St Cleer, Cornwall

A quoit and its context

Cornwall is known for some of Britain’s most striking prehistoric remains, notably quoits, stone structures consisting of a number of vertical slabs enclosing a chamber and roofed with another slab of stone; the stone chamber was almost certainly originally covered over with an earth mound. Quoits date to around 3500 to 2500 BCE – the early or middle Neolithic period – and are generally associated with human remains. However, archaeologists believe that they might well have been more than just tombs, perhaps combining the roles of mausoleum and place of worship.

Trevethy Quoit, on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor, is probably the most impressive of all Cornish quoits. Its five upright stones must weigh several tonnes each and the enormous capstone has been estimated to have a weight of around 20 tonnes. All six stones must have been dragged here from a site about 2 kilometres away, one of those feats of effort and engineering that seem impressive even with modern machinery, awesome with the rudimentary technology available in the Neolithic. And the task was not just getting the stones to the site but also manhandling them into position, where they have remained for several millennia. However, the stones, with the capstone poised as a very steep angle, are not in exactly their original position. They have shifted a little, making the capstone tilt more dramatically, producing a visual effect that is even more astonishing to modern eyes.

An air of mystery surrounds prehistoric structures like Trevethy Quoit. Back in 2019, an excavation was carried out to attempt to shine more light on the structure’s history and use. When a geophysical survey of the area around the quoit showed a number of anomalies, archaeologists dug numerous test pits. The most remarkable thing they found was a large stone platform, now hidden beneath the soil, at the western end of the monument. The area covered by the platform is around 20 x 12 metres, and the platform itself is made up of an enormous amount of greenstone, which had probably been quarried from an outcrop to the east of the quoit. Hundreds of tonnes of this greenstone were carefully laid, large stones towards the bottom and small ones at the top, originally forming the surface of the platform.

No one knows how this platform was used – for assemblies or ceremonies, perhaps – but its size is once more testimony to the amount of effort that went into creating this monument and the corresponding importance of the site for its creators and users. As so often, studying the context of a prehistoric structure – the objects in the immediate vicinity, such as the stone platform – helps to fill in the picture, while also posing more questions. One hopes that more research will be done into these enigmatic and fascinating monuments.

Winchcombe, Gloucestershire

Toil and rubble

I’ve mentioned before how it’s impossible to live in the Cotswolds without being aware of Cotswold stone. The stuff is everywhere: the lumps, bumps, cliffs and outcrops of old quarries are a familiar sight and in some fields the earth is so dotted with chips and fragments of oolitic limestone that the colour is an almost equal mix of brown and cream. And in many places nearly everything is built of the stone, which has been in use since (of course) the stone age.

So when doing some long overdue gardening this week, we expected to dig up quite a bit of stone – from the displaced lumps of old drystone walls and bed edges to miscellaneous flakes and chunks. But some bits of old rubble are more interesting than others. These two especially. One is a cylinder of stone between four and five inches in diameter; the other a piece worked with a straight incised groove. Chipped and worn as they are, these pieces look like a section of a small shaft (the kind of miniature column that ran up the sides of doorways or windows in high-status medieval buildings) and a length of moulding.

They probably came from Winchcombe Abbey, a large medieval Benedictine monastery that vanished after it was dissolved by Henry VIII. We’re only a few hundred yards form the site of the abbey, and many houses in our street, not to mention our local pub, have bits of medieval carving let into their walls. More than one neighbour has unearthed something more spectacular than our bits of rubble – chunks of Norman zigzag carving, for example.

The buildings of the monasteries that Henry dissolved had many fates. Some were turned into country houses by the grandees who acquired them; some became parish churches; some, like the one in Winchcombe, were largely demolished, and no doubt most of the stone was recycled elsewhere: some 470 years later, we’re still finding the rest.

Great Rollright, Oxfordshire

All the king’s men

Going over to Oxfordshire the other morning for lunch with some friends, I decided to make a short diversion and visit the Rollright Stones. This stone circle on the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire borders is one of my favourite ancient sites and I’m not its only fan. The small site can get busy, but it was a cold, foggy day and I thought the stones would be deserted and atmospheric, and so they were.

The Rollright Stones are some 70-odd lumps of limestone arranged in a circle about 31 metres across. The stones are not very big (few of them are higher than about 1.2 metres) and, as they’re limestone, they’ve eroded into a wonderful range of shapes – the standard cliché in books and websites compares them to rotten teeth, which does them no favours at all. They’re hard to date, but I think archaeologists refer to them as late Neolithic or early Bronze Age – in other words around 2100 BC. Of course, no one knows exactly how they were used, but such circles were clearly religious sites.


The stones have their fair share of legends. The most famous story tells of a king and a group of knights who were marching across the countryside. They met a witch hereabouts, who told the king that he would be ruler of all England if, when he took seven strides, he could see the nearby village of Long Compton. The king strode forwards – but the village, which should have been easy to see, was shielded from his gaze by a hillock. Then the witch turned the king and his men to stones – the knights became the stone circle, while their leader became the so-called King Stone, a megalith that stands across the road from the main group. In another legend, the stones regularly leave their field to walk down to a local spring and take a drink, while another tale says that the stones are impossible to count.

Looking at the stones on a misty morning, a sharp wind blowing and the sun struggling to get through, it’s easy to believe how legends formed about this place. It’s easy too, to understand how people still see the circle as a sacred space. Those who had left sprigs of ivy and mistletoe and a holly wreath on top of some of the stones clearly felt the same way. There are some fine druids in West Oxfordshire, as my friends told me over lunch.

Arthur's Stone, Dorstone, Herefordshire

Above the east Herefordshire village of Dorstone the lane rises, flattens, bends, and rises again. You know, when you’ve visited a few Stone Age burial chambers, that your goal is likely to be at the top of the last rise, on a ridge, with views for miles. And so, after another short rise, here is Arthur’s Stone, and beyond it views of the Herefordshire hills and the Welsh hills too.

This late-Stone-Age monument is a burial mound without the mound – in other words, it consists of the stones that line and cover the burial chamber and entrance, the earth mound that covered them having eroded away. The large capstone is about 20 feet in length and lifting it must have taken all the manpower and technology that the builders of 3400-2400 BC could muster.

Burial sites like this were among the grands projets of prehistoric England, and the people who built them weren’t going to hide their light under a bushel. Such a mound, the result of long labour, was a conspicuous memorial to those buried there, as well as being a major landmark. You don’t have to believe in ley lines to appreciate that hill-top barrows provided a good way of orienting yourself, as well as being powerful symbols of community and place.

The symbolism could get a bit mixed up in later centuries though. I don’t know when this place became known as Arthur’s Stone, but associations with King Arthur are not uncommon with hill-top monuments, especially in the south and west. It’s not hard to see why the Arthurian associations could multiply hereabouts – the king demonstrated his royal rank by pulling a sword from a stone, and he and his knights might be sleeping in such a burial mound, waiting for the time when they will return to supply England’s need. More prosaically, the mound was said to mark the site of one of the king’s battles. All evidence that Arthur’s Stone – technologically, scenically, mythically – is a place with the power to make us wonder.