In addition to the Walking My Own Furlough activities, I have had a daily project which I have been a bit hesitant about sharing. However, it has been a part of my routine and it now half fills a sketchbook.

I sometimes receive proof or galley copies of books as part of my bookshop job. These cannot be sold on in anyway – so not for the charity shop when they’re read. If I don’t feel the need to keep them, and no one else at the shop wants them, I have been tearing them up and putting them in the recycling. So partly inspired by Tom Philips ‘A Humument’ project or the work Austin Kleon sometimes posts online, I have been making erasures. Each day of my furlough I have randomly selected a page from a publisher proof and ‘treated’ it in some way by erasing parts of the text. I don’t claim artistic or poetic greatness in this, or any degree of originality but it has been a daily creative project to keep me going even when other activities have descended into procrastination. Some days pages are more successful than others, but in any case I hesitantly share some of the better ones here…

Following on from one holey stone, Minchinhampton Longstone, we move to a whole group of them.

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The Rollright Stones – technically in Oxfordshire but still the Cotswolds. This site comprises a stone circle, with standing stone and remains of a barrow standing slightly further off. The circle itself has been much ‘adjusted’ by well-meaning antiquarians – adding stones to the existing circle – however it still retains the reputation for being uncountable.  Legend has it that it is impossible to count the King’s Men: the stone circle. It is said that the man will never live who shall count the stones three times and find the number the same each time but is also said that the same counting task will give the person their heart’s desire fulfilled. A baker swore he could count them and, to prove it, he baked a quantity of loaves and placed one on each of the stones. But each time he tried to collect them up some of the loaves were missing, spirited away either by the Devil or by fairies.

Other tales of the Rollright Stones include their use in fortune telling, some bad luck stories and various stones going down the hill to drink, as the Minchinhampton Longstone was said to. Most famously perhaps is the story of their origin. The Stones take their names from a legend about a king and his army who were marching over the Cotswolds when they met a witch who challenged the king by saying, “Seven long strides shalt thou take and if Long Compton thou canst see, King of England thou shalt be”.  On his seventh stride a mound rose up obscuring the view, and the witch turned them all to stone:  the king became the King Stone; his army the King’s Men; and his knights the Whispering Knights (plotting treachery).  The witch became an elder tree, supposedly still in the hedge:  if it is cut the spell is broken the Stones will come back to life. It is also said that as one tree dies another grows and in summer when the flowers blossom, if her bark is cut, she will bleed. On midsummers eve people would form a ring around the king stone whilst one man cut the elder witch and as she bled the king’s head would move his head.

Fairies were said to dance around the king stone. The king’s stone is a slightly eccentric shape because 19^th century tourists would chip off bits for luck. This despite the legend that any passing carrier who chips bits off the King Stone will find the wheels of his cart become irrevocably locked!  Girls would go up to the whispering knights pressing their ears to the stones in the hope of hearing their fate.

As with other stone monuments there are difficulties or dangers in trying to remove stones. A local farmer supposedly took one of the largest stones to make a bridge over a stream. It took 24 horses to drag the stone down the hill and a man was killed on the way.  Eventually they got the stone across the stream, but by the morning it had flipped over onto the bank!  This happened each time they replaced it; then the crops failed, so they decided to put the stone back.  It only took one horse to drag it up the hill!

For more gems of local folklore seek out a copy of the excellent book ‘Folklore of the Cotswolds’ by Katharine Briggs.

Corvid-19 postponed my talk at the museum, where I work one day a week. However, as small portions of it came from previous research I had done for various art projects and used my own photos, I thought I could share a couple of snippets.

In the museum we tell you the story of prehistory through the archaeology of these sites but for hundreds of years they were explained in a very different manner. After all, how would you explain a mysterious hump in the ground or standing stone if you hadn’t the benefit of the twentieth century’s archaeological discoveries?

Let us begin with the Longstone of Minchinhampton. Situated 1 mile east of the village, the stone is 7.5 feet high and 6 feet wide. It has holes pockmarking it, some of which go through the stone’s 15” depth.

It is said that a ploughman who found the stone impeded his ploughing tried and yet failed in an attempt to pull out the Longstone, no matter how many oxen he set to the task. The notion that standing stones are immovable may be partly inspired by awe in their mysterious presence in the landscape but also their reputation for being a little like icebergs, having more below the surface than above. This is not the only tale associated with this holey stone. Like many other standing stones in folklore, this large rock is said to walk around the field in which it stands at midnight, and occasionally wander to the spring at Minchinhampton to have a drink.

In a slightly perplexing practice, it has also been said that mothers were said to have passed their children through the largest hole in the stone to cure them of rickets or smallpox. The hole in the Longstone looks like it would have been quite a tight fit for even the smallest child. This connection between stone holes and curing rickets pops up in other places like Men-an-Tol on the Penwith peninsula in Cornwall. Having crawled through this particular stone hole I have to say it’s more likely to give you backache than cure any ailments.

For more gems of local folklore seek out a copy of the excellent book ‘Gloucestershire Folklore’ by Roy Palmer