Normally in the second week before Christmas I would be lucky to have any time to myself, let alone a whole day off (well, apart from Zooming some prayers for Hornington Town Council's meeting in the evening). But yesterday I managed to get out for a walk around Hascombe Hill, somewhere I know relatively well; the specific reason for going there was to find a site I have only just found out about, the Dragonstones.
Around the UK you can find a variety of would-be megalithic sites which have been knocked up in relatively recent times. Some look very fake indeed such as the Temple at Ilton (though, as I discovered on my visit some years ago, there's nothing inauthentic about its horrid and threatening atmosphere) or this one somewhere in Shropshire. When they hove into view, provided you keep your eyes peeled, just to the south of the footpath that runs itself to the south of Hascombe Hill between Nore and Lodge Farm, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the Dragonstones have been there millennia rather than just over two decades, which is in fact the case. They really look the part.
It would probably be invidious to describe the circle as a 'folly' anyway: everyone says it was erected by 'the Modern Order of Druids' and so it perhaps counts as a genuine religious monument. Everyone, it turns out, is copying Wikipedia, and there doesn't appear to be an actual organisation with that name, but the stones have been erected with an eye on the numinous according to this gentleman who did it, even if he doesn't let on who employed him. He knows what genuine Neolithic monuments are supposed to look like, and which stones to pick to make his circles appear genuine second cousins to Avebury. Most interestingly of all, Surrey has very little suitable stone for this kind of thing so the raw material for the Dragonstones Circle was trucked all the way from a quarry on the Isle of Portland - a little bit of Dorset in the midst of Surrey!
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