Four miles west of Bridlington is the village of Rudston. Within its churchyard, there is something quite stupendous. In my judgement, it deserves the label "awesome" when so many things that purport to be awesome are not really awesome at all.
Standing twenty six feet above the ground, it is the tallest standing stone in The British Isles. Furthermore, some experts have concluded that another eighteen to twenty feet of stone lie below ground level. Quite amazing.
Nobody knows for sure how long The Rudston Monolith has stood in that place but it was there many centuries before All Saints Church was built next to it by Normans. Knowledgeable archaeologists have determined that it has probably been in situ for over four thousand years.
Carefully studying the surrounding landscape, others have suggested that the monolith was once central to a pagan cult and that the current church stands on the very ground where there was once some sort of pagan temple.
Early Christians were very cunning that way - commandeering pagan sites in order to win over local inhabitants whose associations with paganism went right back through the mists of time. Normally those early Christians sought to obliterate evidence of previous belief systems that were invariably connected with fertility, water sources, the sun, the moon and the skies above.
However, at Rudston they left the huge stone and probably affixed one of their crosses to the top of it. That might be what saved the monolith. Another name for a cross is a "rood" and so the village became "Rood-stane" which evolved into the modern name Rudston.
But where did the huge gritstone come from and how was it made to stand upright? It is estimated that The Rudston Monolith weighs approximately thirty tons. It was probably hauled to Rudston from Cayton Bay - some ten miles away. If that is true, it was an incredible feat but the actual process involved remains unknown and how the stone was made to stand upright is also pure guesswork.
I freely admit that I am enamoured with such places, such ancient evidence of past human life and if I hadn't been with Shirley and Phoebe on our Bridlington mini-break, I would have been doing some proper walking and exploring in the surrounding district. Mind you, there would have been no answers to stumble across - just a tantalising sense of what once was - long, long ago.
Shirley, Phoebe and Lam-Lam by the monolith.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/H1dlPu3
