Jane

In a big, wide rolling, landscape pockmarked with earthworks and tumuli, Duggleby Howe stands proud and tall despite being a shadow of its former self. Now only 20 feet high, rather than 30, and without its surrounding ditch and bank of which I could see no trace, this massive tump really dominates this little valley. We followed the edges of the field to reach it, as there is no path.

I liked it enormously and had there not been a biting cold northerly wind, I’d have liked to sit and considered its position in the landscape a little longer. Like you do at Silbury, for example.

How this survived in a churchyard, God only knows. Woooo! I challenge anyone not to be impressed by this monster though it is made to look silly with its little metal helmet. I lay on the ground and looked up from its base watching the clouds scudding past. I was intrigued by its juxtaposition with the gravestones and its proximity to the church itself.

In the corner of the graveyard, under a tree lies a couple of broken standing stones one of which has the most amazing bright white lichen on one side only. Seek this out, it’s fab. Next to this is a gorgeous, open stone-lined coffin. Loads to see here!

Reduced now to a virtually imperceptible swell in a meadow, you have to be a real Long Barrow Detective (cue for TV series?) to even notice this let alone get excited by it. I walked its length. At some point it was very big, but this has melted away to almost nothing. What a bloody shame.

This is – or was – an absolute beauty. Ten metres longer than Belas Knap it shows signs of once magnificent side chambers, à la Belas Knap, perhaps as many as six of them. There was a lot of rubble underfoot, some still stacked up, which you could see if you lifted some of the leaf mulch and dug around a bit with your fingers But at some point it has been carelessly dug out. One single standing stone at its head end is all that’s left upright; 3 feet tall, 3 feet wide and only 6 inches thick.

Despite its terrible condition, I was really impressed with this place. I guess I have seen enough long barrows now to be able to fill in the blanks in my imagination.

You really wouldn’t want to come here in the summer when the undergrowth is at its height, the brambles turn it into Ankle Laceration City, even in winter.

We drove right up the farm track and parked next to the field in which it lies. Reduced to an uncultivated patch in the distance, we didn’t dare walk over the field to see it for fear of becoming caked in mud up to our knees. I noted that the farm on which it stand is called Lad barrow farm, which may be why it still exists: you wouldn’t plough up the very thing your land was named after would you? Though big, from this distance it really is quite underwhelming, though its position on the highest land up here is stunning.

This is a total disaster. Weep, dear reader, then forget this one and instead see Poles Wood South long barrow which still lives.

Standing completely alone at the top of a field, nowhere near the field edge, crouches this rectangular megalith just 3 feet tall and 5ft 7ins wide. You just wouldn’t see it at all if the field was in full-crop. Today, planted with low-growing brassicas, I hmm-ed and ahh-ed about whether or not to trapse through the field to see it as there was no clear track. I decided to go for it, being careful to step between the plants. Like everything else round here its of oolitic limestone, pockmarked and weathered. There was something of immense pride about this stone. Definitely worth look-see.

Apart from its great height, (it’s very steep sided) there’s not much to see here. It’s big and tall at maybe 25 metres long, but there are no outstanding features. Badly overgrown, it’s now the domain of badgers. Could the Whittlestone have once been something to do with this? It’s very close.

This is a really big long barrow and not overly trashed. On the edge of woodland, it hasn’t suffered under the plough and its shape, height, total length and significance is clear. Punctuated by mature trees along the top, its outline is still relatively smooth and straight. And to my pleasant surprise I found two stones and a bit of rubble making up a little stone cist on the top, small enough to curl up in. What a great long barrow!

If you didn’t know it was a long barrow, you wouldn’t notice it. It’s a large unmarked hump, slowly being reclaimed by beech trees, today lying under a thick carpet of leaves, providing fantastic cover for the wildlife now being hunted around us. I thought I could make out the shape of the horns of an entrance way, as at Belas Knap.

Bang slap in the middle of Lower Swell village the Whittlestone lies dead. Were it not for the little brass plaque revealing its neolithic origins you would be forgiven for mistaking it for something the bin men forgot. It’s not pretty, but it is big and thick, too, and it’s recorded to have been shifted here at some point in the recent past. Dumped, more like. Given its proximity to Lower Swell long barrow, it may well have been part of that.

I was pleased that Moth, too, thought that these stones were more than just badly placed gateposts or idly strewn field clearance. And this time, due to lack of undergrowth we could see that opposite the tallest stones on the north side of the driveway were four or five more large stones, upright, large and Rollrighty. Moth vigorous set about pulling off the ivy and moss to expose them more clearly to view. I still have no idea what’s going on here at Churchill, but something very big once did, for sure.

More of a leaning stone than a standing stone it probably only remains at its tortuous 45 degree angle by virtue of the wall it lies against. Were it not for this, it would almost certainly be over, lost amongst the undergrowth. My guess is that this was once some kind of marker stone, perhaps leading to Lyneham longbarrow. Worth a glimpse if you are coming to see Lyneham.

It feels like it’s on the edge; crouching, clinging like an animal to the very crest of the hill, on a threshold between the known world of the Marlborough Downs and beyond, between land and sky, between the earth here and now and the heavens. And what a view! Leaning heavily into the wind, I watched the low winter sunlight fade fast producing weak yet dramatic shadows on the very sexy figure of Knap Hill just opposite.

I never expected this long barrow to be so dramatic and frankly so bloody big. I never expected to see a bank and ditch running round it, today providing welcome relief from the howlin’ wind. I never expected to like a place so much in such foul conditions.

For those unable to get up to the Mother’s Jam, here’s a great way to see how the landscape up there is littered with massive stones. Why this little valley escaped field clearance is not apparent, but it did and very impressive it is, too. And we’re not just talking about a handful of big stones here, there are hundreds of them lying exactly where the long-forgotten glacier dumped them as it melted into history. Fantastic.

...but climb it and it seems even larger still. Phew -whee! As you climb, its spiralling terraced design and construction become more apparent and from the top its bulk is quite overwhelming and makes the ugly school buildings seem tiny. Lurking in a dip at the top of the mound is a huge ugly water tank and a kilny/chimney thing. I wondered if it was a rudimentary crematorium for disposing the bodies of schoolboys who’d been thrashed to death by an over-zealous master. Maybe not. But perhaps it should be.

In a large field opposite Little Kit’s Coty lies the natural outcrop of the Coffin Stone. We could see it clearly, but it was right in the middle of a crop of developing brassicas and we walked as far along the field edge as we could, but the light was fading fast and despite attempts I failed to get a decent photo of it. However, even from the distance from which we viewed it, it looked monumentally huge.

The sign says twenty. Moth counted n-n-n-nineteen. Countless? I think not, baby puppy. Whatever the number they’re certainly countable, though you have to have a very lively imagination to reconstruct in your mind the fabulous monument that this once was. A huge burial chamber at some point has just laid down and died. Hopelessly collapsed, its bleached long-dead elephant bones lie strewn ingloriously in a heap. You have to be keen on stones to be impressed by this. It made me want to weep.

Parking precariously in the recommended spot, we squidged the 200 metres up the muddy sunken path to the top of the hill and there it was – looking as cute as a puppy dog’s nose.
With great views over the Medway valley, in spite of the murky weather, this little construction is rudely caged, with a fuck-off spiky fence reminding me of a fluffy chinchilla sitting inside razor wire. But look closely and you see why. The interior portal stone has been a honey pot to the graffiti bees. Mostly delicately carved in classical caps in the late 19th century, they nevertheless have all the charm of repetitious spray-painted ‘Fucks’ on a subway train. The delicious thing about Kit’s Coty is, I think, it’s proportions. It doesn’t overwhelm or impress, it simply enchants with its human scale.

Standing broadside at the chalky escarpment, the stone screamed “Tomb!” to us, though there is no evidence of anything else to justify our assertion. It just felt ‘tomby’ on account of it being big and longer than it is tall.

Like a rock ‘n roll star, the chamber perches on top of the edge of a ridge, so that its stones look for all the world like some Freddie Mercury figure, arms aloft, allowing itself to bask in the glory of its adoring fans. Climb the steps to the left and rise up behind the ‘stage’ to see the pattern of placement of the kerbstones marking out the depth of the longbarrow. And look over the Freddie Mercury chamber and you see that the the rolling fields of Kent are the audience.
A ranch style fence indicates that you’re not meant to walk on the top of the barrow, but people clearly had. Had the weather been better, I may have done so, just to get nearer the chamber, but it was so wet, and I so fearful of going arse-over-tit, I decided against.
This is a cracker of a monument, grand and spectacular and a real surprise to find such a beast lurking in Kent.

Once mistaken for two monuments – bit of a burial chamber one side, bit of a stone circle the other, a road was driven through the middle in the 19th century. Only it isn’t two monuments. At one end is a burial chamber, for sure, but what was once mistaken for a stone circle is in fact the kerbstones of a beautiful long barrow. Joan lovingly preserves it and proudly told us that, thanks to her guadianship, 47 different species of wild plant grow there now. She has had it designated as a nature reserve.

This great monument of enormous megaliths comprises what is left of a whopping burial chamber, aligned, Joan thought, on the winter solstice. Carefully selected, shaped sarsens stand in a line 10 to 15 metres across making up the portal stones and main interior chamber which is all that is left now, but these are incredibly impressive. It remined me of Pentre Ifan, but without the cuttlefish topping. I liked the glistening of them in the drizzly rain and the way the peppermint-green lichens shone out of the surface of the stones. The idly strewn capstones, which must weigh 15 tons or more each lie at the back of the stones which still stand. What a fabulous thing to have in your back garden! What a huge responsibility! Fortunately for us all, they’re in the safe hands of Joan Bygrave. Learn from her, ploughmen.

When I visited, two years ago I had only the OS map and my intuition to find this one.

As baza says, it’s in a copse, which requires you to trespass. I went in winter when the undergrowth had died back and after frightening a least half a dozen pheasants as I paced up and down, I found a monumental stone, now sadly down, and pretty much ready to be reclaimed by the earth. It was undoubtedly the Hoar stone. All mossy and uneven and covered in leaf-mulch and fruits of the forest floor, it’s over 10 feet in length. This one is crying out to be re-erected before it becomes lost to us forever, as it surely will be if it is left in it’s current condition.

Goodbye Hoar stone.

A very curious affair this! I counted six obvious low stones making a reasonably easy to spot construction. But the thing about this one is in the middle of the circle is a large grassy mound – a collapsed cairn with a whopping great deep chamber into which you can walk. It goes pretty deep, maybe 5 feet? I likes this one hugely. It was quirky.

Almost unrecognisable to the untrained eye but nevertheless thrilling to find when one is into this stuff, it lies just off the main path. Now just a low ring of overgrown bank, you have to inspect pretty closely to find the stones. But they’re there! You’d be forgiven for thinking it looked more like a ring cairn.

Even once actually inside the circle, it doesn’t become apparent until pointed out. The low stones, the high heather, deep bracken and the broken outline of the circle all conspire to camoflague the place almost entirely. I was glad I didn’t attempt this one without a stubob! I think even a GPS would find this tough to locate. The views over the surround country are quite lovely.
Access: Impossible except by the hardy and able-bodied!

Now reduced to little more than a big pile of scraggy rocks with a dip in the middle, the only clue to what-it-once-was is the big fuck-off Ministry of Works (who are they exactly?) rusty sign, erected rudely at its periphery. Despite its appalling condition, the cairn is impressive right on the edge of a ridge and with Wet Withens just metres away.

Probably missed by the copious numbers of ramblers passing this way, this unobtrusive stone circle lies about 10 metres from the main drag along the ridge. Surrounded by silver birches, in the most wonderful setting, the largest of the stones, standing about four feet tall at the southern edge of the ring had a huge weathered dip in the top, which today was full of water and reflected the blue sky.

A clear circle, well defined and peaceful, certainly worth a look and reasonably accessible for those who don’t like or can’t walk too far.

What a fantastic place! Pretty and with small stones, of immense charm in this enormous landscape, the circle looks skyward. It is of a very human scale somehow. We mused as to the weathering patterns on the stones and wondered if what looked like a recumbent had actually been upright once, but our ponderings were conclusion-less and Barbrook I kept her secrets.

We parked at the end of the lane leaving a walk on flat ground of only 200 metres or so to reach this elegant pair of beautiful standing stones. The taller one is about 10 feet high and slimline like a blade. Their shape and grace reminded me of the shape of stones I had seen pictures of on Orkney, which I haven’t (yet) experienced. Hauntingly lonely, this pair’s angled tops seem to be pointing, but to what is unclear. I wished we’d had more time.

The walk from the only realistic car parking space was not hard, maybe 20 minutes at most, and if you know what you’re looking for you can see it as you pass over the first cattle grid, but I could not, despite Moth’s insistence, “look, woman, it’s there!” For me it was more of a ‘slow reveal’ and a thrilling one at that. As we got closer, its distinct shape came into view and I become more silent, gobsmacked by it’s beauty.

Imagine the Rollrights, and now combine that vision with Castlerigg... yep! you have Sunkenkirk. Over fifty beautiful stones, some fallen, but predominently still standing, enclose a wonderful space somehow of a human scale. I walked round, pausing to admire the craftsmanship in each carefully dressed stone: the snooker-table flatness of the dressing, the sharp edges where the flatnesses intersected... oo-er, but this is a blinder! Something about its completeness is utterly alluring. The rise in the land just at the back of the circle affords views of its entirity, which you just don’t get at other circles.

It is covered with a fine collection of ancient cupmarks and marks created by more modern tossers who had decided to add their names to the collection, including Christine, Dave and 1984. May they rot in hell. Then it occurred to me that perhaps, before the advent of writing, the cupmarks themselves were little more than neolithic tribal graffiti, which would mean that Christine, Dave and 1984 were actually no different to the cupmark makers. Or maybe not.

Hackpen Hill affords glorious views from the top where the Ridgeway intersects the road. I came here in 1991 with my then-husband and then-baby daughter the morning after a crop circle had appeared the night before. You can see why the circle makers would choose this place to practice their art, the views down into the field below are clear and close.

Today, we saw the remnants of a harvested crop circle and went down to investigate the white horse, carved in 1837 to celebrate Victoria’s coronation.

We could clearly make out the field to the west in which Winterbourne Bassett stone circle lies in the distance. Everything here is interconnected.

Curious, indeed.... couldn’t get my head around this one at all. A great outlier at the corner on the road tells you something great once stood hereabouts, but enter the field and prepare to be initially underwhelmed. But give it time, walk around the fallen remaining stones and you’ll soon feel that this was once *massive*. To me it felt like the gigantic Avebury-sized megaliths hadn’t just fallen – they were pushed! They didn’t sit on the ground, they were now almost flush with ground level and it felt like at any minute the earth could have swallowed them up again.

A whopping great outlier to the east hints at something else going on here...

Moth and me had the place completely to ourselves. It seems to be quite forgotten for a site so close to Avebury.

The gentle rise of the hill gives you no clue as to how far up you actually are when you get to the top, and it won’t make you break into a sweat either. What a great place to blow the cobwebs away! A series of earthworks, round barrows, saucer barrows and a cracking bell barrow set in a hummocky landscape and all the while one’s gaze is pulled towards the looming figure of Silbury Hill....

Mmmmm... groovy! Ooooh.... smooth!

This big old rock is so soft to the touch and worn so completely smooth it’s absolutely staggering! To consider just how many people’s actions upon this stone created the way it is today makes my head spin.... But why this stone and why here, exactly? I wondered has it fallen or been moved or was it always thus? (I now see from baza post below that it has indeed been moved)

I lay in the sunshine pondering these questions and drew a complete blank. This is a stone with secrets never to be revealed.

It’s a bit of a hike up to find it but with good directions is actually pretty easy to find. (Moth used me as a guinea pig to test whether his written directions were clear or not. Well, I found it, which either proves I’m not as stupid as I thought or Moth writes well. Or possibly both.)

If you can find it, see this! But take your time once you have. It’s very rewarding.

A small circle of six stones, not tear-jerkingly cute in a Doll Tor way, and not dramatic or breathtaking either, it’s just there, comfortable with itself and it’s rather nice. Cracking views of dales all around, this little survivor is absolutely worth a peep. When we saw it there were patches of blue dye all over them, all at a certain height. Immediately I thought ‘bloody graffiti vandal bastard-types!’ but then I realised that the sheep, sprayed with blue identification dyes cuddled up against the stones as they sought shelter from the wind, which fortunately wasn’t howling the day we went.

A gratifying short walk from the car, this is highly suitable for people who find walking either difficult or rather tedious.

What appears to be a teeny weeny stone circle at Yockenthwaite is in fact the retaining kerbstones of all that remains of a once-impressive cairn. What a great place to just be. Today I had the energy to paint, but not enough time so I only made a really rough sketch. The circle nestles at the bottom of the valley right next the river (just over the wall) and is quite lovely in a ruinous way.

Oooo.... but this is nice! This pretty stone circle has been badly damaged over the years, but such is the feeling for it that people continually re-erect the stones, propping them up with whatever they can find.

I was breathtaken by it and not just cos I’m unfit: bright, lofty ‘John Constable’ skyscapes and a 270 degree view! The Twelve Apostles sit in a green clearing amid the purple heather and sing to the heavens! Flopping down absolutely shattered I opened my flask, lit a fag and thought I had died and gone to heaven. Sadly, I was too pooped to paint anything at the time.* Next time, then!

*though I did make a little study when I got home.

Three very distinct and one a bit flattened tumuli of giant proportions run in a line north/south just to the west of Popham airfield. I went to Sutton Hoo recently and was mightily underwhelmed by the ploughed out barrows there – to think they may have once stood tall as tall as these at Popham! Definitely worth a visit.

Following baza’s careful and precise instructions (below) we drove down beyond the ‘Private Road’ sign. Nervously we proceeded, aware that not only were we trespassing (and therefore not setting a good example to the children!) but there were some mean-looking bullocks lurking around. We spotted a pile of what were clearly (to us!) fallen megaliths – the ones hamish had seen – and jumped out to take pics. Were these the Goose stones? The longer we proceeded down the lane, the more we saw! Were they ‘erratics’ or something else? There were tons of them! As we reached the end of the lane, we saw the one Celia Haddon had pointed out when she was taken there by Bennett and Wilson (authors of ‘The Old Stones of Rollright and District’). Which ones were the Goose stones? Had we seen them at all?

It was only afterwards it occurred to me that maybe ALL of them are the Goose stones...

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.

Standing about two feet tall under a large bay tree, this stone has somehow survived in it’s position in the very centre of Chipping Norton’s genteel urban landscape. Like all the other stones in this area (Goose stones, Hawk stone, Rollrights, etc) it is of oolitic limestone and is very badly weathered. Massive holes are worn right through like a huge piece of sweet gruyere. It screams ‘genuine’ to me. It’s probably the oldest erection in Chippy!

I noticed these quite by chance after having visited the Churchill village stones. I spotted a tall stone, looking for all the world like a gatepost, but bigger. Stopping to investigate I saw that the standing one was about 3 or 4 feet tall but looked taller by virtue of it’s position on the edge of a sunken track, and it had three or possibly four fallen companions each about 4 feet long.! (I couldn’t see *exactly* due to dense undergrowth.) It most certainly wasn’t a gatepost. The stones are not marked on the map but their proximity to the Churchill village stones certainly made me wonder if something else has been going on here.

Ten days after seeing the Churchill Three stones, I found a reference for them in a book I thought I’d lost, ‘The Old Stones of Rollright and District’ by Bennett and Wilson and I was heartened to find that they too thought them as suspiciously genuine as I did.

This pretty flint-built church with dark clapboard tower and pointy red clay-tiled roof hides a secret. Where have all these idley strewn about megaliths come from? I counted two at the entrance of the path, one in the church and seven lying about amongst the gravestones. There may be more, lurking just under the surface of the turf. I did a reccie to make sure there weren’t others, naturally occurring on the edges of the field next to the church, but they were so different to be inexplicable. Undoubtedly, this was an ancient site, though precisely what it is impossible to say. The lie of the land seemed right, and I was reminded of the Churchill village stones which I had seen only the week before. In response to ocifant’s musings on whether or not the indentations on the stones are cup-marks or weathering, I would join the weathering school-of thought, but I have no real experience on which to base this hunch. I’d need to know more about geology to tell.

The eight stones placed closely together are all of the same rough size and shape as many of the original Rollrights, just a couple of miles down the road, and most notably, in the same weathered condition. Many of the stones used as kerbstones at the roadsides in the village were not as weathered, but we did notice that some of the larger ones bore tell-tale signs of a different past, more weathered, dressed differently, more ceremonial and probably part of the same something that the alignment were once part of.... but what, we couldn’t say.

There can’t be a more impressive sight at nine o’clock in the morning as these massive erections! We stopped to admire the sheer unimaginable bulk of the single obelisk next to the road, rudely caged up behind a fence doing it’s damnest to out-tall the trees surrounding it. It must’ve been 25 feet tall – a real neolithic skyscraper. We wondered how deep the root of the stone was and settled on between six and 10 feet UNDER ground. This is one big mother! And if that is not enough, cross the lane and you see two more! The sun broke through as these two of the three magnificent menhirs of an alignment of perhaps five stones jutted out of a field of bright yellow corn, today with added interest as somebody/rutting deer/aliens/weird vortex/UFO/drunken pranksters (delete as applicable) had created a wonderful corn circle. I couldn’t make out the pattern precisely as I had no vantage point from which to gain height.

As the traffic swishes past on the A1(M), just 50 metres away, it’s great metal gantries and signs looming over the scene, you realise that the route of the A1(M) is probably as old as these stones themselves and it’s precisely why they were placed here.

Gently ruined and flattened and not half as impressive as the central circle, time has softened this henge, though you can still gain height by perching on its flattened banks in order to see it’s saucery interior. It’s big, it’s wide and open and you shouldn’t miss it.

After the jungly rainforest of the North henge, this one is a delight! Suddenly you can understand what the builders were on about! With massive earth ramparts, the hint of a ditch, and a distinct raised central platform, this has an everyone’s-welcome, inclusive market-place-type feel to it. Surely not a burial place, to me this feels like a place for the living: for singing, dancing, meeting, trading, playing and ceremony. Moth and me sat for sometime on the top of the bank at the southern end trying to make sense of it, looking to the wooded Northern henge just 500 metres or so away and down to the southern henge, it’s soft contour just rising out of the field 500 metres in a straight line to the south.