The Great Stone of Lyng, Norfolk, UK
The great stone of Lyng is off the beaten track – a large glacial erratic boulder left after the last ice age. .It sits beside a footpath in a small wood on the southern side of the Wensum valley near the hamlet of Lyng Easthaugh. It has attracted its share of folklore. Some say that birds can’t be heard singing near it; others that can be seen to bleed, while another story links it to buried treasure. In pagan times, such stones were important markers on the landscape and often venerated and put to use as boundary points, meeting places, preaching stones, way-markers or even as the place where courts were certain nights – it doesn’t say which - the stone is said to bleed if pricked with a pin. The blood in the stone was perhaps absorbed after its use as a sacrificial altar by Druids, or following the bloody battle between King Edmund and the Danes. Locally, the wood was known as The King’s Grove after that battle when the dead were said to have been strewn along the Grove and the spirits of the slain left to haunt the woods. Another legend has it that there is treasure under the stone – a landowner once tried to move it with a dozen horses but only succeeded in further securing it to its secluded spot – while another story links the stone to a former convent which was nearby. Road excavations on Hogsback Hill several generations ago unearthed skeletons – perhaps the nun’s cemetery, perhaps those of King Edmund’s soldiers.
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Photo credit: © John Worrall / Alamy / Afripics
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Keywords: bleed, boulder, copse, druids, easthaugh, edmund, england, erratic, footpath, glacial, grove, haunted, king, kings, legend, lyng, moss, norfolk, remote, rural, spooky, st, stone, superstition, treasure, uk, weird, winter, woodland
