However, in 2021, just after lockdown had ended, I went there to watch a live performance by Jools Holland and his orchestra. It was a fantastic gig, made even better by guest singers Ruby Turner and Eddi Reader. But before the show I went to stretch my legs as it was a lovely sunny day and I had noticed a set of curious stones near by the old chapel. I assumed they were a folly of some kind. I was wrong.
The chapel and the house were built on the site of a prehistoric circle of standing stones - one such stone has been visibly incorporated into the south-east corner of the chapel.
There are two types of stones. There are sarsens, blocks of sandstone, residual boulders from a bed of sandstone which once covered the chalk at the top of the valley to the East of the chapel, and which were deposited by the weight of the ice melting at the end of the ice age – more than 3000 years ago. The name sarsen is derived from the 17th century use of the word Saracen, denoting something foreign and unusual. Another type of natural stone formation is the pudding stone, consisting of pebbles stuck together by natural limestone cement that has washed between them and hardened into solid rock.
Both these types of stone are present in the stone circle.
Having done some research I found that the County Sites and Monuments Record Officer for Oxfordshire is on record as saying that ... 'We have recorded it as a folly. A primary source is the Country Life article, May 7th 1981. Apparently the chapel was built over the original site of the circle; the circle was first reconstructed in C17th the re-erected in 1981 "as near as possible in its original formation".'
So it is both genuine ... and a folly it seems.
It's not a circle I've ever seen much written about.
Here's the Stonor Park website.
And here's the entry for the cicle on the Megalithic Portal and The Modern Antiquarian.
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