The Wansdyke & District Forums

A question that has nagged me for years. The old accounts of this country describe sarsen stones lying so thick on the downs that you could cross whole valleys stepping stone to stone without touching grass. The grey wethers, they called them, because at a distance a field of them looks like a flock of sheep lying down. Aubrey wrote of it, Stukeley too. Go up there now and you will find a fraction of what they describe. Where did they all go? I know the broad answer is the stone-breakers and the building trade, but I would like the detail if anyone has it.

You have most of it, Trevor. Two waves, really. The first was the medieval and later builders taking the surface stones for churches, barns and field walls, the easy ones lying loose. The second and far more destructive was the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when sarsen was broken up commercially for kerbstones, setts and road metal. There were teams of sarsen-splitters working the Marlborough downs into living memory. They would light fires along a line on the stone, then quench it with cold water, and it cracked where they wanted. It is why Lockeridge Dene and Piggledene were saved: the National Trust bought them precisely because they were among the last valleys with the stones still in place.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/ ... piggledene

my grandfather did a bit of sarsen breaking as a young man, hard money he said. theres still split ones in our walls, you can see the line of holes where they drove the wedges in. people think theyre ancient monuments, theyre gateposts and pigsty walls half of them.

That is exactly the detail I wanted, thank you both. Bill, those wedge-holes (feather and tare, the masons called the tools) are worth recording; they date the working fairly closely. The irony is not lost on me, that the same stones the Neolithic hauled miles to raise at Avebury were being knocked into kerbs for Swindon within the memory of your grandfather.