The tale of the standing stones of Stanton Drew you may choose to dismiss or believe.
It happened they say many years ago on the night of a midsummer's eve. A young man and
woman had plighted their troth and been married that same afternoon. And now with their guests
they determined to dance til the rise of the midsummer moon. They'd hired a harper and
offered them coin if merry dance tunes they would strum. So the harper he played and the
hours flew by 'til the poor harper's fingers were numb. Tomorrow's the Sabbath the harper
cried out. You should go to your home and your bed! Or the Devil will come here and
make you his own. But they laughed and kept reveling instead. The
bride called to a piper to play on their pipe and the poor harper left them to rest. And
the piper piped up and the midnight hour passed and they danced on like they were possessed.
Next morning the harper returned to seek out a hood they'd mislaid in the night. In the
glow of the dawn of the midsummer sun they saw a remarkable sight.
Of the bride, groom and guests who but hours before had danced, there was nowhere a trace.
Instead where they'd capered and croused without care a stone circle stood in their place.
A circle of stones on the undisturbed grass where no circle of stones stood before. And
as for the revelers who danced past the dawn they were heard of and seen of no more.
To all wedding parties on midsummer's eve do not dance when the sabbath is due. Heed
this warning or you may find yourselves transformed like the standing stones of Stanton Drew.
The Stanton Drew circles are supposed to be people who gathered for a wedding long, long
ago. They had the wedding on the Saturday but they didn't know when to stop. They didn't
realise that their dances and celebrations were going on through Saturday night towards
Sunday morning and they were encouraged by a mysterious musician who arrived from nowhere
and got them to keep on dancing. But when they passed the fatal division into Sunday
morning they were profaning the sabbath by making merry upon it and so automatically
got turned to stone to punish them for their sins. All of course except the mysterious
musician who was probably the Devil himself and vanished cackling to head on for another
misdeed.
The story is first recorded in the 17th century by one of the great founders of the discipline
of archaeology, a man called John Aubrey. He said that the circles were called the Wedding
in his time which commemorates the fatal wedding which ended up in the petrified dancers. There
are no less than three magnificent stone circles at Stanton Drew and another three stones set
in near the church so this is quite a spread-out magnificent elaborate site. They are a series
of ceremonial monuments. You can call them temples for short, built around about four
and a half thousand years ago to celebrate a religion of which we know absolutely nothing.
To keep people from dancing on the Sabbath, to point to something in the landscape and
say that could be you if you don't pay attention is an absolutely wonderful way of seizing
people's imaginations. Legends work really well if you can literally touch them, in other
words if they're about solid objects which you can see to the present day and to which
you can relate and Stanton Drew hits that one absolutely straight on.