By their very distance in time, the origins and motivations of the builders of the various ancient monuments littering our landscapes can only ever be guessed at. But over the years various explanations and stories behind the origins of many ancient stone monuments have become enshrined in folklore. So we thought we’d take a brief look at some of the stories behind 5 of the most common Folklore Motifs.
Rocks thrown by Giants or the Devil
Crousa Common Stones © Chris Brooks
There are many instances of this story. Typically, standing stones have been set in place after an argument or competition between giants, (e.g. the Crousa Common Stones on the Lizard, see our earlier article for this story ) or as the result of a pact with the Devil, such as at the Devil’s Arrows near Ripon.
Their name, as the Devil’s Arrows, seems to have originated from the following story, which we had related to us by an hoary headed individual living in Boroughbridge, when soliciting information as to their history:
“There lived a very pious old man {a Druid should we imagine} who was reckoned an excellent cultivator of the soil.
However, during each season at the time his crops had come to maturity they were woefully pillaged by his surrounding neighbours; so that at this, he being provokingly grieved, the Devil appeared, telling the old man if he would only recant and throw away his holiness he should never more be disturbed in his mind, or have whatever he grew stolen or demolished.
The old man, like Eve in the garden, yielded to temptation, and at once obeyed the impulse of Satan for the benefit of worldly gain. So when the old man’s crops were again being pillaged, the Devil threw from the infernal regions some ponderous arrows, which so frightened the plunderers by shaking the earth that never more was he harassed in that way. Hence the name of the ‘Devil’s Arrows.'”
From the notes and queries section of ‘The Geologist’ for October 1860.
Entrances to the Underworld
The Piskey Hall at Trewardreva © Alan S
Several Cornish fogous, such as that at Trewardreva have legends of strange sounds emanating from them, as do several barrows e.g. Nempnett Thrubwell, which are considered to be possible entrances to a supernatural world of fairies or goblins.
At Glastonbury Tor, Geoffrey Ashe in his The Landscape of King Arthur mentions the local legends:
To this day you can hear local tales of a chamber below the summit, or a well sinking far into the depths, or a tunnel running all the way to the Abbey, a distance of more than half a mile. Rash explorers are supposed to have found a way in and to have come out insane.
Buried Kings and their Treasure
King Zil's Sepulchre © Jane Tomlinson
The archetypical example for this story is that of King Zil, supposedly buried upright beneath Silbury Hill on the back of his charger, with his chariot of gold. Of course, we now know, thanks to the recent excavation work to stabilise Silbury, that no such tomb exists, although Stukeley claims that the remains of a horse and rider were indeed discovered there in 1723:
In the month of March, 1723, Mr. Halford order’d some trees to be planted on this hill, in the middle of the noble plain or area at top, which is 60 cubits diameter. The workmen dug up the body of the great king there buried in the center, very little below the surface. The bones extremely rotten, so that they crumbled them in pieces with their fingers. The soil was altogether chalk, dug from the side of the hill below, of which the whole barrow is made. Six weeks after, I came luckily to rescue a great curiosity which they took up there; an iron chain, as they called it, which I bought of John Fowler, one of the workmen; it was the bridle buried along with this monarch, being only a solid body of rust . I immerg’d it in limner’s drying oil, and dry’d it carefully, keeping it ever since very dry. it is now as fair and entire as when the workmen took it up… There were deers horns, an iron knife with a bone handle too, all excessively rotten, taken up along with it.
There are several other similar legends, none of which have been proved, though the existence of Dark Age golden treasures such as at Prittlewell and Sutton Hoo provide some possible basis in historical fact for these stories.
Petrification
The Rollright Stones © Jane Tomlinson
Possibly the most common piece of folklore associated with ancient sites is that of petrification. Many stone circles are known as the Maidens or Ladies, supposedly young women turned to stone for dancing on the sabbath, eg the Merry Maidens or the Nine Ladies of Stanton Moor who were petrified dancing to the Devil’s fiddle playing. Alternatively, the stones were men, either sportsmen as at the Hurlers. In many of these cases, the stories may have originated in Puritanical times, when church attendance on the Sabbath was strictly enforced. The Rollright Stones which includes a circle, a standing stone and a burial chamber, takes a different angle on the petrification legend, claiming that a King, his men and a group of Knights were victims of a witch’s trick. The knowledge that the burial chamber is much earlier that the other stones at the site gives the lie to this particular legend, entertaining though it is.
Walking or Moving Stones
Minchinghampton, hot to trot? © Chris Brooks
The Tinglestone and Minchinghampton Longstone, both in Gloucestershire, are said to run around their fields when the clock strikes twelve.
The Whittlestone in Oxfordshire has a legend that when the clock strikes twelve it goes down to the nearby Lady Well to drink. Tom McGowen in Giant Stones and Earth Mounds hypothesises that “legends of stones that drink water may indicate that water was once poured over them – perhaps an effort to cause rain to fall?” We’ll reserve judgement on that one!
But it does seem that many sites have stones which either suffer from midnight thirst, or are said to dance around at certain times – the Rollrights previously mentioned do both!
Are there any legends or stories you’re aware of that don’t fit into one of the broad categories above? Tell us your stories in the comments!
The Heritage Journal 
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
17/01/2012 at 08:54
Maju
In the Basque traditions the two first cases do exist: jentilak (gentiles, mythical giants) are said to throw rocks usually against churches (Pagan-Christian conflict is very obvious in Basque legends), however excepting some “rock of Sanson” or “Roland”, there are normally no specific stones associated.
Dolmens and very specially caves are entrances to the underworld, often associated with the pre-Christian divinities Mari and Sugaar. Some legends talk even of “whole cities” in those caves, and both the gentiles and Mari are said to have escaped this world by such entrances to the underworld when Christianity succeeded. This I would say is the more genuine legend, surely coming from the Megalithic period or even before, because it talks of a cosmology that, as ancient Basque religion, is not sky-centered but ctonic, with the dead and the gods making that underworld that was central to cosmogony of that age.
20/10/2013 at 22:41
Tenuk
Maju says: 17/01/2012 at 08:54
“… the more genuine legend, surely coming from the Megalithic period or even before, because it talks of a cosmology that, as ancient Basque religion, is not sky-centered but ctonic, with the dead and the gods making that underworld that was central to cosmogony of that age.”
Yes. The sun and moon both demonstrated the cycle of life and death and were seen as divine spirits before religion became the centralised, inflexible monoliths we see today. Local gods were then invoked to deal with local situations and issues. The divine spirit of the male sun and female moon, along with a multitude of gods, were meshed into the fabric of everyday life.
Understanding the cycles of the sun and moon were vital for our ancestors for navigation, hunting migrating herds and cultivation of food plants. I think all the various megalithic artefacts found were central to this understanding of the cycles of life and essential to ancient man’s survival.
22/10/2013 at 15:13
Maju
Without doubt the Sun and Moon were perceived as “living” powers of some sort but from what I can reconstruct from Basque, Greek and other European mythology, they were seldom or never considered supreme gods, unlike what happened in Egypt or Japan, for example. As I see it there were the following religious layers:
1. The deepest one seems to believe in a “sexual” dynamic of the universe, expressed in a Mother Earth goddess and her male partner: Gaia and Eros in Greece, Mari and Sugaar (aka Maju) in Basque mythology, etc. (similar to Shakti & Shiva in India, Yin & Yang in Taoism, etc.) This may well be the religion of the first European Neolithic and in many places the seats of this power are the local mountains. Following I. Hartsuaga (available only in Basque, I fear) this deepest religious layer, still surviving until recently in Basque folk mythology, was purely chthonic and the sky was just a secondary scenario in which the divine couple “pastured” their clouds (bringers of fertility) as if they were sheep, used for travel from mountain to mountain or for fanciful manifestations such as fireball lightning. Hartsuaga contrasts this old religion with the Indoeuropean one, emphasizing that the former had high community values, while the latter was essentially a religion of warriors with victory or success as their supreme value.
2. The next layer should be that of Astronomy and the Sky (rather than the celestial bodies), expressed as Uranos in Greece or as the very similar sounding name Urtzi (also Ortzi, Ost) in Basque mythology. Uranos is the god of the (nightly) sky in Greece and directly relates to Astronomy. Curiously Basque tradition has no mythology related to Urtzi whatsoever, but he names weekdays (Thursday and Friday: osteguna or “day of Ost”, ostirala “fern field of Ost”) and meteorological phenomena (lightning: ortzarri or “Ortzi’s stone”, rainbow: ortzadar or “Ortzi’s horn”). Basques seem to have assimilated all new celestial gods (Indoeuropean, Judeo-Christian) under the umbrella of Urtzi, at least judging by Aymeric Picaud’s testimony: “et Deus vocant Urcia”. I can only imagine that such a Nordic god as Thor (master of thunder but distinct from the supreme god Odin) could also belong to this layer (but unsure).
3. On top of these are the Indoeuropean and Judeo-Christian layers (and in Greece and maybe also Italy the intermediate layer of Kronos-Saturn, which seems a less widespread phenomenon, probably with West Asian roots).
I’d say that what matters to this discussion is layer #2, which would seem a religion of astronomers, existing surely on top of (or in equal terms with) a more popular and ancient “farmer” layer which is #1. It’s curious that, while it has left a lasting legacy in terms of monuments such as Stonehenge (and others, I’m fascinated with Göbekli Tepe for example) and scientific astronomical knowledge (as well as probably astrological traditions, I guess), it seems to have caught much less the imagination of the populace and, in most cases, the layer is either erased or very minimized in the mythological references. I could guess that this is because the “alpha male” gods who could not stand each other, while they could instead tolerate a watered down Earth grandmother or mother, as happened with Gaia (and similar goddesses: Demeter, etc.) in Greek tradition or the role taken by Mary in most Christian traditions, where she is really what inceses popular devotion. This may be the reason why Indoeuropean and Christian “heroes” kill serpents and dragons, which should be understood as the male partner of Mother Earth (Eros, Sugaar, etc.) In Basque mythology at least, Sugaar is often represented as snake, while Mari instead manifests as redish colored animal (ram, cow, horse) but also as the black billy goat (said to bring luck and protect the home, recycled later as satanic icon in the time of the witch hunts).
I could say more but let’s keep it not too long. Just to mention that, in Basque mythology the Sun and Moon are seldom mentioned and, when they are, they are said to be “daughters of Earth”, to which they return every day. The gender of these celestial bodies varies a lot between traditions: for Indoeuropeans the Sun is male and the Moon female, for ancient Egyptians both were male (Horus-Ra and Thoth), for Japanese religion the Sun is female and the Moon male, etc. It’s clear that they are “humanized” but only in some religions they are central. It does not seem to have been the case anywhere in Europe as far as I know, so I think that the understanding of astronomical-focused Megalithism should be done in the context of the Uranos/Urtzi layer: one in which the Sky as a whole is divinized (and studied) rather than any particular body.