The Whispering Knights is a kind of neolithic timb called a "portal dolmen" and these are mostly found in Cornwall, Ireland and Wales. And this is the easternmost example that we know of in Britain and it would probably have contained disarticulated burials. The only evidence of burials was a human jawbone found in the 1920s.

And, in fact, one of the drawings, we discovered, was by Sir Norman Lockyer who was the Astronomer Royal in the late 19th century and who had drawn a plan of the circle in, I think it was, 1860 and then had come back and made more annotations in 1872; and then had come back again in 1890 and had discovered that a whole lot of stones had been moved around. [*Someone chuckles*] Anyway, the upshot of that was to see whether we could work out what the design of the stone circle was and what kind of circle it was related to other ones. And basically what we discovered was that a lot of the stones in their original positions are standing very close to each other. And the best group is over there.

If you take the tallest stone; then there's a small stone; and that rather pointed one; and a sort of trapezoidal one. Then there's a very big flat one; two smaller ones; and another rather pointed one. By looking at the antiquarian drawings you can see that the tallest one was standing; the next one was fallen inwards; the next one was standing; the little one was fallen inwards; and then the next four were all standing. And you can see how very close those are together. You can also see, when you look at that group, that those six which were standing have large white lichens on them, and the others don't. And we did a survey of all the lichens on the stones and that helped to confirm which ones are in their original position. The conclusion from all that was that originally the stone circle was more or less a continuous wall of stones.

Anyway, we put a trench across that mound to see whether it was natural or whatever, and discovered a round cairn by the King Stone - previously undiscovered, which was still intact - so it was about 17 metres across, and had various cremations put in it, and a little cremation next to it, which had been marked. And there's also a very small barrow next to it, which we also excavated, and again found cremations - one of which was buried in a funny little cavern under the ground which had a big, broad post erected next to it. So in both cases there was evidence that these were Bronze Age burials, marked by standing wooden posts, and so the theory which I like best about the King Stone is that it was erected as a memorial to a burial ground.