Rollright Stones

The Rollright Stones are a complex of three Neolithic and Bronze Age megalithic monuments near the village of Long Compton, on the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. Constructed from local oolitic limestone, the three monuments, now known as the King's Men and the Whispering Knights in Oxfordshire and the King Stone in Warwickshire, are distinct in their design and purpose. They were built at different periods in late prehistory. During the period when the three monuments were erected, there was a continuous tradition of ritual behaviour on sacred ground, from the 4th to the 2nd millennium BCE.

The first to be constructed was the Whispering Knights, a dolmen that dates to the Early or Middle Neolithic period. It was likely to have been used as a place of burial. This was followed by the King's Men, a stone circle that was constructed in the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age; unusually, it has parallels to other circles located further north, in the Lake District, implying a trade-based or ritual connection. The third monument, the King Stone, is a single monolith. Although its construction has not been dated, the dominant theory amongst archaeologists is that it was a Bronze Age grave marker.

The British philologist Andrew Breeze has proposed that the name "Rollright" is from the Brittonic phrase ''*rodland rïx'' 'wheel enclosure groove', where ''*rïx'' 'groove' refers to a narrow valley near Great Rollright and ''*rodland'' 'wheel enclosure' refers to the King's Men circle. By the Early Modern period, folkloric stories had developed about the Stones, telling of how they had once been a king and his knights who had been turned to stone by a witch. Such stories continued to be taught amongst local people well into the 19th century. Meanwhile, antiquarians such as William Camden, John Aubrey and William Stukeley had begun to take an interest in the monuments. Fuller archaeological investigations were undertaken in the 20th century, culminating in excavations run by George Lambrick in the 1980s. The site is listed by Historic England as a scheduled monument and was first designated in 1882.

In the 20th century, the stones became an important site for adherents of various forms of Contemporary Paganism, as well as for other esotericists, who hold magico-religious ceremonies there. They also began to be referred to more widely in popular culture, being featured in television, literature, music and art.

Location

The Rollright Stones are located on the contemporary border between the counties of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, two-and-a-half miles north-northwest of the town of Chipping Norton, and one-and-three-quarters of a mile west of the smaller village at Great Rollright. Lambrick 1988. p. 1. The monuments are located on the scarp of the Cotswold Hills, just as the scarp forms a ridge between the Stour valley to the north and the Swere valley to the south. Geologically, this ridge had been formed from Chipping Norton limestone, itself a variant of the Great Oolite series of Jurassic limestone.

Background

Early Neolithic Britain

In the 4th millennium BCE, around the start of the Neolithic period in Britain, British society underwent radical changes. These coincided with the introduction to the island of domesticated species of animals and plants, as well as a changing material culture that included pottery. These developments allowed hunter-gatherers to settle down and produce their own food. As agriculture spread, people cleared land. At the same time, they also erected the first monuments to be seen in the local landscape. Such activity has been interpreted as evidence of a change in the way people viewed their place in the world.

During the Early and the Middle Neolithic large megalithic tombs were constructed across the British Isles. Because they housed the bodies of the dead, archeologists have typically believed these tombs to indicate rituals around death and ancestor veneration by those who constructed them. Such Neolithic tombs are common across much of western Europe, from Iberia to Scandinavia. The practice was likely brought to the British Isles along with, or roughly concurrent to, the introduction of farming. Pearson 2005. p. 34. A widely held theory amongst archaeologists is that these megalithic tombs were intentionally made to resemble the long timber houses which had been constructed by Neolithic farming peoples in the Danube basin from circa 4800 BCE. Hutton 1991. p. 21.

As the historian Ronald Hutton related:

There is no doubt that these great tombs, far more impressive than would be required of mere repositories for bones, were the centres of ritual activity in the early Neolithic: they were shrines as well as mausoleums. For some reason, the success of farming and the veneration of ancestral and more recent bones had become bound up together in the minds of the people.

Late Neolithic Britain

During the Late Neolithic, British society underwent a series of major changes. Between 3500 and 3300 BCE, these prehistoric Britons ceased their continual expansion and cultivation of wilderness. Instead they settled and farmed the most agriculturally productive areas of the island: Orkney, eastern Scotland, Anglesey, the upper Thames, Wessex, Essex, Yorkshire and the river valleys of The Wash.

Late Neolithic Britons also appeared to have changed their religious beliefs, ceasing to construct the large chambered tombs that archeologists widely think were connected with ancestor veneration. Instead, they began the construction of large wooden or stone circles, with many hundreds being built across Britain and Ireland over a period of a thousand years.

Construction

The Rollright Stones are three separate megalithic monuments, constructed close to one another during the later prehistoric ages of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Their current names  – the King's Men, the King Stone, and the Whispering Knights – descend from folklore that has surrounded the site since the Early Modern period. These local terms have since been adopted by archaeologists and heritage managers.

Fragments of stone used in the construction of the monument underwent a petrological examination at the British Museum in London, where it was established that they were a form of oolithic limestone that was local to the area around the Rollrights. Lambrick 1988. p. 27. Archaeologist George Lambrick argued that the stones had been discovered by prehistoric peoples as naturally occurring surface boulders, rather than having been quarried. He noted they had certain weathering patterns which were consistent with those found on surface boulders. He said that the most likely place that such surface boulders would have been found in the late prehistoric was "on the sides of the ridge at or near the level of the strong spring line between the Inferior Oolithic and the Lias clay." If this had been the place where the megalith builders had found the boulders, the huge stones would have had to be transported up hill. The gradient averages about 1 in 15 on the shortest routes, for either 250 metres (for the Whispering Knights), or 450 metres (for the King Stone and King's Men). Lambrick 1988. p. 28.

Basing his ideas upon experimental archaeological investigations performed at Stonehenge, Lambrick suggested that the prehistoric workers who hauled the stones uphill would have made use of wooden sledges. They may have used timber rollers beneath the sledges, in order to reduce the manpower needed to drag the sledge. Lambrick 1988. p. 49. Lambrick calculated the estimated work force and labour that would have been required to produce the Rollright Stone monuments. In comparison to that required for many other monuments, he concluded that the time and labour investment would have been "trivial", and would not have stretched local resources in terms of manpower. Lambrick 1988. p. 51.

The Whispering Knights

Believed to be the earliest of the Rollright Stones, the Whispering Knights are the remains of the burial chamber of an Early or Middle Neolithic portal dolmen, lying 400 metres east of the King's Men. Four standing stones survive, forming a chamber about two square metres in area around a fifth recumbent stone, probably the collapsed roof capstone. Lambrick 1988. p. 34. Although archaeologists and antiquarians had been speculating and debating the nature of the Whispering Knights for centuries, more about the monument was revealed only following the excavations carried out around the stones by George Lambrick and his team during the 1980s. Lambrick 1988. pp. 28–32. They found that the portal dolmen had never been a part of a longer cairn, as had been suggested by some earlier investigators. In addition, they uncovered a few pieces of Neolithic pottery around the monument. Lambrick 1988. p. 32.

Writing in 1743, the antiquarian William Stukeley described the Whispering Knights as sitting upon a round barrow, something which Lambrick accepted as being "reasonable in the context of a portal dolmen". But, he cautioned against accepting such an explanation too readily. He suggested that a "mound-like effect" could have been created at the base of the monument if ploughing in later centuries had led to the accumulation of soil around the dolmen's uphill side and the removal of it on the downhill side. Excavation failed to provide evidence to prove either suggestion, leaving the issue "ambiguous". Lambrick noted there was a possibility that some of the stratigraphic layers "may represent the base of some sort of cairn" around the Whispering Knights.

Lambrick believed that raising the capstone on the Whispering Knights would have been the hardest task of the Rollrights' construction. He said it was "analogous" to the raising of the lintels on Stonehenge. He suggested that the builders had constructed a ramp out of "collected stones", which was "placed against the back of the chamber". The capstone was then "hauled up on rollers, probably running on logs embedded longitudinally in the ramp", in order to get it into position.

The King's Men

The King's Men is a stone circle in diameter, currently composed of seventy-seven closely spaced stones. Lambrick 1988. pp. 41–42. It was constructed during the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age.

After undertaking limited excavation at the circle in the 1980s, Lambrick concluded that when it had been originally erected, it would have been a "more perfect circle" than it is today. He thought that each of the stones would have touched one another, creating a continuous barrier all the way around. He also speculated that the monument's builders intentionally placed the smoother sides of the boulders to face inwards. The outer facing sides are predominantly rougher in texture. Lambrick 1988. p. 46.

Resistivity and magnetometry surveys undertaken during the 1980s revealed four magnetic anomalies within the centre of the circle, possibly representing "pits related in some way to local ground surface undulations and the presence of localised burning." Lambrick 1988. pp. 38–41. Lambrick noted that similar features could be found within the stone circles of Mayburgh, Stenness and Balbirnie. He said that it was a possible original prehistoric feature, although accepted it may equally have been the result of refuse deposited in the Romano-British period, or tree-planting holes. Lambrick 1988. p. 48.

Meanwhile, archaeological excavation revealed that there was "no indication" of there having been "a substantial ditch" either inside or outside the bank on which the stones were positioned. Lambrick 1988. pp. 42.

Making an estimate of the time and manpower required for this project, Lambrick concluded that each of the King's Men could have been constructed by a team of ten or twenty (depending on the size of the stone) in about two-and-a-half hours. He noted, however, that the time could have been reduced if the workers had been divided into two groups for some of the smaller stones. Concluding his examination of this issue, he argued that "83 journeys by the whole team would have been required, giving an actual construction time of ''c'' 137 hours, or 3735 manhours." Adding to this "210 manhours" for digging the post holes for the boulders, as well as "40 manhours for cutting timber and making the shear-legs and sledges", and "another 40 for fetching and trimming the timbers", Lambrick concluded that a total of around "4035 manhours" would have gone into the construction of the stone circle. This would have been about three weeks' work for around twenty workers.

Since the late 19th century, the monument has been in part a reconstruction. In 1882, the owner of the site re-erected around a third of the stones that had previously fallen. Some were moved from their original positions. Lambrick 1988. pp. 35, 41. Using documentary evidence and lichen