The King Who Took Seven Steps

On a high ridge above the village of Long Compton, where the road runs along the edge of the Cotswolds, there stands an army turned to stone.

There are three parts to it. A ring of weathered, pitted stones, worn into strange shapes like old teeth, is called the King’s Men. Across the road stands a single tall stone, bent and hunched, called the King Stone. And a short walk away, a huddle of great slabs leans together as if sharing a secret. These are the Whispering Knights.

This is how they came to be there.

Long ago, a king marched across England with his army, bent on making himself its master. As he climbed the ridge above Long Compton, a witch stepped into his path. She was the wise woman of those parts, and she knew what he wanted.

She made him an offer, in rhyme, as witches do:

Seven long strides shalt thou take,
And if Long Compton thou canst see,
King of England thou shalt be.

The king laughed. Long Compton lay just over the brow of the hill. Seven strides would be nothing. He strode out, counting them aloud, while his men stood in a ring to watch and a few of his knights hung back, muttering among themselves.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

On the seventh step, the ground rose up in front of him. A long mound swelled out of the earth and blocked his view of the valley. Long Compton was gone.

The witch spoke again:

As Long Compton thou canst not see,
King of England thou shalt not be.
Rise up, stick, and stand still, stone,
For King of England thou shalt be none.
Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be,
And I myself an eldern tree.

And so it happened. The king became the King Stone, frozen mid-stride on the ridge, forever looking towards a village he cannot see. His men became the circle. The knights who had been plotting treason behind his back were caught in the act, and became the Whispering Knights, still leaning their heads together. The witch turned herself into an elder tree, and stood on guard over them.

That is not quite the end.

The stones, they say, cannot be counted. Count the King’s Men three times and you will get three different answers. One story tells of a baker who was determined to beat the spell: he brought a basket of loaves, laid one on each stone, and counted what was left. But he never got the same number twice either.

At midnight, some say, the King’s Men come to life and walk down the hill to the spring to drink. And on Midsummer Eve, when the elder tree was in flower, the people of the district would gather round it and cut it with a knife. The tree would bleed. And as it did, the King Stone would turn his head.

Here is the twist. The witch may be younger than she looks.

In an old antiquarian book, someone once scribbled a different version of the rhyme into the margins. In that version there was no witch at all. A Danish general stood on the ridge and boasted that if Long Compton he could see, then King of England he would be. And it was a Saxon general who answered him and turned him to stone. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Saxon general had gone, and the witch had taken his place.

The stones themselves are older than any of it: older than kings, older than England, older than anyone’s memory of witches. The Whispering Knights were set up as a tomb in the Neolithic, well over five thousand years ago. The circle followed, around 2500 BC.

Nobody knows who raised them. But on a winter evening, with the light going and the wind coming over the ridge, it is not hard to believe they were once men.