Distance: 6.6 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk from Hook Norton in Oxfordshire to Long Compton in Warwickshire’s north Cotswolds. The route takes you on foot via the rightly celebrated prehistoric megaliths collectively called the Rollright Stones.
The Story
Route Notes
Getting Back
A Midlands Megalithic Site, Just About
It is widely known that the Midlands are pretty bereft of prehistoric stone circles. Possibly nowhere better illustrates this point than the Rollright Stones in the northern Cotswolds.
The site consists of three different ancient megalithic features constructed hundreds, potentially thousands of years apart, indicating that the site was highly significant to the area’s ancient inhabitants for generations.
Of the ancient stone formations the oldest is known as the Whispering Knights, an ensemble of overpalling stones potentially constructed 6-7,000 years ago, when the people of the southern Midlands first became farmers. It was long thought to be a burial marker known as dolmen, but now following investigations in recent decades archaeologists are less sure.
The largest feature is known as the King’s Men, a closely packed spherical stone formation. It was constructed several hundred years after the Whispering Knights at a time when agricultural society was well established and religious devotion appears to have revolved around such locations. Unusually, the stone circle is stylistically similar to ones in Cumbria which may indicate a close connection between the southern Midlands and the far North West existed at the time.
While the largest stone which stands by itself 2.4 metres off the ground at its highest point is called the King Stone. The most widely accepted theory is that it is a bronze age gravemarker.
Taken together, and combined with the fact that the area’s early medieval inhabitants buried their dead on the ridge where the megaliths stand both before and after the widespread adoption of Christianity, suggests the location has always been a place of ritual significance.
As if to make the point about the Midlands being bereft of stone circles, a country lane, quite the rat run these days, bisects the site splitting the King Stone to the north from the Kings Men and Whispering Knights to the south. This road marks the boundary between Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. Which means that the two clusters of stones are outside the Midlands while the solo megalithic King Stone lies inside the region practically at Warwickshire’s most southerly point.
Unsurprisingly the fairytale style names indicate there are numerous myths and legends associated with the Rollright Stones. A myth first written down by William Camden in 1610 postulates that the King Stone and Kings Men are the petrified remains of an ambitious aristocrat and his pre-modern warband. According to the story a witch convinced the “king” to march his soldiers up onto the ridge and look north across the Warwickshire Cotswolds down towards Long Compton at which point he would attain the crown of England. Upon doing so, he and his men were turned to stone creating the tall lonely megalith and tightly arranged stone circle that stand today.
Later myths from the 18th and 19th Century claim that the King Stone comes to life at midnight, and that on certain days of the year when saint’s feasts are celebrated both the “king” and his army come to life and march down to Long Compton. Reputedly parents in Long Compton would warn their children not to get out of bed on those nights.
During the same time period the stones collectively became associated with various fertility rituals, including traditional games played by girls and young women to try and foresee who their future husband would be, and more individual rites and rituals which older women engaged in to try and conceive.
As the 19th Century the stones which had long been a symbol of the north Cotswolds, represented in art and literature, became more widely known and increasingly became a secular tourist attraction. This became a problem as while there was a longstanding tradition, known about at least as far as the middle ages, of curious travellers looking for souvenirs chipping off pieces of the stones as momentos, during Victorian times this trickle of curio creating became a flood. The threat to the Rollright Stones and other prehistoric remains was one of the spurs to the creation of the Ancient Monuments Commission (the great grandparent of Historic England and English Heritage) in 1882. Upon the creation of the Commission as the UK’s first state backed conservation organisation the Rollright Stones became one of the first sites to come under their protection. It was the Commission who erected the now slightly absurd, but in the 1880s utterly necessary, metal railings which still ring the Whispering Knights and the King Stone.
English Heritage does not own the site however. Rather it is owned by a charitable trust established in the 1990s by a coalition of pagan groups and other friends of the stones who were concerned about access to the land when the site’s owner put it up for sale. It is known that modern pagans gathered at the site to engage in collective ritual practice as far back as the 1950s, with the Rollright’s significance to the traditions that make up contemporary paganism only increasing in the decades that followed.
Their concern was that a new private owner would either operate the Rollright Stones as a tourist attraction or disallow public access. For this reason they resolved to purchase the stones, care for them, and ensure that the public could freely access at any time.
Having succeeded in their purpose the charity created to own and look after the stones has instituted many improvements to the site, including level access, sensitive ecologically informed grounds keeping, waymarking, interpretation boards and an occasional artists programme. They request a small fee (currently £2 for adults, £1 for children) to support their work maintaining the site into the future, as well as adjudicating between different pagan groups to ensure that each is allocated appropriate timeslots to conduct their collective ritual observances and practices. While practising pagans remain involved in the charity its board also includes local representatives and experts who are from other faith traditions.
This legacy of collective ritual and religious observance spanning the period from when Britain was first inhabited by settled communities up to the present day, alongside the Rolliright Stone’s rich folklore attests to a mystical side to the Cotswolds that is often elided by its chocolate box image and reputation as a bolthole for affluent southerners. The stones signifying that the Cotswolds area has a far more interesting past and present than is typically evident.
Route Notes
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
This walk from Hook Norton to Long Compton via the prehistoric Rollright Stones begins from the bus stop just before Hook Norton parish church.
Having alighted the bus head towards the t-junction marked with an old fingerpost traffic sign at the centre of the village. Here, turn right walking towards the southern edge of the village.
Walking along a lane towards the edge of Long Compton you reach a footpath waymarked for the D’Arcy Dalton Way and turn left to follow it.
Walk along the footpath skirting the edge of the village before heading uphill and then across a large field to reach a lane.
Turn left upon reaching the lane and follow it. It was very busy when I walked the route on a Saturday morning with cars travelling fast around tight bends, so take care.
Presently, just after you turn right onto a larger road, and pass an unusual enclosed dog walking area, you turn right onto a bridleway running across fields.
Walk across the fields gradually approaching the village of Great Rollright.
Reaching a tree lined lane on the edge of Great Rollright, turn right into the village’s churchyard.
Leaving the churchyard beneath the lichgate head towards the centre of the village.
Before you get there, turn left and cross a scrap of grass near the middle of the village. On the other side of this meadow turn right and pass an incredibly tumbleddown disused pub to reach a crossroads.
Turn left at the crossroads heading into woodland.
After a short distance you come to a broken down wooden gate on the left leading onto a path running through the trees. Turn left off the road and start walking along it.
Follow this path, which soon widens into a proper path for some distance, crossing a field which when I walked the route was planted with crops, to reach the stand of trees which screen the fields from the busy A3400.
Descend some steep steps in the trees to reach the roadside. Taking care, cross the road and head up a corresponding flight of steps.
Emerging from the trees follow the path across a series of fields, approaching a driveway which divides some woodland from the agricultural land.
Cross the driveway and walk through the woodland.
On the far side of the trees turn right, walking a little way uphill towards the Whispering Knights, a burial chamber roughly 6,000 years old. Upon entering the enclosure you are asked to donate either online or in cash to the charitable trust which maintains the prehistoric remains.
Follow the path uphill and then left along the top of the field to the impressive, very distinctive, King’s Men stone circle, which consists of dozens of thin jagged pieces of stone.
From here cross the road, heading into Warwickshire and into the Midlands, to visit the King Stone, a tall enigmatic monolith, overlooking a striking north Cotswolds vista, all of southern Warwickshire arrayed before you.
Having visited the stones – taking care as it can be busy with fast cars – walk along the road along the top of the ridge where the Rollright Stones are situated.
Soon you see Long Compton beneath you. Here you can turn right through a footgate and take a footpath straight downhill to cut a corner on the road.
Once back on the road turn right and keep on walking until you reach the edge of the village.
Long Compton, whose building’s, church aside, must date from at least six centuries, sprawls along the main road it is situated upon.
Walk all the way up the main road to reach the village’s quaint church, accessed through an even quainter lichgate.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
At the time of writing in June 2025 Stagecoach’s no. 50 bus called several times a day at Long Compton, including at a stop outside the village’s church. The 50 ran three or four times a day through the village on Mondays to Saturdays. It is best to check for current times, and what the situation is regarding Sunday services. The 50 links Stratford-upon-Avon and Chipping Norton. Stratford-upon-Avon has frequent trains north towards the West Midlands, with some services continuing towards Worcester, as well as buses across southern Warwickshire and adjacent areas. Chipping Norton has buses back to Hook Norton and in to Banbury.