Boreades wrote: Judging by the Archaeos' track record, they will probably call it Ritual Sacrifice To Pagan Gods.
Laurence Keen, an ex-president of the British Archaeological Society, was mystified by
TME and having seen an article of his on Batcombe Down's menhir, called the Cross in Hand, I can see why.
* He keeps wondering what it's doing in such an out-of-the-way spot yet further on reveals that from here you have 'a commanding view of both the English and Bristol Channels' and even more revealingly says that local folklore describes how the Cross in Hand became a pillar of fire when a priest dropped his pyx there.
I looked up
pyx and found
1. Also called pyx chest the chest in which coins from the British mint are placed to be tested for weight, etc.
2. (Christianity / Ecclesiastical Terms) Christianity any receptacle in which the Eucharistic Host is keptThis out of the way spot happens to be close to an intersection; there are any number of guesses about the stone's purpose but what
is known is it was visited annually during perambulations, i.e. boundary beating, and half-pennies were distributed to children here, people actually climbed it to retrieve coins placed on top.
Like any respectable herm and despite its Christianised name, the Batcombe stone was thought of as sinister and the village of Batcombe had its own conjuror, John Minterne. He was of course in league with the Devil and he and his horse managed to leap from Batcombe Hill to the village, in the process toppling a pinnacle from the church tower. He landed safely in a field next to the church of St Mary Magdalene where his horse's hoofprints remain to this day; needless to say nothing can grow there. Minterne and his descendants were blacksmiths and there are several Minterne places in the Dorset badlands. The manor house and estates of nearby Minterne Magna belonged to the Churchill and Digby families.
The trackway from the Cross in Hand site goes south, crossing the River Frome at Muckleford, and runs straight past Winterbourne Abbas to Portesham, on the ridgeway overlooking Chesil Beach and Abbotsbury. Blimey, you could hardly find a more strategic route.
* I doubt Mr Keen read TME as he passed it to the editor of Merry Meet magazine (Dorset folklore) who calls the book 'complete and utter rubbish' and couldn't work out whether it had been sent as a misguided tribute or a calculated insult.