Last time I went to the Rollright Stones, I met a chap who asked me if I were the warden. Understandably. Being quietly yet well-dressed and with an air of indefinite authority, I was just the sort of person who could have been the warden if I weren't someone else. Someone other than the warden being undeniably precisely who I was. To my knowledge I am not and never have been the warden of the Rollright Stones.
Having established that I was not the warden, he announced to me "I love this place."
Which I understand. I love that place too. It's beautifully free up there on the Cotswold fringes, and three people at the Rollrights constitutes quite a rush - a real blessing if you're used to the noise, Yanks and druidic campaigning of Stonehenge. The little perambulation from the King's Men to the King Stone and down to the Whispering Knights is an enjoyable ramble in unchallenging terrain, except for that momentary terror as you run across the Little Rollright road to get to the King Stone. And it's infinitely more attractive now that the former warden's hut has gone.
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Some things we know about the Rollright Stones. For example, we know that the Whispering Knights were a tomb, not standing stones in the sense that you could see the stones. And we know that the King Stone is in Warwickshire. So we can presume that the stones were erected to keep the Brummies out of the South - maybe act as boundary markers that said to the people of the Midlands and North - "stay out and eat your pies. We don't want your sort here".
But why do people go there? What drags someone across from - ironically probably Birmingham, in the case of the chap I met the other day - to wander around a bunch of worm-eaten if enigmatic stones, and then announce to someone he suspects may be the warden that he loves them (the stones, that is, not the person who's not the warden)? We don't know what ceremonies were conducted there - or even if any were. We don't know if maidens were slaughtered, hedgehogs were eaten or tea lights burnt.
Perhaps they were for good, perhaps they were for ill. Perhaps the stones were to hold the dead in, the same way that the Whispering Knights enclosed them - a dead weight to hold them down. Or perhaps the ring was the crown of an Earth God, whose nose was somewhere near Long Compton.
Perhaps they were for good, perhaps they were for ill. Perhaps the stones were to hold the dead in, the same way that the Whispering Knights enclosed them - a dead weight to hold them down. Or perhaps the ring was the crown of an Earth God, whose nose was somewhere near Long Compton.
So why hang ribbons on the branches of the surrounding bushes? Why stick flowers in styrofoam pots in ledges in the stones? Since, for all we know of the people that erected them, putting flowers on the stones could have been a special way of cursing your uncles, while hanging ribbons in the trees could have been a way of asking for the supernatural doubling of the size of your ear lobes.
Yet some people have a feel for things that can be other than what they are. Some people believe that there is knowledge available and good in the world that we have lost. Some know that there is strangeness in the world, and that the sarcasm of atheists and droning of Christian priests and nagging of fundamentalists just doesn't let them break through to it. For some people the world is good - so anyone who understands the world better, will also be working for good. For some people - having something they just can't understand is their best way of understanding.
And meanwhile I have to wonder what the guy would have said if I had been the warden.
The hut that isn't there.
Perhaps the stones were placed in Warwickshire, to keep southerner's out, not to keep Brummies from coming south.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if they were transportable, as they would go very well in my proposed Rockery (just thinking of the entry fee's, cream tea's etc........
Just to make it quite clear. Only the King Stone is in Warks. The Whispering Knights and the Kings' Men, the vast majority of the extant complex, including the beautiful and yet slightly eerie stone circle itself, are in God's wonderful county of Oxford, where the air is pure, the skies blue and subtle thoughts are wrapped in the gentle ambivalence a straight-down-the-line Calvinist Cantabrigian could only grasp at.
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