The Devil · Standing stones · Oxfordshire

The Devil's Quoits

The Devil's Quoits, Stanton Harcourt, west of Oxford

Family-friendly

Across the Thames from Stanton Harcourt, on the Berkshire side, is a steep little hill called Beacon Hill, about two and a half miles away as the crow flies. One Sunday, so the people of Stanton Harcourt said, the Devil was up on Beacon Hill playing quoits.

Quoits is an old game. You throw a heavy ring at a peg in the ground, and the closest throw wins. The Devil's quoits were not rings of iron, though. They were great slabs of stone.

Someone told him that playing games on a Sunday was wrong. The Devil flew into a rage, and he flung his quoits away, over the river. Three of them came down in the fields by Stanton Harcourt, and there they stand to this day.

And they won't be moved. Once, one of the quoits in Walker's Field was carted off and laid over a ditch, the Back Ditch in the Farm Close, to make a bridge. But it would never settle. It was always slipping, and however often they put it back, it wouldn't rest. In the end they had to take it back to where it stood before. You can still see the marks of the cartwheels on it, people said.

Charles Batts, a labourer of Stanton Harcourt, told this to Thomas Carter, who collected stories for the antiquary Percy Manning, on New Year's Day 1898. He had it from his father.

The village had another story too, about how it got its name. Long ago, an old man told Thomas Hughes, there was a great battle at Stanton, and the English came very close to losing it. The general rode up to one of his captains, a man called Harcourt, who was in the thick of the fighting, and shouted to him: “Stan' to un, Harcourt, stan' to un, Harcourt!” Harcourt stood his ground and won the battle, and the village has been called Stanton Harcourt ever since.

No plate yet. We are still looking for an old picture of this place.

What people said

  • The stone that slipped. The quoit used as a bridge over the Back Ditch would never rest there, and had to be taken back. Its wheel marks were said to be still visible (Charles Batts, 1898).
  • A battle by the stones. Joseph Goodlake of Stanton Harcourt, aged 63, told Manning in 1901 what he had from his father. When “the war was in England”, the fighting ended at Stanton by the stones. The officers hid behind the Quoits from the bullets, and when he was young, men used to pick the bullets out of them. Harcourt was the general, “Emperor in England”, buried in the church “with his sword and gun and clothes”.

Other tellings

  • An old name. Robert Plot already called the stones “the Devils Coits” in 1677, so the Devil's part in the story is at least that old, though Plot doesn't tell the tale. He thought they were raised for Britons killed in battle nearby.
  • In 1858 the antiquary J. Y. Akerman recorded a more down-to-earth version. An occupier of the land had laid the northernmost stone across a watercourse as a bridge for waggons and carts, and it was put back at the request of one of the Harcourt family. A groove near its top was said to have been worn by the wheels.
  • Arthur Evans, writing about Rollright in 1895, noticed the same story here: one of the Quoits taken away to make a bridge and then put back, just like the Whispering Knights' capstone.
  • The old man's battle and the “Stan' to un” story are both told to explain the name, but Manning gives the real meaning: Stanton comes from the Old English for “stone enclosure”, after the Quoits themselves.

What the history says

The Devil's Quoits were a henge, a circular bank and ditch, with a ring of standing stones inside, raised some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Oxfordshire County Council calls it one of the most important stone circle sites in Britain in its day. By the end of the 19th century only three stones were still standing, which is why the legend speaks of three quoits.

The henge bank was rebuilt in 2002, and in 2005 some of the original stones were set back up and new stones raised in place of the lost ones. So the circle you see today is partly a modern restoration.

Manning thought the stories of a battle might have grown from British and Anglo-Saxon burials dug up nearby. The church does hold the armoured effigies of Harcourt knights, including Sir Robert Harcourt, Henry VII's standard-bearer at Bosworth.

Go and See

Where
In fields on the west side of Stanton Harcourt, off Cow Lane, west of Oxford.
Access
[TODO: confirm public access and parking with Oxfordshire County Council or the site's owner. Visitors' reports mention a car park reached past the recycling centre, whose gate is locked when the centre is shut]
Allow
Half an hour at the stones.
Families
A gentle, rather funny tale for young children. [TODO: ground and path conditions]

51.7400° N, 1.4059° W · Open in OpenStreetMap

Make a day of it

From our sister sites

Acorn & InkWrite your own legendStory planners to print. What else might the Devil throw in a temper?

Sources

  1. Percy Manning, “Stray Notes on Oxfordshire Folklore”, Folk-Lore, vol. 13 (1902), pp. 288–295, from the notes of Thomas J. Carter. Our main source, and the earliest telling of the Devil's game that we have found. Internet Archive.
  2. Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-shire (1677), chapter 10, § 101. The earliest record of the name we have found. Internet Archive.
  3. J. Y. Akerman, “The Ancient Limits of the Forest of Wychwood” (1858), as quoted by Manning.
  4. Arthur J. Evans, “The Rollright Stones and their Folk-Lore”, Folk-Lore, vol. 6 (1895), p. 28. Internet Archive.
  5. Thomas Hughes, The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), chapter 3, for “Stan' to un, Harcourt”. Project Gutenberg.
  6. Oxfordshire County Council, Discover the Lower Windrush Valley walks leaflet: the age of the site and its restoration.

This is a legend, told as people told it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.