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.
