An Ancient Double Act ?

14.01.2025

My first monolithic encounter of 2025 would be on the Staffs/Shropshire border. It was new territory for me and I was a little apprehensive as there was widespread flooding throughout the country with many roads closed in the West Midlands. I crossed the M6 and headed in the direction of Market Drayton to find the village of Norton in Hales. South of the village in a wood surrounded by farmland was a very unusual pair of standing stones called the Devil’s Ring and Finger. I took a dead end road and a man with his dog told me the lane was ok to drive down in my large van. The lane ended at a new house that was being built, so I parked up and asked one of the workmen as to the whereabouts of the stones. He knew about them but wasn’t sure where they were and pointed to the wood up on the horizon.

A gate lead into a field where I kept to the edges and made my way up to the trees that appeared to be in an old quarry of some kind. Staight away I spotted what looked like possible candidates. I found a section of fence that had been trampled down and made my way through the undergrowth into a basin of tangled branches where I scrambled up the other side to a large oak tree and there surrounded by it’s dry fallen leaves were the distinctive duo of The Devil’s Ring and Finger.

A large slab stood angled back with a twelve inch wide hole in it’s centre. Overlapping it slightly was a second larger stone with deep vertical gullies running down it resembling the fingers of a hand. I had seen nothing like it and was immediately struck by their sculptural nature. They could have been shaped by Anthony Caro or Joan Miro. Green moss covered much of their surface and the hole in the right hand stone looked extremely smooth. Bare branches hung down creepily from the tree which oozed a black sap high up through it’s bark.

The boundary fence was quite close but I could just step back enough to photograph the pair with the tree framed over them. Behind me were open fields and the hole began to look like an eye peeping out behind a covering hand. Theories have formed that the stones were part of a chambered tomb and that they were once located elsewhere. This begs the question; how long have these two been together ?