Stories of the Sun by Dawn Nelson

Author:Dawn Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

DANCING WITCHES, COWS AND KINGS: STORIES OF STANDING STONES

Dancing Witches

In Penrith in Cumbria there is a stone circle thought to be Neolithic in origin that is named ‘Long Meg and Her Daughters’. William Wordsworth was noted to have commented that these stones were second only to Stonehenge. The legend goes that the stones, only twenty-seven of which remain standing to this day, were once a coven of witches. As punishment for dancing on the holy day of Sunday, a magician turned them to stone and made it impossible for them to be counted. If anyone is able to count them twice and come up with the same number on both counts, the curse will be lifted and the coven will return to its corporal form.

Long Meg is thought to have been Meg of Meldon, also known as Margaret Fenwick, a seventeenth-century woman referred to locally as a witch. This reputation may actually have been linked to her business as a moneylender and her opportune foreclosure on the loans she had made to two large estates, which brought her much wealth. Her prosperity was considered suspicious and her seizure of the properties was not at all popular with the landed gentry of the time, perhaps because she was a woman. I’ll let you decide whether or not Meg was a witch or simply a shrewd businesswoman, but she is now thought to haunt the surrounding area as well as being linked to the standing stones at Penrith.

Castlerigg Stone Circle, again in Cumbria, this time just outside Keswick, is very popular with tourists and if you have the chance to visit you will see why. Looking south, Castlerigg Fell and High Rigg frame the circle, and if you look north you will see the mighty Skiddaw and Blencathra, Skiddaw being the sixth-highest mountain in the UK. This circle is thought to be older than Stonehenge and also has the folklore motif of ‘countless stones’ associated with it. In this case, if you manage to count the same number of standing stones twice, you have achieved the impossible and who knows what will occur next?

Zealous Brides

More dancing on the Sabbath resulted in mishap in Stanton Drew in Somerset. There are three stone circles in Stanton Drew in close proximity to each other; one large and two small. Why they were built this way almost 5,000 years ago, no one knows, but one story tells of a wedding party. It was a Saturday evening and the happy couple were celebrating at their wedding reception and all their guests danced well into the night. The moon rose high and the fiddler’s music rang out across the countryside. But come midnight, when the church bells took over to mark the start of a new day, Sunday, the fiddler stopped and refused to play any more.

The bride tried every which way to get the fiddler to play again, but he would play on the Sabbath for neither love nor money. Eventually she shouted at him that she

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