Rhiannon

At a point 352 yards S.S.E. from the farmsteading, the O.M. records the position of a monolith as the “supposed remains of a Stone Circle.” Information obtained on the land was to the effect that the Stone had been long ago removed, and was on the point of being built into a wall, when the tenant became “troubled” – the precise symptoms not discoverable – and he thereupon caused the Stone to be replaced “as nearly as he could remember” on its original site. This happens to be on the distinctly steep westward slope of the field, an unlikely place, as it seems to me, for a Circle. The drawing (fig. 5) shows the Stone as seen from the south-east, looking down into the water of Livet. It is an irregularly prism-sided, tall, block of, I think, quartziferous schist, 5 feet 6 inches in height, and with a girth of about 4 feet 5 inches.

From ‘Report on Stone Circles Surveyed in the North-East of Scotland (Banffshire and Moray)..’ by Fred R Coles, in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (February 11th 1907).

Should you be here, not half a mile down the hill from this stone (at SN064383) there is said to be a special well:

A rocky outcrop nearby is called Carn Cwn (Cairn of Dogs). Beneath an overhanging rock is a wishing well. The water is said to rise and fall with the tide and people used to throw pins into it to cure their warts.

Mentioned by Chris Barber in ‘Mysterious Wales’ (1982).

The Bully Hills, Tathwell.
These artificial mounds consist of a group of six, lying in close contiguity to one another, and of a detached one removed a few hundred yards from the others, now surrounded by a tuft of trees. They are from 8 to 10 feet in height, and being conspicuously situated on the brow of one of the higher Wold hills, near the village of Tathwell, have long attracted considerable attention, particularly as the remains of two small circular earthworks on an adjoining elevation (consisting of six slightly-raised concentric rings about 180 feet in diameter, usually assigned to the Danish period), in conjunction with these tumuli, have naturally led to the supposition that some conflict between the Saxons and the Danes occurred here, the entrenchments indicating the position of the defendants – the tumuli the graves of the chiefs who fell in the contest.

Other reports have also long been floating about in the vicinity respecting these hills, as retailed by nursery-maids, to the great delight of their juvenile charges, and of course all are connected with hidden treasure. The following reason, for instance, why these mounds are termed “Bully Hills” is really too good to remain unrecorded, although we fear it will not satisfy the doubting mind of every ethnologist and archaeolgian who may come to examine these remarkable earthworks, enquiring what race found them, and when?

It had ever been believed that they covered an immense treasure, and at length a certain farmer, probably by the aid of a judicious dream, was led to dig into one of them, when, after much toil, deep below the surface he found a vast chest, which from its great weight clearly contained some very heavy substance – probably gold! To drag this from its long entombment the said farmer borrowed all the bulls of the district, and yoking them to an iron chain nearly half a mile in length urged them on. The bulls began to pull; but alas! alas! the chain broke – the animals were scattered in the greatest confusion over the hill side – in fact there was a regular “bouleversement” of them, and the mysterious chest sank into the earth deeper than ever, leaving only a reminiscence of this transaction in the term the mounds still bear of “Bully Hills!”

It may be considered presumptuous, perhaps, to doubt the correctness of any part of the above charming bit of local folk lore; otherwise, we might have ventured to suggest that, as several bubbling springs are termed “Bully” springs from the French “bouillant” or boiling, so these hills may have received their appellation from “boule” or “boulet” (a ball), indicative of the rotundity of their outline.

I really don’t think his statements about Saxons and Danes are any better than the pronouncements of “nursery maids” but there we are. From the ‘Stamford Mercury’, 17th July 1857.

The cairns are numerous, but are rapidly disappearing before the advance of improving agriculture, and are only to be found intact on the unreclaimed land. The first we will notice is a ruined one, in a field on Burnside of Rathven, a few hundred yards west of the farm house of Conage, on the road from Fochabers to Cullen. When complete it must have been of considerable dimensions, and probably marks the last resting place of some chief of Celtic or Scandinavian type. The centre portion has been reduced to the level of the surrounding field. It measures 133 feet from east to west, and 50 from north to south; and varies in height from 5 feet 3 inches to 8 feet 6 inches.

The local name is “Tarry Clearick,” which some translate as “Priest’s Cairn;” but this interpretation does not agree with the apparent antiquity of the cairn. Tradition says that it occupies the site of a battle between the Danes and Picts, and that the cairn itself is the grave of the chief who fell in the engagement.

Thomas D Wallace, writing in the Banffshire Advertiser, 24th May 1883.

Someone getting a bit of mileage out of the local folklore:

A Singular Legend.

Those prone to superstition, no less than students of folklore, will have a special interest in the finding of the body of the young man who is accused of having murdered his sweetheart on the lofty Cornish hill of Castle an Dinas. The ancient and ruined fortress stands in the parish of Ludgvan; and of the saint after whom it was named there has long been told in the district a singular legend.

Saint Ludgvan, the alleged founder of the church there, was an Irish missionary; and it is said of him that he brought a stream of water under the church stile for the purpose of bestowing on it certain miraculous qualities, one of which was that no person baptised with it should ever expiate any of his crimes through medium of a halter.

Consequently it has been accustomed to be believed that no man of Ludgvan ever suffers this disgrace; and the popular belief in the legend is certain to be strengthened by the fact that now a peculiarly cruel murder has been perpetrated at Castle an Dinas, suicide, to use the old phrase, has “cheated the gallows.”

The belief, it may be added, is so strong in the district that the inhabitants of neighbouring parishes have been known to carry away the water of Ludgvan for baptismal purposes; but proof of its efficacy when thus removed is wanting.

From the (geographically surprising) ‘East of Fife Record’, 24th June 1904. It’s a slightly peculiar interpretation that St Ludgvan would be complicit in people getting away with terrible crimes, perhaps he intended that the local people would actually turn out very good and not do anything meriting hanging. But there we are. The poor victim found in the ditches at Castle-an-Dinas was Jessie Rickard, shot by Charles Berryman.

Fonaby Top is now a farm, immaculate and clearly highly organised. This place is also the resting-place of the Fonaby stone sack, whose sinister history clings close. It nestles in a hedge bottom, untouched and, while not immovable, unmoved.

Mr Peter Cole, who farms here, treats it with the respect due to its hideous reputation. Would he move it, I asked? “By hell I wouldn’t,” he replied swiftly and decisively. And you wouldn’t think to look at him that the stalwart Mr Cole was a man to be easily moved by old wives’ tales. But that’s Lincolnshire!

From ‘Grimsby Daily Telegraph’, 17th September 1986.

This is from ‘The Antiquities of Warwickshire‘ by William Dugdale (1656).

Southwards from Haseler (but within the same Parish) is a Coppice wood, and in it a notable Hill, which is of such a steep and equall ascent from every side, as if it had been artificially made, so that it is a very eminent mark over all that part of the Country, and by the common people called Alcocks Arbour. Towards the foot whereof is a hole, now almost filled up, having been the entrance into a Cave, as the Inhabitants report: of which Cave there is an old wives story, that passes for current amongst the people of the adjacent Towns;

viz. that one Alcock, a great Robber, used to lodge therein, and having got much mony by that course of life, hid it in an iron-bound Chest, whereunto were three Keys; which Chest, they say, is still there, but guarded by a Cock that continually sits upon it: And that on a time, an Oxford-Schollar came thither, with a Key that opened two of the Locks; but as he was attempting to open the third, the Cock seized on him. To all which they adde, that if one Bone of the partie, who set the Cock there, could be brought, he would yield up the Chest.

There’s another strange small hill not a few hundred metres down the road, and this is called ‘The Night Cap’ on modern maps.

The other hill has been known as either the “Devil’s Bag of Nuts” or “the Devil’s Night-cap.” The former name is part of a well-known group of legends clustering round September 21st, the devil’s nutting day. And in the local form it ran somewhat thus.

The Blessed Virgin Mary took shelter beneath a hazel bush, somewhere near this spot, and the bush spread a thick shelter over her so that she was not the least inconvenienced by the rain. She accordingly blessed the bush, so that it should bear specially good nuts. Now the devil was anxious, as usual, to undo any good that might be done, so he came nutting this way, but was very soon detected. In order to escape he flung down the troublesome bag of nuts, which grew into this hill.

In the ‘Stratford upon Avon Herald’, 4th July 1913.

Rumours of underground tunnels always count as folklore don’t they. (It reminded me of that at Fiddler’s Hill in Norfolk).

Arbury Hill is an ancient encampment. The great earthwork was thrown up by the Romans and the whole was surrounded by a wide ditch 20 feet deep enclosing about 10 acres. There are subterranean passages which were discovered a few years ago when a dog disappeared after a rabbit, in, it was thought, a rabbit hole. The dog was called, but never came back, though it was heard barking under the ground a long distance away. Digging operations revealed an underground passage with foul air in it. The dog was never recovered.

From the ‘Northampton Mercury’, 20th October 1933.

Also (I have not read it) John Walbridge’s article in ‘Mercian Mysteries’ (1991) suggests Arbury Hill is the ‘omphalos of England’ being further from the sea than anywhere else in the country. Which could be a fun fact.

Bygone Ashwell. Interesting lecture by Mr H.W. Bowman.

{...} The next object to arrest attention was Pancake Hill upon Highly Hill, the legendary voice of the old woman therein rewarding with a pancake all those who could complete the circuit of this old mound three times without drawing breath {sic ...}

Herts and Cambs Reporter, 27th March 1914.

The Supposed Tumulus In Parliament Hill Fields.
Nothing has come of the excavations undertaken by the County Council on the supposed tumulus in Parliament-hill fields. The result is exactly what many persons expected, for the legend connecting the British warrior queen with the mound is of the vaguest possible character. There are not wanting old inhabitants of the neighbourhood who assert that this particular mound has only attained to notoriety as “Boadicea’s Grave” within their own time, and that it was so christened by some practical joker who wished to impose upon the learned. Others of an antiquarian turn believe that genuine tumuli exist in the higher regions of Hampstead, bordering the Mansfield estates, but certainly not in Parliament-hill fields, which were in old times the dumping grounds for all sorts of rubbish. Anyhow the digging of the authorities has come to nought.

London Daily Chronicle, 5th November 1894.

Last week The Bedfordshire Times published a picture of Marston Church and with it a story of certain alleged exploits of the Evil One. Mr F.W. Marsom, of Northill, has some more stories to tell about the athletic prowess of Mephistopheles round and about Northill:

In Northill two versions of the story of the jumping powers of the devil are told, and both in connexion with Marston. The first is the same as that told before, but with the addition that when he took his leap he landed on Moxhill near Northill in a field called Hopper’s Hole.

The other version is that the devil took a hop, step, and a jump from Marston. His hop brought him to Hopper’s Hole, he stepped across Northill parish to Caesar’s Camp, Sandy, and from here he jumped and disappeared.

( Mr Marson then goes on to connect the story to leylines, an idea Alfred Watkins had in the early 1920s. ...) Applying these theories to the one-inch ordnance survey map we find that a straight line from Moat Farm, Marston, passes through the moat of Manor Farm, Cotton End, across Moxhill, Northill, to Caesar’s Camp, Sandy, which is the site of a prehistoric camp. This seems to fit the trackway theory, but the trouble is that so many lines can be found that the map soon begins to look like a spider’s web gone crazy.

Well I’m sold anyway :) From the Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 18th September 1936.

No. hang on. They’re not in a straight line at all.

Bear with me. It’s for your own good so you know how not to behave.

One day the Devil spied a man playing jumps or leapfrog in his own field upon the Sabbath. By this monstrous crime the Devil recognised him as one of his own. With one jump from the (church) tower he seized him and by another jump bore him to Hell. On the spot where he met his fate there is a stone known as the Devil’s toe-nail. It is a round stump about three feet high.

Miss D.B. Ward writing on Country Legends in the Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 16th July 1965.

At Marston Mortaine, Bedfordshire, one Sunday morning several boys played truant from church and wandered about the fields. A man dressed in black joined them, and proposed a game of hop-skip-and-jump. The boys acceded to the proposal, and commenced the sport, and when his turn came, the man in black took such an extraordinary hop-skip-and-jump, and cleared so much ground that the boys became excessively frightened, and concluded he was the devil. They ran home, and took care never to absent themselves from the services at church ever after; and the inhabitants of the village had stones placed on the spots where the devil’s feet came down to commemorate the event. And these stones remain to this day a testimony against Sabbath-breaking, and a witness of the devil’s prowess at hop-skip-and-jump.

Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 8th March 1873,

If you ask Marston people about the “Jumps” you are fairly certain to get widely-varying accounts of some legendary happenings. At least, when I passed through Marston the other day the stories I had heard came to my mind and I inquired about the legends. Older folk told some hair-raising yarns – in fact, the more the versions recounted, the more hair-raising they became and the more they differed in detail.

Of course this is nothing to complain about. It is a necessary stage in the building of a legend. Various accounts which come to us through the ages are gradually combined into one story, but the process is never completed, for by their very nature the stories acquire new details; generations of people see them in differing lights and read new meanings into them. And so it goes on.

The meanings of such inn signs as “Chequers”, “Rose and Crown”, “Three Horseshoes”, and “Bell” are fairly easy to trace, but the “Jumps” is local to Marston, though the legend of the devil’s leaps appears in various forms and in various districts. My authority tells me that at Marston the devil once appeared to a number of lads who were playing in the fields instead of going to church. After offering them money for jumping the devil is alleged to have exhibited his own agility by making two long jumps of about forty yards each. He then bounded over the church tower and vanished in a blue flame. Presumably there was also a smell of sulphur, but we are not told about that.

The incident caused so much dismay that the venerable Abbot of Woburn had to visit Marston and, with solemn ceremony, “disinfect” the place. Three stone crosses were placed where the devil jumped: the part of an octagonal shaft in the field opposite the inn years ago was said to be one of them. Local imagination long saw the impressions of the devil’s foot on the stone. Has this stone survived Marston’s mechanical navvies?

Marston Church tower stands about fifty feet from the church, the reason for this being wrapped in obscurity. Fanciful minds insist that the devil attempted to carry it away from the church, found it too heavy, and dropped it where it now stands. Apparently Satan is not so accomplished as a strong man as he is in other athletic directions.

Ernest Milton writing in the Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 10th December 1937.

The Principal Meeting of the Bedfordshire Licensing Committee {...} was held at the Shire Hall on Wednesday. Mr Eales represented the Justices, and applications for the renewal of the license of the “Jumps” Inn, Marston Morteyne, was made, on behalf of the owners, Messrs. Charles Wells, Ltd., and the tenant, Alfred Jackson, by Mr C.E. Dyer, instructed by Messrs. H. Tebbs and Son.

Against the renewal it was submitted that the house was isolated, with only a farmhouse and two cottages in its vicinity, and that the trade was small. When Mr Henry Swaffield was giving professional evicence, the Chairman (Mr Harter) said he believed the house obtained its name because the Devil was supposed to have jumped from a certain stone to the house, or from the house to the stone – which was it? – Witness: From the stone to the house. Mr Warren: And has not been seen since, I think? – Mr Swaffield: Not in that locality (laughter).

Mr Dyer pointed out that the trade of the house during the war was no criterion, and to take away this license would leave his client’s competitors in a majority of 2 to 1 in that parish. The house had been lately restored and was in excellent condition. During the last 20 years there had been only 3 transfers. The Bench declined to renew the licence.

Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 31st May 1918.

To the Editor of the Walsall Observer.
Sir, – I have been rather interested in your notes and the correspondence about Henry VIII and Sutton Coldfield. I shall be much obliged if you, or any of your correspondents, can clear up a certain puzzle about the origin of the name, or place, called King’s Standing. By the way, is this the place where King Henry was supposed to be standing when he was said to be attacked by a wild boar?

I have been told two quite different versions about the origin of the name King’s Standing. First, I was informed that this was the place where the Tudor Monarch used to stand to watch the hunting, or that he started the hunt from this spot, and this was one reason why Sutton was allowed to use the Tudor Rose on its coat of arms, etc.

Later on, I was informed that this was the place where Charles I stood to watch one of the battles between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians.

It is quite obvious that both these accounts of the origin of the name of King’s Standing cannot be true. Can anyone say which is the correct version of this interesting bit of local history. – Yours, etc., G.M Wood.

The newspaper (dully?) replies that Duignan says in ‘Staffordshire Place Names’ that it’s about Charles I, and that he didn’t have any evidence that the area was known as King’s Standing before 1642.

From the Walsall Observer, 9th August 1941.

There is a fine menhir at Lizerea Farm, Burhos, Wendron, which had fallen down, and was re-erected some fifty years ago by the then tenants of the farm – the three Pearce brothers. They were enormously strong men – one of them being the redoubtable champion wrestler, John “the Samson of Wendron.” It is said that these young men performed this tremendous task in order to leave a lasting memorial of their herculean strength.

Folklore in action by the sound of it. From an article on ‘Antiquities of the Helston District’ by A.S. Oates, in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser on the 20th May 1948.