The morning haze gave the sky a bright grey luminescence which bounced its scattered rays off the green fields and the golden Molinia. The air was still near Wind Tor as I trod out to walk along the ridge of Hamel Down. The brown ground was bone dry and unyielding under my feet after another especially dry April. So much for drip, drip drop little April showers.
I was here, primarily, to walk to the bond stone known as the ‘Blue Stone’ above Widecombe, which has been piquing my interest for a few months, since I found its name in my High Dartmoor book. I had been specifically scanning Hemery’s index for any references to blue stones on Dartmoor. But why was I hunting for blue stones?
Back in February a story hit the news – a new discovery relating to Stonehenge. Archaeologists had worked out that the bluestones, the rock of which was known to have come from the Preseli Hills of Wales, were recycled. They had found what is thought to be the location where the stones were originally erected in its first guise as a stone circle (George, 2021), before they were up-rooted and hauled, without wheels, to Salisbury Plain. A day or two later, in an online forum that I follow, someone shared the link to a blog. The link took me to a post from an academic who had been writing about the ‘blue stones’ of Lincolnshire, their etymology and their wider context.
In her blog titled ‘The ‘bluestones’ and ‘Bluestone Heath’ of eastern Lincolnshire: some thoughts on their significance and name.’, Dr Caitlin Green shares examples of blue stones, not just from Lincolnshire, but further afield. She demonstrates that the term ‘bluestone’ or ‘blue stone’ is used for a number of apparently notable boulders found in eastern Lincolnshire, which seem to have been used as boundary markers, meeting places and ‘judicial’ places. Widening her net, Green then tells of many other blue stones, from Northern England and Scotland, but also from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Flanders (northern Belgium), and parts of Germany, with the examples in Flanders additionally being often associated with prehistoric burial mounds. Similarly to the Lincolnshire stones, these national and international examples also had a function as boundary-stones, court-stones or even execution-stones. Occasionally, antiquarian writings also linked them to folk tales of them also having magical powers.
Green goes on to say …
“It would be remiss not to also mention here perhaps the most famous insular ‘bluestones’, those non-local stones—transported ultimately from Wales—known by this name at Stonehenge, which were first recorded as ‘blue stones’ in 1812 according to the OED. With regard to these bluestones, it is worth noting that the name Stonehenge seems to derive from Old English stān + hengen, arguably meaning ‘stone gallows’, suggesting that the site may have had some (at least imagined) judicial function”
Green, 2021
One would imagine that what these various stones have in common is that they are all blue in colour, but this is not the case. Even at a stretch, many could not even be described as being even ‘bluish’. In fact, Green (the author, not the colour) shows that a blue stone in Grimsby is in fact made of pink granite. So, if they are not blue, then why the name?
Citing Richard Coates, the President of the English Place-Name Society, Green suggests that the name might derive, not from a description of their colour but from an etymology linked to their function:
“The origin of the term bluestone has not been ascertained, but the colour blue seems irrelevant to the instances known to me. There is no strong formal reason why the first element should not be Sc. *blōð ‘blood’ or even *blōt ‘sacrifice”
Coates, in Green, 2021
Further supporting this blood-related explanation is the case of the Blåstein (Bluestone), near the 9th C Gokstad ship-burial at Sandar in Norway. This stone was originally called the blotstein, or ‘sacrifice stone’, demonstrating that a shift from blood-stone or sacrifice-stone to a blue stone is not without parallel.
Green urges caution in ascribing blood-related interpretations based solely on a linguistic basis but, when combined with historical and folk history references to their having a judicial or execution purpose, makes the case, if not compelling, then certainly intriguing.
In her blog Green puts an emphasis on Old Scandinavian in relation to the words blōð and blōt, however, these words also appear in dictionaries of Old English and Old Saxon, so I don’t see any reason to think that blue stones only link to places with norse-related histories. In relation to the word blood, I think it is also pertinent that its pronunciation in Middle English gave it an ‘ooooh’ sound as in tube, rather than an ‘ugh’ sound as in tub (Liberman, 2018). Therefore, if one was to pronounce Blood Stone in the middle ages it would have sounded like Blude Stone. This phonetic link, it seems to me, is just a hop and a skip to modern use of the word blue to describe these stones.
So, with this potential context in mind, let’s get back to the Blue Stone of Widecombe. If you are looking for it on a map then you will struggle to find it. It is not marked on any OS map, not even as a boundary stone, let alone with its name attached. However, it can be seen labelled on the tithe map (c. 1840) and is described by Hemery as being on Hamel Down ‘at the point where the Kingshead Lane and the Natsworthy tracks join, close to the newtake wall‘.
So for me, this is the first element of mystery: the fact that nothing appears to be known about the blue stone apart from that it is an ancient bond (or bound) stone, yet it was significant enough to warrant its own label on the tithe map. The purpose of tithe maps was to show apportionments of land. Generally, very few labels appear on tithe maps, although practice varies between cartographers. On some, only the numbering of fields are provided whilst on others, farms, villages and towns may be labelled. For this location, the village of Widecombe is not labelled, (but the vicarage is!). It is within this context of sparse annotations that the fact that Blue Stone is written down is suggestive of a historical importance that has been long lost.
The next element of mystery relates to its colour. As was the case with the blue stones documented by Green (2021), this blue stone on Dartmoor is not blue either. When I explored Hamel Down I paid careful attention to the geology. The British Geological survey map indicates granite for this area. I observed a fairly standard looking granite as predominating – one containing large mega-crysts of feldspar with occasional nodules.
The ‘Blue Stone’ was not made of this type of granite. There were other types of rock evident nearby – mostly dark grey, sometimes with white, quartz-like bands; some black, almost charcoal-like pockets; and some pinker rocks. Whatever was going on here millions of years ago, it was complex.
The Blue Stone was made of a block of this dark grey local rock and I am advised by someone that knows about these matters that it is a quartz, tourmaline pegmatite, which are igneous rocks that form in the final stages of cooling. In relation to this story, it doesn’t really matter what its geology is. The point is that it is not blue. I saw the stone in bright sun on my outward journey and cloud on my return. I even went to the effort of pouring water over it to see if the colour changed when wet and this only served to make it look even more grey.
Finally, picking up on the link between the Flemish blue stones with prehistoric burial mounds, then this Blue Stone of Widecombe couldn’t be better placed. Hamel Down ridge is covered by burials at high density including some of the largest barrows to be seen on the moor.
Turning aside the blue stone for a moment and returning once more to the index of my Hemery book, I could see that there are only two more places on Dartmoor with ‘blue’ in their name – Blue Gate and Blue Jug. Coincidentally, both of these occur in this locality. What are the chances?
Blue Gate, Hemery describes, lies south of Challacombe cross, being now only a gatepost where the road meets an ancient sunken lane and a track that leads up to the Blue Stone, through the old abandoned village of Blackaton.
Blue Jug is a Duke of Somerset boundary stone, placed in 1853/54 close to Broad Barrow at the top of the East Webburn River. Isn’t Blue Jug a strange name? Does the blue part have a connection to Blue Post and Blue Gate? What is ‘jug’ all about? Perhaps it relates to its headwater location; damp and wet, where water collects and from which it pours. If this is the case then it is a most uncommon name and one not repeated on Dartmoor.
Close to Blue Jug is another of the Duke’s boundary stones, also with a colour in its name – Grey Wether – a wether being a castrated ram. What I found odd about Blue Jug and Grey Wether is that the Grey Wether boundary marker is placed next to a stone of the same geology as the Blue Stone. Possibly a much more ancient boundary marker. It made me wonder; was there a 19th C mix up? Was the Duke’s Blue Jug stone actually intended for the location where the Grey Wethers stone was placed, and vice versa? It would make sense if these two unusual and geologically linked stones shared blue names.
Whatever. I am speculating. We will never know. But what I do know is that the Blue Stone remains an enigma. It is a blue stone that is not blue; it is an unassuming stone not recorded on any OS map yet of enough consequence to be named on a tithe map; and its blueness triangulates with Blue Gate and Blue Jug – the only three blue places on Dartmoor.
If anybody has any further information about the blue stone near Widecombe, or any of the other blue places in this blog, I would love you to comment. Likewise, if you are a geologist and can tell me a bit more about the rock that the Blue Stone is made from, or the geological story of Hamel Down, please, please offer your interpretations.
References
Archiuk. Old Maps. https://www.archiuk.com/archi/archi_maps.htm
British Geological Survey. Geology of Britain Viewer (3D). www.bgs.ac.uk
Devon County Council Environment Viewer. https://maptest.devon.gov.uk/portaldvl/apps/webappviewer/
George, A. (2001). Stonehenge was built with bits of an older Welsh Stone Age monument. New Scientist. 12 Feb 2001.
Green, C. R. (2021). The ‘bluestones’ and Bluestone Heath of eastern Lincolnshire: some thoughts on their significance and name. The Personal Blog and Website of Dr Caitlin Green. Thursday 11th Feb, 2021.
Hemery, E. (1983). High Dartmoor. Hale: London
Liberman, A. (2018). Blood is thicker than water. Oxford University Press Blog. www.blog.oup.com
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