It’s only a short 30min drive from our house to a small but interesting Late Neolithic set of stone circles we had been meaning to visit for some time; Not on as grand a scale as Avebury or Stonehenge, but worth the trip even if it was snowing and the windchill had the temperature at around -5 Centigrade! The notes below are taken from Wikipedia but the photos are our own.

The Rollright Stones are three separate megalithic monuments, constructed close to one another during the later prehistoric ages of the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The names which are currently given to them – the King’s Men, the King Stone and the Whispering Knights – descend from folklore that has surrounded the site since the Early Modern period, although these terms have since been adopted by archaeologists and heritage managers.

After over a thousand years of early farming, a way of life based on ancestral tombs, forest clearance and settlement expansion came to an end. This was a time of important social changes.

The Kings Men Neolithic Circle

The King’s Men is a stone circle 33 metres (108 ft) in diameter, currently composed of seventy-seven closely spaced stones. Resistivity and magnetometry surveys undertaken during the 1980s revealed four magnetic anomalies within the centre of the circle, possibly representing “pits related in some way to local ground surface undulations and the presence of localised burning.”

This small site and set of circles is definitely worth a visit, especially if you look up the reason for the name Kings Men and the relationship to the English Civil War.

Categories: England

Tags: Cotswolds, Kings Men, local history, monuments, Neolithic, rollrights, stone circle, Travel, Travel guide