High up on an outlying spur of the Cotswold hills, where Warwickshire
and Oxfordshire meet, there is a sort of miniature Stonehenge, known as
the Rollright Stones; and the Story they tell about them is that they
were once a king and his courtiers who, by evil spells, were changed
suddenly into Stone.
The Rollrights are scattered about the hill top, seven hundred feet
above sea-level, a mile or so from the quiet village of Little Compton.
And this is the old Story of how they came there.
Ever so long ago there came marching over the hills a king and his
army bent upon the conquest of England. As they neared the summit of
the hill the king was met by a witch who told him that he had nearly
achieved his desire. She spoke in rhyme, and her words are remembered
in the neighbourhood even now.
“If Long Compton you can see,
King of England you shall be,”
she said. The king rushed forward, but, owing to treachery on the part
of some of his men, his view of Long Compton, which lies in the valley
below, was impeded.
Then the witch turned to him with a croaking laugh, and muttered:
“As Long Compton you can’t see
King of England you shan’t be.
Rise up stick, and stand still stone,
For King of England you shall be none.
You and your men hoar stones shall be
And I myself an elder tree.”
The unfortunate king, although within a few paces of a spot from which
he might have viewed Long Compton and so become ruler of this realm,
was unable to move a step further. His joints became stiff, his energy
left him, and in a few minutes he had turned into stone. And there
you may see him to-day as “the King Stone,” a grey weathered monolith
standing stark in a field, but in a place from which Long Compton is
invisible.
But his treacherous supporters who had hindered him from success did
not escape. The old story tells that there were five knights who
led the company. Seeing their leader’s strange fate, they tried to
escape. But the same doom overtook them. A few hundred yards from the
“King Stone” is a group of five large upright slabs. These are the
“Whispering Knights,” turned to stone in the very act of conspiring
against their king.
Nearer to the silent king is a circle of stones, once his faithless
soldiers, and all about grow elder trees, said to be descendants of
that witch who was herself transformed into an elder after her magic
spell had worked upon the king and his men. They tell you that if you
stick a knife into these elders you will sometimes draw blood.
The Rollright Stones form a weird relic of some long forgotten time.
Men have written of their strange appearance throughout many centuries.
Bede called them the second wonder of the kingdom. Whether the legend
of their formation be true or not, it must have been some very
important event that caused them to be erected.
You may best reach them from Rollright station on the line between
Banbury and Chipping Norton, and if you dare venture up to visit them
on a moonlight night, they say you may find the fairies at their
revels, dancing all about.
This is a peaceful English country of hill and vale, fine country
estates--Compton Winyates with its matchless Tudor mansion is near
at hand--and little churches, rich in architecture, that will repay
a visit. Here you are on the outskirts of Shakespeare’s land, real
generous England, full of history, that has not changed so very much
since the spacious days of Elizabeth--the England that the English
tourist all too seldom sees.
[Illustration: _The King Stone._]
[Illustration: Man in monk’s robes crawling up a hill-side on a blustery
day.]