Rhiannon

From ‘Wiltshire: the topographical collections of John Aubrey. Corrected and enlarged by J. E. Jackson (1862)’.

John Aubrey wrote:

Hubba’s Lowe: In the reign of King Ethelred, Hinguor and Hubba, two brothers, Danes, Leaders who had gott footing among the East Angles. These Pagans, Asserius saith, came from Danubius. Bruern, a nobleman, whose wife King Osbert had ravished, called in Hinguor and Hubba to revenge him.

Jackson, out to correct him, leaves the footnote:

There seems to be no authority for this tumulus having been ever called ‘Hubba’s Low’ (ie the burial tumulus of Hubba, the Dane). It is merely the name that Aubrey gave it, because his neighbour at Kington St Michael, Sir Charles Snell ‘told him so’. Hubba was most likely buried where the Chronicles say he was slain, in Devonshire. See Hoare’s Anc Wilts ii 99, and a minute account of this barrow by Dr Thurnam, in Wilts Arch Mag III 67. The common name is Lan Hill (Long Hill) barrow. It is three miles NW of Chippenham in a meadow on the left of the high road leading to Marshfield. It is a heap of stones about 60 paces in length, covered in turf. For the convenience of obtaining road materials it has been much injured.

One feels he was rather missing the point, shirtily pointing out that Hubba would have been buried in Devon. But you can see his disregard for barrows in his description of it as ‘a heap of stones’. Oh well.

The young son of the landowners, Charles Goring, planted the beech trees of Chanctonbury Ring in 1760. There are various romantic tales about their birth – that as a child he ran around the hill scattering their seeds, or that he often went up the hill with a little flask of water to tend to his little seedlings. A less sympathetic story tells of him sending his poor servants up the hill with buckets of water! A more pro-proletariat version has the lowly girls and boys of the village sowing the beechnuts.

(collected together in Westwood and Simpson’s ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005).)

Westwood and Simpson (’Lore of the Land’ 2005) mention an early version from 1774 about the tunnel which runs from the south side of the hill to the centre of town. Variations continue to thrive: “A man who wanted to test its truth put a duck into the hole, and a few days later ‘the duck emerged, looking slightly confused, in the centre of Dorchester’.” (Don’t go shoving any more ducks down holes or I’ll have to call the RSPB.)

They also mention Jeremy Harte’s researches into Maiden Castle(s) in which he mentions ‘ghostly Roman soldiers’ and ‘a strange force capable of rocking a parked car’. Sounds intriguing. Such a big hillfort has plenty of room for plenty of weirdness. You’d better see their bibliography in ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005).

Following on from the information about “Molly the Dreamer” at Gatcombe Lodge:

“Molly is also supposed to have dug at the Longstone, where she did find gold, but lightning flashed just as she was about to lift it out; ‘after that she was never the same again’.”

From an article in ‘Folklore’ (1912), mentioned by Westwood and Simpson in their 2005 ‘Lore of the Land’.

Watch out for the big cats, if this tale of schoolboys on ‘Farshores’ is to be believed.
100megsfree4.com/farshores/c_dart.htm

woodland-trust.org.uk/broadleaf/leaffirst.asp?aid=533&issue=60

This page at the Woodland Trust suggests that people chipped bits off the stone to pop them under their pillows – that way they’d dream of their future lovers. Or spouses, as the page so primly puts it.

The Spa at Gilsland obviously got popular in Victorian times, but could chalybeate and sulphurous springs have gone unnoticed before this (you doubt it). This extract from ‘Northumbria’ (1920) tries to suggest the fad was a survival of the past.. though who knows. Gilsland Spa was obviously used as such before the Victorians (Kentigern’s website says it was on a map from the 1770s).

Gilsland Spa has long been a noted resort, and an account is given even within recent times of the yearly pilgrimage to the chalybeate and sulphur waters as a modern survival of well-worship. On the Sunday after old Midsummer Day, called the Head Sunday, and the Sunday after it, hundreds if not thousands used to assemble from all directions by rail when that was available, and by vehicles and on foot otherwise. From North Tynedale and the neighbourhood for many miles round these unconscious adherents of heathen rites visited the wells.

oldandsold.com/articles32n/northumbria-21.shtml

[With regard to the ‘synthetic folklore’ derided in the post above, I would say that folklore is being created all the time (think urban myths) and even if it is made up on the spot it is clearly to fill a certain gap that is perceived to require some, and generally draws on ideas of what folklore should be about (midsummer meetings etc). I don’t think I should only be recording ‘genuine folklore’, whatever that’s supposed to be – if ideas get told, believed and retold, then that IS folklore, surely.]

Stukeley was told by local people that there had been seven churches here originally, but that six had vanished entirely.

(mentioned by Westwood and Simpson in ‘Lore of the Land’ 2005 p215)

Castle Hill is an Iron Age fort, later reused in medieval times. You can see the remains of a tower on top, and this has a legend attached which is more often associated with the siting of churches (but without the fake boar – it’s usually the devil or some other supernatural interferer. Could this be a ‘rationalised’ version of a previous tale?):

A lord of Callaley in the days of yore commenced erecting a castle on this hill; his lady preferred a low sheltered situation in the vale. She remonstrated; but her lord was wilful, and the building continued to progress. What she could not attain by persuasion she sought to achieve by stratagem, and availed herself of the superstitious opinions and feelings of the age. One of her servants who was devoted to her interests entered into her scheme; he was dressed up like a boar, and nightly he ascended the hill and pulled down all that had been built during the day. It was soon whispered that the spiritual powers were opposed to the erection of a castle on the hill; the lord himself became alarmed, and he sent some of his retainers to watch the building during the night, and discover the cause of the destruction. Under the influence of the superstitions of the times, these retainers magnified appearances, and when the boar issued from the wood and commenced overthrowing the work of the day, they beheld a monstrous animal of enormous power. Their terror was complete when the boar, standing among the overturned stones, cried out in a loud voice--
“Callaly Castle built on the height,
Up in the day and down in the night;
Builded down in the Shepherd’s Shaw,
It shall stand for aye and never fa’.

They immediately fled and informed the lord of the supernatural visitation; and regarding the rhymes as an expression of the will of heaven, he abandoned the work, and in accordance with the wish of his lady built his castle low down in the vale, where the modern mansion now stands. --George Tate, F.G.S., in Alnwick Mercury, August 1, 1862.

From the Denham Tracts, which also has a bit on weather forecasting using the site:

When the “Callaly pot is boiling” it indicates bad weather. A mist in a ferment rises straight up from the ravine between the Castle Hill and Lorbottle Moor, and clings to the top of the hill. This is a sure sign of rain, both as seen from Biddleston on the west and Shawdon on the east. The “Callaly pot” was boiled by the Clavering owners, who were a Catholic family, to provide a dinner for the poor people who on Sunday and holidays attended the services at the chapel attached to the mansion.

In the late 19th century (according to the Magic record) several Bronze Age stone coffins were discovered during quarrying on the north side of the hill. On the south side there are quite a few round cairns. One is near Macartney’s Cave (’In one of the huge fantastic rocks among the heather is Macartney’s Cave, a little oratory hewn out of the sandstone by a former chaplain of Callaly Castle’*), and at least five are near ‘Hob’s Nick’ – a deep fissure in the rock.
*taken from ‘Northumbria’ (1920 – no author mentioned?) online at
oldandsold.com/articles32n/northumbria-32.shtml

The Denham Tracts say of the waterfalls in Callaly Crags close by:

The pot-holes... are Robin Goodfellow’s or Hob-Thrush’s Mills, wherein he grinds his visionary grain. The mills are set going by spates, which bring down stones that rattle in the pot holes, like the grinding gear of a mill set in motion.

Visionary grain eh?

Local folklore had it that Nympsfield was originally built as a shelter for lepers, and locals avoided it. Someone clearly overcame their fears in the end, judging by the ruinous state in which the barrow now lies.

Mark Richards also suggests (in ‘The Cotswold Way’ 1984) that the name Nympsfield could be derived from ‘open country belonging to a place called Nymed’.. and nymed possibly coming from the Welsh ‘nyfed’ – a shrine or holy place (a grove?). Nympsfield the village is not really next to the barrow – it’s more equidistant from this long barrow and Hetty Peglar’s Tump. It’d be nice to think such a romantic explanation were true though.

According to ‘Dorsetshire Folklore’ by John Symonds Udal (1922), this hill features in a couple of connected local sayings:

“As much akin as Leuson Hill to Pilsen-Pen” implies people who are near neighbours ‘but neither relations nor aquaintance’.

“As far off as Lewedon Hill from Pillesdon Pen” denotes ‘a distinct severance of friendly relations between near neighbours.”

Lewesdon and Pilsdon Pen are indeed very close; and according to the info on Magic there are four hillforts overlooking this end of the Marshwood Vale “representing an unusual concentration.”

According to George Witts in c1882, “There is a local tradition that ‘in the time of the wars’ blood ran down Abbey Lane like water, and many people are still afraid to go down the lane at night! ”

“The views from this position are very extensive, including the river Severn for many miles, Stinchcomb Hill, Haresfield Beacon, Bredon Hill, the Malvern Hills, May Hill, Dean Forest, Lydney, Chepstow, &c. The ancient Ridge way runs through the centre of the camp. ”

As for its name:

[It] is in a piece of ground called the Abby, as Sir Robert Atkyns thinks from an old house near it which formerly belonged to an Abby. It is about a mile from Alveston, and near the eleven mile stone in the road from Bristol to Gloucester. Its dimensions are about two hundred and forty yards from east to west, and about three hundred and forty from north to south. It is much mutilated by the plough and other things. It may be seen from Oldbury, Old Sodbury, and Westridge. Most probably also from Dyrham, Horton and Drakestone.

From ‘An Account of a Chain of ancient Fortresses’ by Thomas Baker – In Archaeologia 19 (Jan 1821).

Local landowner, Sir Philip Brocklehurst, wrote in 1874:

The peasants of the neighbourhood have a curious legend respecting the origin of ‘The Bridestones’. “When the Danes invaded England,” they say, “a Danish youth became enamoured of a Saxon lady, and in the end the two were married at Biddulph church (about a mile and a half distant) but on returning from the wedding, they were here met and murdered, and after their interment had taken place on the spot where they fell, these stones were laid around their grave, and the name Bridestones given to it from that circumstance.” So much for public opinion.

You can see him rolling his eyes.

Quoted in Westwood and Simpson’s 2005 ‘Lore of the Land’.

A village grew up inside this hillfort, including the church of St John the Baptist. In 1402 the Devil appeared in the church during a terrible thunderstorm, taking on the form of a grey friar and ‘behaving himself verie outrageouslie’ according to Holinshed’s Chronicles (written in the 16th century). The nave and a part of the chancel were destroyed. Cynics will put this down to the relative height of church, the fort being the highest point in Essex, and thus vulnerable to lightning and eldritch storms, rather than to any devilish qualities of the fort itself.

Mentioned in Westwood and Simpson’s ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005) p255.

It seems to be originally in Thomas Walsingham’s ‘Historia Anglicana’, written at about the time the event is supposed to have happened? You can see it here, and if you put the latin into google translate (I’m afraid my latin talents won’t run to it otherwise), you will hear about Unspeakable Terror of the parishioners and flashing globes of lightning.

Westwood and Simpson suggest in ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005) that an alternative name for these stones is ‘Lady Williams and her little dog Fido’. What can this mean? They give no explanation. Surely no-one can miscount stones that badly. Does anyone know what this is about?

Perhaps this is the tale Purejoy hints at below. It was described by Edward Waring in his 1977 ‘Ghosts and Legends of the Dorset Countryside’.

A farmer was out on the hill late one night, when he heard in the distance the sound of a huntsman’s horn, and the baying of a pack of hounds. Looking across he saw ‘the form of a man running for dear life’ through a hedge and ditch. The hounds appeared next, ‘urged on by a tall black figure striding at an unearthly pace, with sparks of fire flashing from his boots’. They seized their quarry before he got down into the valley and the farmer realized that what he had seen ‘must be the Devil tormenting a lost soul’.

Nice turns of phrase. Quoted by Westwood and Simpson in their 2005 ‘Lore of the Land’.

Sir Walter Scott apparently stole the story and transferred it to Scotland in ‘The Black Dwarf’. Scroll down to chapter two of ‘Tales of My Landlord’:
arthurwendover.com/arthurs/scott/bdwrf10.html
Sir Walter. I’m disappointed in you.

“In the annotated edition of his novels, Sir Walter fails to tell that he took up this idea from a communication to the Gentleman’s Magazine of April 1808. In this paper it is stated that, on the top of an eminence in the parish of Addlestrop, in Gloucestershire, there was a number of blocks of stone, which had stood there from time immemorial, under the name of the Grey Geese of Addlestrop Hill, until they had lately been taken by Mr Warren Hastings, and formed into a rock-work for the decoration of his grounds at Daylesford. There was added a ballad which had been composed evidently for the amusement of the circle at Daylesford..” It’s on p246 here, in the Book of Days by Robert Chambers (1832).
google.co.uk/books/pdf/The_Book_of_Days.pdf?vid=0tSGEQNuyrkTdE0eELtBZ_4&id=K0UJAAAAIAAJ&output=pdf&sig=OpY85EZW24QzN-ZCK_vXk_KAr44

Hastings was the former governor general of the East India Company. If he’d just retired I expect he was looking for something to interfere with around the house??

I wonder how the stones looked before he moved them. And have they been moved about since?

Westwood and Simpson (’Lore of the land’ -2005) mention a tale collected in 1985 by the Cotswold writer Edith Brill. She spoke to an old man who said “he wished he could borrow a bulldozer and search for the money that lay hidden inside [the tump] and then he would be rich for the rest of his life.” She herself ‘knew’ that the money originated from a wealthy local chief who’d left it there while fleeing the Saxons.

Until the 1750s, it seems that the stone stood upright? Westwood and Simpson (’Lore of the Land’ 2005) quote from the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1813:

Some old persons in the neighbourhood, still living, remember when it stood a very considerable height, perhaps 8 or 10 feet, in an artificial fosse or hllow. About fifty or sixty years ago the upper parts of the stone were broken off, and the fosse levelled, that a plough might pass over it; but, according to the then frequent remark of the villagers, the owner of the land who did this deed never prospered afterwards. He certainly was reduced [..] to absolute poverty, and died about 6 years ago in the parish workhouse.

Still, it sounds like he lived to a ripe old age. Unless he actually died six years later.

Many years ago, all the country round about Stokesay belonged to two giants, who lived, the one upon View Edge, and the other at Norton Camp. Most likely they were brothers, for the land belonged to them both alike, and so did the money. They kept all their money locked up in a big oak chest in the vaults under Stokesay Castle, and when either of them wanted any of it he just took the key and got some out, and took the key back with him. And if the other one wanted it, he shouted to his brother on the other side to throw it to him, and then he went down and got some; and so they went on, throwing the key backwards and forwards just as they happened to want it. But at last, one day, one of them wanted the key, and the other had got it, so he shouted out to him to throw it over as they were used to do; and he went to throw it, but somehow he made a mistake and threw too short, and dropped the key into the moat down by the castle. They tried every way to find it, but they never did, and there it lies now at the bottom of the pool somewhere. Many have been to look for it, quite of late years even, but it has never been found. And the chest of treasure stands in the vaults still, so they say, but nobody can get into it, for there is a great big raven always sitting on the top of it, and he won’t let anybody try to break it open, so no one will ever be able to get the giant’s treasure until the key is found, and many say it never will be found, let folks try as much as they please.

From volume 1 of ‘Shropshire Folklore: A Sheaf of Gleanings’ by G F Jackson and CS Burne (1883).
archive.org/stream/shropshirefolkl00burngoog#page/n30/mode/2up

To add to Bryony’s note,

“on the Trundle, near Goodwood, Aaron’s Golden Calf lies buried, and local people in the 1870’s claimed to know the very spot -- only no one could dig it up, because whenever anyone tried, the Devil came and moved it away.”

From Brewer’s ‘Dictionary of Phrase and Fable’ 1870 (351,761) and the Rev. W D Parish’s ‘Dictionary of Sussex Dialect’ of 1875, and mentioned by Jacqueline Simpson in:
Sussex Local Legends
Folklore, Vol. 84, No. 3. (Autumn, 1973), pp. 206-223.

She also says (p207) “Modern archaeological excavations may serve to reinforce [traditions of buried treasure]; a party digging on the Trundle in 1928 found that the story of the Golden Calf ‘was much upon the lips of the people of Singleton during the progress of our excavation’. Their presence can only have strengthened, not created, the belief, for it happens that this particular tale first appeared in print in 1870.”

William Crossing, in his 1900 ‘Stones of Dartmoor’ gave the following explanation of the stones of Stall Moor.

One Sunday afternoon a group of girls set off across the moor – once out of sight of the farmhouses they began to dance. This was of course extremely naughty as it was the sabbath day, when they should have been doing good or resting, not enjoying themselves. They accosted a young man and invited him to dance with them. Cheekily he refused to dance, saying that he would only play ‘Kiss in the Ring’. So the girls formed a circle and (one imagines) they played by him chosing one of them by touching her shoulder, then running off round the ring until she caught and kissed him. However things got a bit out of hand and the girls started grabbing and kissing him out of turn, so he demurely ran off, and they followed, running in a long line. As is usually the way, these transgressors of the Sabbath got turned into stone for their behaviour, and you can see them as the stones of the circle and the row. William Crossing rather bizarrely suggests that perhaps they were petrified for failing to abide by the rules of a game. So no cheating next time you’re playing ludo.

(I have paraphrased from a summary of Crossing’s original story in Westwood and Simpson’s ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005))

The name ‘Pupers Hill’ surely led to the invention of the following story, told by William Crossing in his 1900 ‘Stones of Dartmoor’:

There are two of these [pipers] and according to the story they once played there on a Sunday afternoon, while a companion danced to their harmonious strains. Suddently the music was interrupted, and to the horror of the latter he beheld those who were expending so much wind to furnish a suitable accompaniment to his nimble steps turned to stone.. and as there was no more music to be got out of them, he rather unceremoniously took his leave. But he had not gone far ere he too shared the fate of his comrades. You may see them if you choose to take the trouble to visit the tor.

-quote taken from excerpt in Westwood and Simpson’s ‘Lore of the land’ (2005)

“A child might easily swing the great stone backwards and forwards, but a ‘mighty man’ with great strength would fail to move it if he had ‘guilt on his soul’.”

(Adrean Searle, in ‘Isle of Wight Folklore’ (1998) -he doesn’t state where he’s quoting from)

.. a very fine monolith, locally called the “Long Stone” [is] on the left hand side of the main road a short distance from Gatcombe Lodge entrance. It is 7 1/2 ft high above the ground, and is said to be as much below the surface.

It is a very fine block of the peculiar stratum of the great oolite formation, locally called holey stone, which underlies the surface soil to a thickness varying from 6” to 18”.

Report says that the superstitious mothers were in the habit of passing ricketty children through a hole in this stone with the idea that they would become strong.

A much smaller stone of a similar kind stands in a wall about 30 feet away, and a third is said to have been removed during the last century.

From ‘A history of the parishes of Minchinhampton and Avening’ by Arthur Twisden Playne (1915).

Iley Oak was said to be the place where King Alfred and his troops rested overnight before the battle of Ethandun. The oak was later a favourite (and less legendary) meeting place of the non-conformists of Crockerton, who held their religious meetings in secret there, at the earthwork called Robin Hood’s Bower.

Iley does look like Ilegh, which was the meeting place for the hundreds of Warminster and Heytesbury until at least 1652, according to the Victoria County history (see
british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=16071) – and this was described as the site of a great tree standing in Southleigh or Eastleigh woods. Southleigh is where RHB is. Ah, it all comes together you see.

Completely bizarrely, according to discussion on the Megalithic Portal, RHB is planted with monkey puzzle trees, and you can also see (encouragingly in light of the above) the remains of a stump of a large deciduous tree (an oak? which would fit in with the story – and make a link to Robin Hood and his oaks in Sherwood Forest).

But what is Robin Hood doing so far south? It’s all terribly confusing.

The record on magic doesn’t have much to say about the site:

The monument includes Robin Hood’s Bower, a sub-rectangular prehistoric earthwork enclosure on low lying Greensand south of Warminster.
The monument comprises a sub-rectangular area of 200 sq m enclosed by a ditch up to 1m deep and 7.2m wide and a slight inner bank 3.3m wide and up to 0.2m high. The enclosure is crossed by a modern track.

“An interesting experience is to visit Hob Hurst’s House, the Bronze Age tumulus up on Beeley Moor, especially at dusk. This ancient tomb is said to hold supernatural powers and if you listen carefully you may hear the voices of the original inhabitants.”

quoted from “The Derbyshire Village Book” 1991, according to the 2000 Derbyshire Stones Meet report at
stones.non-prophet.org/archive/Ancient/004500/102350002200c8a7.html

Sounds just what you want to do – go somewhere dark and lonely and listen to your ancestors whispering away. Not terrifying in the least.

It’s suggested that the rather Scandinavian name of these burial chambers is after the supposed founder of Swansea, Sweyne Forkbeard, (Svend Tveskæg) King of Denmark and sometime king of England 1013-14. Swansea is first mentioned as “Sweynesse” in a 12th century charter. The Welsh name for the city is quite different and sensibly refers to the mouth of the river (Abertawe).

“We all know” the chambers are really prehistoric and not Viking at all – but the mounds might well have been recognised and even reused for a burial in later years: many others across the country were. The story is that Sweyne himself is buried here, but you’d like to think he made it back to Denmark really.

There’s an Earl Sweyne going to Wales here in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle in 1046. So maybe Sweynes were just two a penny at the time.
worldwideschool.org/library/books/hst/english/TheAnglo-SaxonChronicle/chap11.html

swanseahistoryweb.org.uk/subheads/samples/sweynfr.htm