The Devil’s Stone Shebbear: A Landscape Enigma by John Bradbeer
Originally published in the North Devon Archaeological Society Newsletter
Just why Shebbear should have two flat/prone megaliths that are sarsen stones and there to seem to be no others in the county is a complete mystery.
Members will probably be aware of the Devil’s Stone, which lies at the west end of the square, just outside the churchyard in Shebbear. The enigma takes in archaeology, geology and geomorphology (the study of landforms). The stone itself is the centre of much folk lore, culminating in a ceremony every 5 November, when the stone is turned. This is to flush the Devil out from his possible hiding place under the stone and failure to do so puts next year’s crops in jeopardy.
Another element to the story is that the Devil was escaping from Northlew, where he was in danger of catching his death of cold and to hasten his progress, he dropped the stone in Shebbear. He was also supposed to have left his mark in the churchyard at Halwill on this journey and that was the story my cousins picked up in the 1930s at school in Halwill. We can probably explain the November timing of the turning of the stone with the Celtic year, with 1 November, Samhain (pronounced sawin) marking the start of winter. The shift to 5 November almost certainly came about only in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
The stone itself is around 500 to 700 kilograms in weight and sub-angular rather than round in shape. It is described geologically as a conglomerate orthoquartzite, and to the untrained eye, the shiny quartz grains resemble the quartz crystals in granite. It is in fact a sedimentary rock and current thinking suggests that it is Tertiary in age and thus comparable with the sarsen stones (or greywethers) that are found on Salisbury Plain and which, of course, were famously used at Avebury and Stonehenge. It is generally accepted that sea levels were very much higher in the Tertiary period, roughly 5 to 50 million years ago, and many of the succession of erosion surfaces (from c 50 to c 350 metres) and give such flat skylines across much of the county were cut at this time.
Most of the presumed Tertiary cover of South West England has long since been eroded away but Tertiary deposits are preserved on the top of Haldon Hill, south west of Exeter and in the down-faulted Bovey Basin in South Devon and here in North Devon in the Petrockstow Basin and the off-shore Stanley Basin near Lundy. Orleigh in Buckland Brewer has a flint gravel deposit presumed to be of Tertiary age and derived from a former cover of chalk. The Tithe Apportionment of 1841 records some fields as ‘Flint Hill’. So geologists can offer a plausible origin for the Devil’s Stone, but the enigma is whatever happened to the other survivors from this former Tertiary cover.
In central southern England, besides the sarsens used at sites like Avebury and Stonehenge and incorporated in some of the barrows, there are clusters such as those found in a dry valley on Fyfield Down, just north of Pewsey in Wiltshire. Geomorphologists can explain such a cluster by reference to solifluction flow during the very cold periods in the Quaternary when southern England was effectively tundra, lying just to the south of the great ice sheets and the summer thaw delivered sufficient water to move soil and sarsens stones down slope. The river terrace gravels along the Solent also contain many smaller fragments of sarsen stone, brought down by the rivers that drain much of Salisbury Plain. But where are the other sarsen stones from North Devon?
On Salisbury Plain it is plausible to speculate that early humans found and moved many of the suitably large stones to incorporate in monuments, but in North Devon, there are no megaliths formed of sarsens. North Devon’s river gravel terraces, of which there may be at least four or five, have never been exploited so no sarsens have been exposed from these. Perhaps there never were as many sarsens here and most were quite small and thus readily transported or fragmented into yet smaller pieces.
However, the enigma has another twist. For about 750 metres from the Devil’s Stone is another sarsen, rather larger at an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 kilograms, now on the verge in front of Berry House and one that looks far more like potential megalith material in shape. That two such stones should survive so close to each other yet no others appear to have survived anywhere in North Devon. Clearly human agency has to be invoked in the survival and folklore attached, especially to the Devil’s Stone, but archaeology and geology have no real explanation as to why there should be just these two sarsens and no others known in North Devon.
Both stones are on the Devon HER and details of grid references are there. I would give the GR for the Devil's Stone as SS439 092 and the larger stone at Berry as SS438 100. The other things I might be inclined to add by way of context are|:
Shebbear was the name place of a Hundred (although known as Merton Hundred before). The church (about 50 metres from the Stone) is dedicated to St Michael, so the dedication reflects the Devil connotations of the stone. Some of Devon's churches are dedicated to St Michael because of their location on a prominent hill (Brentor is the classic example) but you could not really invoke that explanation here in Shebbear.
it would be tempting to say that the Stone marked the meeting place for the Hundred Court, but there is no evidence of this and of course the stone may have lain somewhere else around the village and been moved to the square which seems to have been the site of the Hundred Court (but once again, there is no evidence and in the case of Black Torrington, a few kilometers away, and also the name place of a hundred, there is no obvious surviving candidate site for the Hundred Court to have met)
With best wishes
John Bradbeer
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