Forgotten Bristol - Stanton Drew Stone Circles

Just before I went to University my parents moved out of the city to Chew Magna, a small village to the south. During the summer I spent kicking my heels waiting for my exam results, one of the places I liked to hang out were the Stone Circles at Stanton Drew. I visited them again for the first time in 45 years this past weekend. Nothing much has changed except that there were more people than I remember walking through the fields and around the stones, and there was even a family picnicking besides them. Yes, despite the bitter March wind.

It is third largest standing stone complex in England after Stonehenge and Avebury and hardly anyone has ever heard of it. Stanton Drew is a tiny village in the Chew Valley, but it's well worth a detour if all things Neolithic are your bag. 

The Stone Circles cost a mere £1 to visit - coins in the honesty box. They date from 3000-2000 BCE. Many are still standing, some are flat out. They are lichen encrusted and pitted by rainwater erosion. They are lovely things to behold, touch with your palm and wonder about their purpose and the civilisation that put them there. Impressive and mysterious, both. There are some farcical local legends concerning them, which you can safely scoff at. I do.

And there's more - an even older (by another thousand years) group of three enormous dolomite conglomerate stones called The Cove can be found in the garden of the Druid's Arms pub in the village - an excellent spot for refreshments too.

Forgotten Bristol - Thomas Chatterton

Next in this occasional series is Thomas Chatterton, parishioner of St. Mary Redcliffe, the 18th C poet known now more for his suicide by arsenic poisoning at the age of 17, as memorialised in Herny Wallis' Pre-Raphaelite painting, than his poetry. His hoax of 'finding' the work of a 'mediaeval' poet called Rowley that he himself had written was his undoing a few short months after he went to London, despite its apparent technical prowess. 

Part of Chatterton's birthplace was spared the Blitz and is across the road from the church. Through my teenage years it sat incongruously in a pot-holed car park. The car park has improved a little, but not that much. You can poke around inside the building if you are so inclined as it is a cafe these days. 

Chatterton has a modern memorial plaque in the church and an information board describing how his family was helped after his death by Coleridge and Southey, both of whom were married in St. Mary's, both facts I had entirely forgotten, if I ever knew them.