visit.
We popped in to have a look at this today, on our way back home from Birmingham, as it’s only a 5 minute drive from J11 on the M40.
Approaching Cropredy from the A361, just before the Cropredy Bridge is a large stone on the left hand side of the road. An information plaque proclaims it to be a boundary stone from the 15thC, but it looks and feels much older than that.
Anyway, continuing on, we came to a ‘T’ junction. We turned Right for no particular reason, and shortly spotted a road on the left marked ‘Cup and Saucer’. I swung in and the stone was there in front of us.
I’m not certain what to make of it, to be honest. It looks as if it should have an inscription carved on the ‘plinth’, for plinth it is. The base and ‘cup’ appears to be a single stone, but at the same time has obviously been extensively worked into its current font-like form. It’s hard to tell if the ‘spoon’ was ever actually a separate stone, or if the whole was carved from a single piece of stone.
Cup & Saucer? Mug & Spoon? Pestle & Mortar? I think the jury’s still out on this one...
This really quite BIZARRE stone is tangled up in the long history of Cropredy and its lost stone circle. On the maps its referred to as a ‘cross’ and certainly feels as if it had a Christian past, but it seems to me there is *much* more to it than that.
The stone itself consists of a font-type construct with what appears to be a spoon-like appendage sticking out of the top. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a weirder stone arrangement. (I felt it should have more accurately been called ‘mug and spoon’.) The fact that a small close of council semi-Ds has been built around it on what was once common land gives it an even stranger feel. It may be that some part of this monument (perhaps the ‘spoon’ element?) is the last remnant of Cropredy’s stone circle and that rather than discard it (and annoy the Dark Forces) it became Christianised and passed into the local folk legend.
A straight track runs from it to the burial ground on the edge of the village.
This one’s a complete mystery. And profoundly weird.
I’ve never been to the site, but looking at the photo, (and I hope I’m not stating the obvious here) doesn’t every schoolboy who has ever been there guess what its for?
Sit in the cup... legs either side of the ‘pestle’... voila... fertility symbol-a-go-go.