To find a large number of standing stones on an area that was swamp until the Roman period is perhaps rather peculiar, but here are four thin, narrow slabs boldly set amongst enclosure-age fields. None are more than four feet high, show any magnetic anomalies or appear to have any relationship to other old or distinctive local features. What little comment they have aroused has tended to explain them away as scratch- ing posts for livestock or as internal boundaries for the great dole moor which preceded today’s neat pasture and arable land. Both theories are plausible, the latter perhaps more so. Nevertheless there are clues, although frustratingly few, that suggest a more ancient origin.
Our first guide is the Somerset historian and topographer John Collinson who suggested in 1791 that the Banwell Moor place name “Rolstone” was derived from an earlier spelling of “Worlestone”, a name encountered elsewhere in the district in connection with other ancient stones.
One of the Moor’s surviving monoliths. is at Rolstone and local folklore states that it marks the grave of a great man - a Roman or a Viking being the preferred
choice. Could this be the Worlestone? Closer to Weston another monolith-associated place name - “Lypstone” - is almost identical to “Lipstone”, the name of an undisputed
monolith that stood at Failand near Bristol.
The other Banwell Moor stone which had folklore attached to it was at Wolvershill, on a small area of high ground which was unfortunately destroyed in the early 1970s by the construction of the M5. Here was a scatter of large conglomerate blocks, originally forming one large slab, and known locally as “The Ploughman and Two Horses”. The name arose in the belief that it marked the spot where the eponymous plough team were struck by lightning.
Altogether the Banwell Moor stones can prove no great antiquity but neither is an ancient origin disproved; archaeological excavation around them could help solve the riddle of their age and function but the paucity of current interest in the stones would seem to preclude this for the time being at least.
Phil Quinn, The Forgotten Stones of West Mendip, 3rd Stone Issue 25
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