#rollright stones

[captnbas]

happy solstice and merry midwinter from one of the uk’s many magical stone circles! ✶

[pers-books]

The Rollright Stones, also known collectively as The King’s Men, the King Stone, and The Whispering Knights, Oxfordshire. Photographer unknown. 

There’s a bit of fascinating mythology about The Rollright Stones, which relates to the alternative names given to them.

The Stones take their names from a legend about a king and his army who were marching over the Cotswolds when they met a witch who challenged the king saying, “Seven long strides shalt thou take and if Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be”. On his seventh stride a mound rose up obscuring the view, and the witch turned them all to stone:  the king became the King Stone;  his army the King’s Men;  and his knights the Whispering Knights (plotting treachery). The witch became an elder tree, supposedly still in the hedge:  if it is cut the spell is broken the Stones will come back to life.

Legend has it that it is impossible to count the King’s Men. It is said that the man will never live who shall count the stones three times and find the number the same each time. It is also said that anyone who thrice counts the same number will have their heart’s desire fulfilled. (It is harder than you might expect!) A baker swore he could count them and, to prove it, he baked a number of loaves and placed one on each of the stones. But each time he tried to collect them up some of the loaves were missing, spirited away either by the Devil or by fairies.

At any rate, this collection of megalithic monuments lies on the boundary between Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, on the edge of the Cotswold hills. They span nearly 2000 years of Neolithic and Bronze age development and each site dates from a different period.

The oldest, the Whispering Knights dolmen, is early Neolithic, circa 3,800-3,500 BC, the King's Men stone circle is late Neolithic, circa 2,500 BC; and the King Stone is early to middle Bronze Age, circa 1,500 BC.

The Stones are made of natural boulders of Jurassic oolitic limestone which forms the bulk of the Cotswold hills. This stone has been used extensively in the region for building everything from churches and houses to stone walls. The boulders used to construct the Rollright Stones were probably collected from within 500m of the site.

[Source]

[magicaldays25]

[horlicks-on-thursdays]

a wicker woman at the Rollright stones today

[jenqoe]

So yes, in other news, I've played about with the shop feature on Ko-fi and now have a bunch of my Patreon stories up there for prices so low you should be calling me CMOT Jen.

Ko-fi Shop link baybeee!

And also! There'll be a mini-collection of my four linked Wayland's Smithy/Rollright Stones stories going up on the Ko-fi shop next week. Woo and hoo!

[cover by me, using images by La La La & Chloe Choa from canva.com. No AI plagiarist bot things were used.]

[hospody]

Falkland Arms, Great Tew - 16th Century Pub by Warwick Hunt

[xgremlinshavepicturesx]

[theprogressivesadist]

Mood

[bad-moodboard]

Rollright Stones, Vintage Postcard

[gacougnol]

Simon Marsden

The rollright stones

Oxfordshire, England

[ancientorigins]

What were neolithic monuments like Warwickshire’s Rollright Stones built for? Many believe Rollright harnesses an ancient energy field, that leaves visitors invigorated.

[cinemaocd]

This week in Rylanceland: hot murderer edition

Yeah so I haven't done this in a while and the main reason is me being triggered by the gore in the mark rylance tag rn because of Bones and All...which is a movie about a guy who murders people and is hot. I guess. I don't know. Mark is in his underwear which is good, but covered in blood which is bad....

But shout out to the Timothee Chalumet bloggers out there who have preserved so many pics of Mark. I thank you.

like this one of Mark and Claire at the Bones and All premiere

Top story: Hilary Mantel's funeral was yesterday and Mark did a reading. Interestingly so did rival Cromwell, Ben Miles (fun fact: I think Hilary preferred Ben Miles and I love him but I will always choose Mark...). Apparently Miles consulted with her for the script for the stage version of Mirror and the Light which is awesome. I hope to be able to see the stage version or the tv version soon (I mean before Mark and Ben become too old to play Cromwell...)

Mark was passed over for an Oscar nom this year, which he doesn't seem too fussed about.

Before the pandemic Mark was set to write a series of plays for the Guthrie theater (shout out to the time I was seated near Mark at a restaurant and managed to not say anything to him so my son had to talk to him for me) but it looks like that project might have morphed into a "TV thing" with Steven Speilberg.

Mark is reviving his role as Dr. Semmelweiss in the Pinter play in the West End this summer. Last summer he revived his epic role as Rooster in Jerusalem.

Mark is a founding patron of the Purbeck Film Festival and launched a fundraising campaign for a statue of Brian Haw. Rylance is an annual participant in Haw-related peace campaign activities, which include hugs from Sting.

It's an older pic, but I really like this quirky tie...

High Rez image of the week: Mark in a field performing The Tempest at at the Rollright standing stones, circa 1991.

[zerogate]

In the early 1970s, a zoologist out hunting for the haunts of Britain’s last small colonies of horseshoe bats, happened to pass one such group of standing stones on his way home in a spring dawn, and noticed something peculiar. He was equipped with an ultrasonic detector to monitor the high frequency sounds of bat navigation, and was startled to find a strong signal coming from the ancient site. It was a rapid and regular pulse unlike anything he had ever recorded before. He searched the area for signs of life, but found nothing and left just as the sun came up, with the slightly uncomfortable feeling that he had been eavesdropping on some megalithic conversation amongst the stones themselves.

The zoologist mentioned his odd experience later to the writer Paul Devereaux, who in turn passed it on to the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford where it reached the ears of a research chemist. Don Robins is one of a small group of scientists – physicists, geologists and electronic engineers – who call themselves the Dragon Project, after the active energy currents which are said to illuminate a landscape in Chinese geomancy. The group are interested in the factors which led those who built stone circles to such tremendous efforts, which clearly stretched the “macro-chip” technology of their day to its limits. The Project members wondered, when they first got together, whether there was anything special about the sites, some physical factor which could be measured. An anomaly, perhaps, in Earth’s electromagnetic field which produced unusual interactions with cosmic and solar radiation.

The problem they faced was which end of the spectrum to begin their explorations, and the zoologist’s story was just the hint they needed. A sensitive wide-band ultrasonic detector was constructed and field-tested for the first time in 1978 on the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire.

Rollright is not a major megalithic site like Stonehenge or Avebury, but it is little visited and much revered. It has a circle of approximately seventy-three stones called the King’s Men – rumour has it that they keep moving and can’t be accurately counted; traces of several other circles; the Kingstone – an isolated menhir; and a collapsed dolmen known as the Whispering Knights, whose capstone was once dragged down the hill to be used as a bridge across the stream, until, it is said, it too kept moving and had to be returned.

Robins arrived at Rollright before dawn on a foggy morning in late October that year. “I walked around the site,” he said, “clutching the detector rather self-consciously, fully prepared to pretend that it was a transistor radio should I encounter a stray visitor. The detector showed a flickering, minimal background, but in the vicinity of the Kingstone I observed a rapid regular pulsing. This ultrasound effect was noticeable for some yards around the Kingstone … and faded soon after dawn.”

Encouraged by this finding, the group built an even more sensitive detector designed to exclude all possibility of radio interference and stray signals from local energy sources or geological faults. And they put it into action all year round. On streets and bridges, in gardens and woods nearby, there was never anything more than weak and random background noise. But at Rollright there was a consistent pulsing which could be measured near dawn on any day, regardless of weather conditions, and which rose to an ultrasonic screech lasting for several hours on those mornings in March and October which coincide with the feasts of equinox. And there are records of equinoctial rites being held at Rollright even in historic times.

[...]

At other times, the stones seemed almost to be creating an ultrasonic barrier. “This was the weirdest thing,” says Robins:

You always have a background of ultrasound in the country – the movement of grasses, leaves rustling, even your own clothing. It all registers. But one morning, as we moved in and out of the circle monitoring the levels, suddenly we found that there was complete ultrasonic silence inside the circle. Our first thoughts were that it was an instrument malfunction. Then we walked through a gap in the stones and there was sound. Inside, silence – outside, normal background levels.

-- Lyall Watson, Beyond Supernature

[fairy-maiden]

The Rollright Stones, UK

[weenafile]

I like to eat outside. . . . . . . #lunch #alfresco #lesbianswhoeatout #blueskies #lunch #backtoschool (at Rollright Stones) https://www.instagram.com/p/Co-ApYaoIdk4p1gGL-ahiMEXb1oVuySdQGTk5I0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[gennetsayremostlyfun]

Meanwhile…Waiting for Nathan… We toured my new office. We bought a car. We drove it around the Cotswolds to practice being on the left and immediately knocked the left mirror off (roads sure are narrow). We visited ancient stone circles (Rollright Stones, very worthwhile). We took it one day at a time. Then Nathan finally arrived on July 21, a week late and a few extra grey hairs to show for it. ❤️❤️❤️