warning: this is not a stock image!



I diden't get much chance to photograph while I was away in England over Christmas , but did manage to revisit a favourite haunt of mine in the Cotswalds called The Rollright Stones.

It coulden't have been more atmospheric.....alone with the heavy frost and thick fog that had blanketed most of our drive out. Not a place for the faint hearted .

The Rollright Stones

The Rollrights have been a traditional meeting place of witches since at least Tudor times and probably long before that, presumably because of the Stones' mysterious power and their pagan origins. One Good Friday a labourer met a farmer who asked him where he was headed. He replied, "Why, I be a-going to the King-Stones, for there I shall be on holy ground."

Long Compton, a mile away from the Stones, has a centuries old tradition of witchcraft. Unfortunately in 1875 this led to the murder of 80 year old Anne by James Heywood, who believed that he had been bewitched by Mistress Tennant. For Heywood the fact that his neighbour kept toads in her garden was probably ample evidence of witchcraft. He was quickly apprehended and readily confessed. He added that there were 16 witches in Long Compton and said "If I had my way, I would kill them all". At his trial he asked the judge to weigh Anne Tennant's body against the church Bible - an old test of determining a witch. Heywood was judged to be insane and was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty's pleasure in Warwick jail. Still believing himself to be bewitched, Heywood refused to eat or drink and died a few months later. What comes around, goes around.

Maybe Heywood had been influenced by the well-known local saying that "there are enough witches in Long Compton to draw a wagon-load of hay up Long Compton Hill". (Surely if they were proper witches they wouldn't have had to push?)

info from rollrightstones.co.uk