“I ascended there a high hill and travaill’d all on the tops of the hills a pleasant and good roade; I came to Rowle Stone, where are many such greate Stones as is at Stonidge, one stands upright a broad stone called the King Stone, being the place a Saxon King was secured against his enemies….â€The Journeys of Celia Fines 1694I am a a complex of megalithic monuments near the village of Long Compton in England, lying across the border between the counties of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire (Grid reference SP2930). I consist of three separate sites:The King's Men, 70 closely-spaced stones that form a stone circle of diameter 33 metres. My stones are set on top of a circular bank with an entrance to the southeast marked by two portal stones. My site is unexcavated and so can only be loosely dated to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. I was restored in 1882.Next to me is the King Stone, a single, weathered monolith, 2.4 metres high by 1.5 metres wide, standing 76 metres east of the King's Men. Some archaeoastronomers claimed ancient knowledge of an alignment between the King Stone, the centre of the King's Men circle and the star Capella as it rose in the sky. However, carbon dating of material found beneath the stone during an excavation in 1982 put the mean date of its erection at 1792 BC, much later than the other sites. The King Stone is more likely to have been a marker stone serving a now-destroyed cairn burial site.The Whispering Knights, the remains of the burial chamber of an early or middle Neolithic portal dolmen lying 400 metres east of the King's Men. Four standing stones survive, forming a chamber about 2 square metres in area around a fifth recumbent stone, probably the collapsed roof. In 1764, William Stukeley visited the site and saw the remains of a round barrowClick Here to get a tiny myspace layout!
