The Rudston monolith

I've recently been re-reading Alfred Watkins' seminal works The Old Straight Track and The Ley Hunter's Manual. I'm not convinced about much of the romanticism and mythos that's been layered onto the concept of ley lines since Watkins first proposed the idea (he was very much against any ideas of energy lines or magic). But there's no denying the existence of alignments. I'm also quite happy with the idea of the 'dodman' - a respected member of the community who could map out the landscape and create paths for people to travel between notable places and sites. The fact that churches and other religious buildings were built on top of existing neothithic sites shows that the church acknowledged the importance of these places too.

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this is the Rudston Monolith. It's not as famous as Stonehenge or Avebury or the Rollright Stones for some reason but it should be - because it is the tallest standing stone in Britain. And it's in a churchyard.

Made from glomerate Moorstone grit and transported over 40 miles to Rudston from the Cleveland Hills near Whitby, Yorkshire, the pillar is has a circumference of nearly 17 feet and stands at 26 feet high. Sir William Strickland's excavation in the late 18th century revealed that the depth below ground matches its  height. This means that people once transported a 52 feet long stone to its current location. Rudston must have been a important sacred site or worship centre in prehistoric times to warrant so much effort. Following a successful strategy, Anglo-Saxon missionaries likely 'Christianised' this already revered object, possibly by affixing a cross to its summit. This could explain the name 'Rudston,' as the Old English term for cross is 'rood,' while 'stane' means 'stone.'

During the Saxon era, a church may have been constructed on the site where the present-day church now stands. Unfortunately, all traces of its existence have vanished, and the Domesday survey of 1086 does not record any church building in Rudston. A popular myth surrounding the stone's origin suggests that the devil, angered by the construction of a church on this pagan sacred hill, hurled a colossal stone javelin or thunderbolt to destroy it. However, divine intervention deflected his aim, causing the stone to land in its current position. 

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Afterword:

After writing this post I noted that the classification given to The Ley Hunter's Manual by the publishers is 'paranormal'.

This despite the fact that Watkins himself was not an advocate of any kind of paranormal association. He was, however, aware of it. As John Michell notes in his foreword to the book:

'Watkins himself avoided contact with the occult, but he was well aware that there was a deeper significance to leys than could be expressed by supposing them to be ordinary traders' and travellers' routes. In The Old Straight Track he wrote: "I feel that ley-man, astronomer-priest, druid, bard, wizard, witch, palmer and hermit, were all more or less linked by one thread of ancient knowledge and power." This idea was taken up by many of Watkins's followers, among whom it began to be whispered that leys and the ancient sites lined up along them were the transmitters and generators of ancient occult power. An early ley hunter, the occult writer Dion Fortune, in her novel of 1936, The Goat-Foot God, described standing stones and other landmarks of the ley system as 'sighting-marks on the lines of force between the power-centres'. The same theme occurs in folklore traditions all over the world which attribute strange magical aualities to ancient sites and the paths between them, and it remains a notable feature of modern ley researches'.