Belief and the Environment: When Spirituality Defines Place

The largest of the three megalithic monuments, the King’s Men stone circle, is late Neolithic, circa 2,500BCE. Image: William Raven 

I had been reading the words of Edward Thomas’ ‘In Pursuit of Spring’ and inspired by his journey, “on or with bicycle” down to the South-West from London, I, too, detoured on one of my trips down to visit my girlfriend, Lily, in Bristol. Thomas’s journey through “the Quantock Hills, to Nether Stowey, Kilve and West Bagborough” offers a “glimpse of England before the First World War” and it has struck me how immeasurably far removed the abandoned scenes of the early-20th-century are from the thunderous M40 or packed railways on which I rely to travel today. Nevertheless, the evidence of the past remains all around, especially if you know where to look. Beyond Leamington, and then Stratford, the landscape begins to roll into the limestone hills of the Cotswolds. There, in the picturesque and now celeb-studded countryside, split unceremoniously by the Warwickshire-Oxfordshire border, stand the three monuments of the Rollright Stones. 

The complex is a gnarled composition of megalithic monuments, made from oolitic limestone gathered locally and probably collected within 500 metres of the site. Today the monuments are spread across either side of the county border, with only the lone King Stone to the north in Warwickshire, while the larger and more complex structures of the King’s Men and the Whispering Knights, can be found to the south in Oxfordshire. Yet, thanks to the extensive excavations carried out by archaeologist George Lambrick in the 1980s, knowledge of the stones is extensive. He revealed that the three monuments were built for distinctly different purposes and at different moments across the late prehistoric period. At Rollright, the disconnection between the separate monuments highlights the deep spiritual significance of ‘place’ during the “2000 years of Neolithic and Bronze Age development” that is represented in the different monuments and continues to last up to the present-day through pagan, rural and community identities and traditions.  

On either side of the King’s Men, pagan objects hang in the trees and shrubbery of the two copses. Image: William Raven 

Lambrick found that when originally constructed, the three would have been found within dense hillside woodland and not on the exposed ridgeline that they are today. This prominent position “on the crest of the Cotswolds” might explain the importance of the site, as the Rollright Stones tell part of a complex rapport between belief and environment, place and spirituality, that existed long before the advent of recorded, or even organised, religion. 

Sites like Rollright bear the signs of these ‘sacred geographies’ superimposed on the land over millennia. The stones were raised and positioned over a period of nearly 2,000 years, with the oldest being the Whispering Knights, from the dawn of the Neolithic era (3,800-3,500BCE), and the youngest being the Bronze aged King Stone (c. 1,500BCE). This time span saw early Britain undergoing a series of major changes as prehistoric Britons “halted their continual expansion and settled down to cultivate the most productive areas of the isles”. As Mike Pearson notes in the Late Neolithic in Britain (2005), the period was “a time of important social change”, when spiritual beliefs also appear to have shifted – and a site like Rollright is a physical palimpsest of these changes.

The “fine standing” King’s Stone to the right of the low rise that supposedly prevented the King seeing Long Compton. Image: William Raven 

All the Rollright Stones have been extensively mythologised and, in turn, debated by historians. The Whispering Knights are an example of this: a collapsed Neolithic portal dolmen of a type widespread across Europe during the early and middle Neolithic. Such dolmens involved balancing a capstone on top of two to four upright stones to create a burial chamber. The antiquarian William Stukeley speculated in 1743 that the Whispering Knights might have formed the central point of a round barrow burial tumulus. Lambrick, writing centuries later, viewed such interpretations with scepticism, although he noted that the act of raising the capstone was “analogous to the lintels on Stonehenge.”  

Change is visible across the complex, and as the late-Neolithic progressed, “a way of life based on ancestral tombs [...] came to an end”, and instead of the dolmens such as the Whispering Knights, the construction of large wooden or stone circles began. An example of this can be seen roughly 400 metres away to the north west, where the 33 metres wide King’s Men can be found – a closely spaced ring of 77 stones originally spaced in a perfectly circular shape. Over the millennia, some stones were lost or destroyed, and up to a third of the stones in the circle are later additions, filling the space of a stone which once stood before.  

Fascinatingly, closer analysis of the circle revealed magnetic anomalies likely from “local ground surface undulations and the presence of localised burning”, a feature found in other stone circles in Cumbria and Orkney. This combination of local and distant knowledges contributes to the monument’s significance. Like the Altar Stone at Stonehenge, which is believed to have come from the Orcadian Basin in Scotland, it also reveals a highly interconnected community of Neolithic peoples living across the British Isles. Together, the three Rollright monuments therefore hold national significance in the development of spiritual belief over more than a millennium. The landscape itself acts as a record of evolving beliefs, social practices, and building traditions, as the complex relationship between belief and environment comes to the fore. 

An offering of berries placed in one of the weathered surfaces of the oolitic stone monuments of the King’s Men. Image: William Raven  

Bibliography: 

Hooke, Della. 2013. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape (Boydell Press). 

Lambrick, George. 1988. The Rollright Stones: Megaliths, Monuments and Settlement in the Prehistoric Landscape (English Heritage). 

Pearson, Mike Parker. 2000. “Attitudes to Disposal of the Dead in Southern Britain 3500 B.c.-A.d. 43. By P. h. w. Bristow,” Archaeological Journal, 157.1, pp. 473–74, doi:10.1080/00665983.2000.11078970. 

“Rollright Stones.” n.d. English Heritage <https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/rollright-stones/> [accessed November 30, 2025]. 

“The Rollright Stones.” n.d. Rollrightstones.co.uk <https://www.rollrightstones.co.uk/> [accessed November 30, 2025]. 

Images by William Raven (Taken 03/10/25)