Mick Davis writes: There are 3 rectangular blocks of stone in two private gardens at the site, 2 standing and one snapped off long ago. The two intact ones are about 9 feet long including the part buried in the ground.
There is no mention of them in local legend or on any map until after WW2 but they have obviously been there a lot longer than that. Until the mid 60’s there was the remains of a long barrow a couple of hundred yards away and the stones were pretty much dismissed as having been dragged from there when the barrow was first discovered in the 1820s. The barrow was bulldozed and built over in 1965.
The stones did not look at all like the right size and shape to have come from a barrow and it was thought that they might possibly have been part of a stone circle- the proximity of the barrow gave some weight to this. There were stories of other stones buried in nearby gardens and the geophysics survey indicated that this might well be the case. Dr. Lewis, BACAS and myself decided to excavate in 2015 and the results were rather disappointing in that the stone we dug beside had been exposed before in very recent times and so any dating material or packing stones were no longer there.
We did reach the bottom of one stone the asbestos you mentioned prevented us from examining one of the anomalies, possibly a further stone, indicated by the geophysics.
From old maps we can see that at least one of the stones lies on the line of a parish boundary and we concluded that the stones had something to do with this or were to do with a small quarry that once existed nearby. That is the situation in brief outline. The stones keep their secrets and would benefit from further investigation one day. Please feel free to use any of the photos and documents on the Megalithic Portal as you see fit.
Re: the nearby barrow - before the builder destroyed the site, Faith Vatcher and the Ministry of Works managed to extract the remains of some 16 individuals which are in Taunton Museum. I got Wessex Archaeology to re-evaluate them and they are judged to be in good condition - quite possibly good enough to get results on Strontium & aDNA tests etc.
Something is not right. This message is just to keep things from messing up down the road