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The late Editor and Founder of ANTIQUITY had to deal with a difficult monument when he wrote his Long Barrows of the Cotwolds (1925). This was the Three Shire Stones which stand in an alcove in the wall on the west side of the Foss Way, two miles north of Batheaston, at the junction of Somerset, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire and the parishes of Batheaston, Marshfield and Colerne. Here are three uprights supporting a capstone. Inside is a broken boundary stone bearing the date 1736, and on the 2-in. manuscript map of the district at the Ordnance Survey (dated 1813–14) there is a note saying ‘Shire Stones, erected 1736’. As Crawford wrote, ‘The present structure is evidently a modem imitation of a “dolmen”.’
If we all accept the Three Shire Stones as an 18th-century ‘dolmen’, as we must, it prompts us to wonder what other megalithic imitations or ‘follies’ were constructed in England.
In 1792 Lord Arundel employed Josiah Lane to make a grotto for him at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. Lane was a celebrated constructor of rock-work and his grotto at Wardour is a most remarkable and charming structure. To quote Barbara Jones’s description of it: ‘Built on a brick basis, it is of tufa and stone with the usual occasional ammonite, now covered with green moss and long ferns, for it is in a very sheltered and gloomy situation. The plan is most cunning, turning in and out with many views through jagged holes into other parts. The dark yews and the bank which it is built against, and the patternbook construction, make it the most Gothic of grottoes.’ Apparently Josiah Lane in his rock-work used part of a chamber tomb on Place Farm, Tisbury: three stones from this tomb were removed in 1792 and used at Wardour Castle.
1 O. G. S. Crawford, The Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (1925), p. 227.
2 Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes (1953), p. 243.
3 Lord Arundel and Colt Hoare, History of Modern Wiltshire: Hundred of Dunworth, p. 129–30. I am indebted to Mr Geoffrey Grigson for this reference. He writes : ‘One monolith is still there, so the rock-work is a meeting place of Druids, Chinese gardeners and the Cumaean Sybil.’
4 Barbara Jones, op. cit., 120–1. The Park Place, Henley, monument should be mentioned here although it is not a folly. Originally the Mont de la Ville monument in Jersey it was moved to Henley in March 1788. See Jacquetta Hawkes, The Archaeology of the Channel Islands: 11, The Bailiwick of Jersey (1939), p. 240.
5 See Arnold Jowett’s article on the Masham Temple in Country Life, 17 August, 1945. In this article he states that in the 19th century the Earl of Darnley ‘carted the Sarsen stones of an entire cromlech to make a Merlin’s Grotto in Cobham Park’. Is this so? Barbara Jones lists no folly of this kind. Information, please.
6 Proc. Preh. Soc., 1957, 221. A full report is in preparation. Meanwhile I have had the benefit of discussing this matter with Professor R. de Valera and Mr Liam de Paor.
7 Mr Murray Easton co-operated very readily in telling me the history of the Chemistry panel, and I am grateful to him for his help and interest. In one of his interesting letters from which he has permitted me to quote, he says: ‘I would like to have the chance of doing a free standing composition of “rude” stones.’ Prevented as we are from doing what the famille Piketty did in France, those of us who wish for modern megalithic tombs may well, one day, satisfy Mr Murray Easton’s desires. The symbols carved by Miss Spencer Watson were taken from The Book of Signs, the sixteenth book issued by the First Edition Club, in 1930, by Rudolf Koch (translated by Vyvyan Holland).
8 See F. Burnand, ‘Notes on French dolmens’, The Reliquary, July, 1896, p. 171.